Words to inspire and beguile

Happy Mother's Day

2006-05-14T10:46:00.000-07:00

Now go thank your mother for letting you penetrate her engorged vagina as your earliest memory!

Princess Sarah

2006-05-13T11:57:00.000-07:00

I used to work at a mystery shopping company. I was going to try to describe it, but I immediately vomitted in my mouth. Anyway, that is where I met my good friend and accomplice Sarah. As I was looking through her blogs on another site, I came across a blog she wrote about me. So I am cutting and pasting it for all to see. Of course, I have added on to it, just to clarify a few things for you people.

Sarah's Entry:

it was a cold day in hell when i met rob.

actually, it wasn't. i don't have the faintest idea what the weather was like because i was on my way into a building that was slowly and painfully sucking my will to live out through my pores. anyway, rob was waiting for the elevator and i took the stairs. that says a lot about our friendship.
we avoid each other.

so i don't really know what we said to each other on our first meeting, but had i known how monumental it was, i would have written down the transcript to be sold on ebay for lots of pennies. maybe even a hundred!
in any case, i figure the first exchange was "hi" or "what are you in for?" or something like that. it quickly degenerated into heinous abuse (i admit, i threw a lot of stuff at rob over the cubicle wall, though it didn't dent his perfectly round head), witty observations of the morons in charge, craigger and tits mcghee, cynical analysis of our daily tasks and blatant abuse of break time during which we plotted escape and other fun activities to break the monotony between cackles and sobs. that is, when we took break. sometimes we were too busy huddled in our cubicles, wailing and pleading for mercy.

you see, we edited stuff. when i say "edited stuff", i mean we wrote mystery shopping reports (not even "rewrote"!!) people submitted in language a chimpanzee would be ashamed to call english. nay, not a chimpanzee - a louse. a louse would have been ashamed to try to pass off what we interpreted, deciphered, eventually grudgingly accepted as attempted english. we wept at the abuse of the language daily and tried not to acknowledge our efforts were futile.

we worked in beige cubicles trying to read reports - through our tears for humanity - submitted by these 'mystery shoppers'. these people - treasures that they were - were somehow overlooked for other jobs. it was beyond me why.

not really.

it was quite obvious why they were overlooked. illiteracy, even when you can spell it properly on a cee-vee, is not a "marketable skill". day in and day out i corrected, interpreted, and indeed just wrote long reports on behalf of people who were paid for a job "well-done". the mystery shoppers were lauded for giving up their time, for their hard work and for their many efforts. i suspected walking and chewing gum was out of the question for these people. and i was trying to be nice. (breathing is supposed to be automatic.)

with the help of rob, passing kleenex back and forth to stem the tide of tears and coming up with the 'idiot of the day' quote (so very many to choose from!), we delved into the deeper background of these mystery shoppers. we wanted to know the selection process. because, you see, we'd have worried a lot less for humanity had these people been a part of some kind of rehabilitation programme. we'd likely have volunteered our time (well, i would have, probably, but rob's plain evil) to help these people gain some basic language skills. but these people weren't new arrivals to our fine country struggling valiantly to learn an additional language, they weren't students who had fallen through the cracks of a faulty education system or people who had been raised by wolves.
they were adults.

and so about the fourth minute on the job, rob and i had bonded in a common cause. 'teach the english language'. it was a simple solution, we thought, to the obviously rampant problem heretofore unnoticed - unabated adult illiteracy in mystery shoppers. good intentions bubbled to the surface: help educate the masses. do your small part. dream the impossible dream. seize the day.

so on our way to break in our fifth minute on the job, we discussed how we could make the world a better place. then we decided to aim lower and concentrate for the interim on how to make our own miserable lives working as editors in beige cubicles less exasperating.

slurpees!

and report cards!

yes. we got to write "report cards" for these mystery shoppers. so rob and i would write long explanations about what "objective" meant. and we'd explain the difference between "your" and "you're" and "they're", "there" and "their" with admittedly finite patience. a hundred times a day and we eventually resorted to cutting and pasting from files dedicated to the personal errors of each shopper we came to know and... loathe. for many mystery shoppers, we encouraged the use of adjectives and gave examples of how to use them. "the french fries were served hot and the texture was crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside. delicious!" or something equally ridiculous.

one day, a staff meeting was called. we (our department) were told that our report card explanations were far too complicated. we were to edit, and we were to edit faster. we were asked if we had any suggestions. being an idealistic fool in my youth, i raised my hand confidently. "maybe we can hire mystery shoppers who know how to read and write?" that idea was shot down and i was properly chastised, duly noted as a troublemaker and subsequently blacklisted from all the "good shifts".
we resorted to circulating "shame" emails around the department as a way of sharing our frustration over mystery shopper illiteracy with our colleagues. all the greatest nonsense made the grade. it made most of us giggle at least once during the day - except when that happened, our newly-promoted manager/yes-man freaked out. rob and i excelled at freaking out our newly-promoted manager/yes-man. it gave us something to do besides contemplating whether a leap through a second-storey window in don mills would be enough to kill us. (did i mention we were in beige cubicles in don mills? across the street from harlequin? yes, that harlequin.)

so my eight-hour shifts - reduced to once a week for bad behaviour (editing, which strangely was the job description when it clearly should have been 'writing fiction'...) i did my best to excel in even less time. i became more efficient. i started sending on the nonsense. as i suspected, no one even read the reports. my friends (co-editors) caught on to the ploy - fair enough, after i announced it with glee to the entire department - and there was no small amount of departmental mirth for two whole minutes. we no longer dreaded reading passages that didn't make sense.

and so before losing my mind entirely, i escaped the hell of editing utter crap. i'll never edit another thing, unless i know the person who requests the service and i can throw large objects at them should they submit drivel or nonsense for my review. just writing this blog has given me hives. but i had to share, because rob is my friend and one must allow for opportunities to reminisce with friends.

Rob's Response:

I remember the weather quite well that October morning. The sky was writhing with terrible premonitions. The Virgin Mary was crying tears of blood in the form of crimson rain. War, famine, pestilence and death were mounting their horses across the heavens. Rainbows were rusting copper and falling to the Earth in a fiery burnished paroxysm. I just thought this all had something to do with the green house effect. I was, admittedly, naive. So I see Sarah as I'm waiting for the elevator. She didn't completely avoid me. She took one look at me, like a jaguar sizing up its meal, and said in a mocking tone, "Are you the new sacrifice?" Searching for something clever to retort with, my flatulence acted up and I let rip a 'Quaker Rocky Road granola bar from earlier that morning' fart. She opted to take the stairs, pulling her shirt over her mouth and nose like a ninja. (I would later reference this ninja story and be met with a roundhouse kick to the head - Sarah had a funny way of taking things literally, but she would say she was just being affectionate. Any contact was a gift I suppose. Even if it hurt like hell). Anyway, the days crawled by slowly and more and more the company began to make a baby in a roasting pan look positively cuddly and delightful. Then one day, when I was sitting there wishing for a plane to fall out of the sky and land on my head (Sarah's paper clip projectiles were the closest thing to that happening), this fat, jovial, kiss-ass with a smug grin only a child molester could appreciate was promoted to manager of our department. His name was Rene Blanchard. He used to molest pitbulls just for fun. If any of you ever see him on the street, throw knives and porcupines at him. Rene had the bosses dicks permanently planted up his ass. He was insanely jealous because no one liked him and everyone liked Sarah and myself. In fact, we would have been voted prom king and queen if the company had a prom. So Rene cut our shifts and separated us (with Sarah working during the days and me working at night with the employees who had disproportionate faces like something out of a Picasso painting and smelled like sour milk). So I had to suffer through reading those mystery reports (or the piles of fuck belched forth by some of the most illiterate and stupid people in the world) alone. Without Sarah, my mind, which I believed to be resilient and impenetrable, was plunged into madness.

Sarah and I were reunited during the A&P crisis (a crisis that puts that war with archangels and flaming swords to shame). I remember the moment well. Sitting in my cubicle, talking to the large poster of Gary Coleman I had pinned to my wall, face twitching, getting in trouble for breathing, Sarah walks in. Our eyes locked. The world slipped away. Everything became soft focus. A single spotlight illuminated my workspace. The haunting and serene sounds of Marvin Gaye sang out in the distance. Paperclips were launched at my head, followed by a half-full bottle of Evian. Sarah had returned! I was concussing.

Shortly after that I decided to partake in the whole "coming up for air" thing people tell me about and quit.

Bad Habits Die Hard

2006-05-10T10:02:00.000-07:00

It's been a week since I stopped biting my nails. I've been shaking, sweating, shivering and twitching. Kicking heroin was easier. But my nails have never been healthier looking or this long. And I did it without any of that poisonous acrylic either. It's all will power. But it's so hard to resist biting, but I must try to continue to fight.

However, I only said I stopped biting my nails. That doesn't mean I won't bite yours. So watch out.

Back From New York

2006-05-09T10:24:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I posted. The voices in my head have been instructing me not to. Take it up with them. Anyway, I am back from my stay in Manhattan. I would have stayed longer but I was sort of forcefully removed from the country. You see, while there, I visited my sister and her husband. As always they decided to use my visit as a means of exploiting me for labor. Turns out they've been completely assimilated by US culture now as they have recently purchased an American flag to dangle from their balcony for all to see. Why anyone would feel the need to embellish their property with patriotism is beyond me. So naturally they demanded that I go hang it up. My sister is pregnant and my brother-in-law is, well, useless. So after 10 minutes of bitching and complaining, I finally dragged my stubborn ass onto the balcony, balancing like some tightrope artist with this huge flag. Since night had fallen, it was pretty dark out. So to see exactly where the flag had to go, I pulled out a lighter to light up the dark space. As luck would have it, I accidentally lit the flag on fire and before I knew it 3 thousand Muslims with long beards and googly eyes were below me, dropping to their knees and calling me "Allah."

That's the type of thing that gets you removed from the US.

Viva La Revolution

2006-04-26T11:05:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning and there was a pod beside my bed over-stocked with funky weaponry and shiny buttons that hummed. It turns out the pod was a state of the art time machine (I knew this from my over-extensive knowledge of time travel engineering and my repeated viewings of the Back To The Future trilogy - mainly the latter). I entered it, pressed some buttons and was sent back to the year 1758 in France. I lived many years there among the aristocracy, finding myself engaged in an affair with a peasant chambermaid. I was soon sentenced, in the revolt, to die by the guillotine. I escaped in the nick of time with a mystical Martian named Oroak through a green vortex that had magically appeared over the Obélisque de Luxor in the Place de la Concorde. I ended up back in my bed and hadn't aged a day.
It's 11am. What did YOU do today?

It Begins With A Limerick

2006-04-25T21:02:00.000-07:00

EFO's (Errors, Freaks and Oddities),

Through one of my many Internet searches, I finally came upon the answer to the much questioned "There once was a man from Nantucket" thing-a-ma-jig. I always wondered whether this was a real limerick or only one line written long ago that was aimed to torture mankind through the ages. Turns out it is a real limerick. Here's the history.

The limerick was discovered in a June 14, 1924 edition of a Nantucket newspaper. It all began when the Princeton Tiger revived the then well-known limerick and the Chicago Tribune answered with a second limerick that continued the first. The New York Exchange went one step further with the third rhyme and the Pawtucket Times took over from there. Basically, there's an open invitation for common folk, like us, to add to the quartet's adventures.

So I present to you the original 4 limericks, followed by my own limerick, added on, continuing the tale. Add to mine with one of your own, but know that it has to follow mine. Find others to add to it. Let's create the mother of all limericks.

It's a good test to see, not only how creative all of you are, but how creative the people you know are. Or have all your acquaintances been corrupted by the monotony of life and corporate/financial/security/ commodity lifestyles? Have they all been turned into a quagmire of morose automatons, forced to become drooling desk pieces or proletarian servants, ever gazing at a computer screen? If not, then let them know about this and have them add in their 2 cents to the pile (consisting of rusted copper and that sticky substance that one finds on old pennies).

There once was a man from Nantucket,
Who kept all of his cash in a bucket,
But his daughter, named Nan,
Ran away with a man,
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.
- Princeton Tiger

But he followed the pair to Pawtucket,
The man and the girl with the bucket;
And he said to the man,
He was welcome to Nan,
But as for the bucket, Pawtucket.
- Chicago Tribune

Then the pair followed Pa to Manhasset,
Where he still held the cash as an asset,
But Nan and the man,
Stole the money and ran,
And as for the bucket, Manhasset.
- New York Exchange

Of this story we hear from Nantucket,
About the mysterious loss of a bucket,
We are sorry for Nan,
As well as the man,
The cash and the bucket, Pawtucket.
- Pawtucket Times

Now the fate of the bucket's unknown,
But who cares about a pottle of chrome?
I'd rather hear tales,
Of midgets in jails,
And rat monkeys plagued with down syndrome.
- Kid Rob

Grumble

2006-04-21T11:15:00.000-07:00

Hi. Life sucks. And is crazy. (This can be used interchangeably with unsound, abnormal, insane, delirious, odd, demented, eccentric and for our Portuguese audience reading along at home: louco).

Nothing clever or witty to say today because I'm not myself. I am actually Chuck, a redneck baker in a Japanese deli. But fear not, I will be back soon enough in top form. I'll buy you all drinks. The first (and likely the last) round of Windex will be on me!

In other news, I've decided to write a delightful little animated film called Angie The Anthrax Bacteria. I hope everyone takes their children to see it.

Oh and I think random sword fighting should make its way back into popular culture.

But for now I must be off. There's a kitty stuck in my tree and I want to be the first to throw sharp objects at it.

Go Leafs Go...back to the minors!

2006-04-18T13:08:00.000-07:00

There is a disease here in Toronto. Not quite as deadly as the bird flu, but almost as catastrophic. It's called the Toronto Maple Leaf fans. Now I don't mind people cheering for their local sports team. But people who aren't from Toronto will never get to experience (and lucky for them) the pathetic phenomenon that grips hold of the city every year. I hate what happens to this city, where everyone and his uncle suddenly becomes a Leafs fan, waving stupid flags around the street, obstructing traffic, jam-packing bars and going through the most drastic mood swings, alternately elating and despairing every time there's a game on. RELAX people...it's a fucking game. It's amazing that the suicide rate didn't sky-rocket last year when there was no hockey. What did these people do with their lives? Clearly they got by somehow (although I suspect the disappearance of hockey last year had a direct impact on the rise of child pornography cases. Merely speculation, of course).

What bothers me is this. Canadians bitch and complain about Americans being so patriotic and always claiming to be "the best," yet are completely at fault of this same accusation when it comes to our beloved hockey. I've actually heard conversations from die-hard Leaf fans regarding why hockey should only belong to Canada. Sure...then the Leafs might actually win a Stanley Cup, but when you're playing a pack of wild beavers in the finals who would rather be sharpening their teeth on the hockey stick than trying to score, that's not quite the sports accomplishment.

I hate hypocrisy. I hate when any group of people bitch about what other people do and then do that act themselves. It's like the mentality here is: "hockey is ours, eh. Americans don't have the right to be better at something that's ours than we do." Well guess what? They are. Deal with it.

The good news is the Leafs are out of the playoffs. So it appears the beer-chugging, gut-hanging, toothless, slobbering, uneducated, wish-you-were-American-wannabe, Canadian patriotic scum can all return to their flea-infested, run-down, unimpressive cottages at some no name, non-picturesque swamp in the armpit of Ontario, and sit and sulk in their own useless and gnarled existence for the remainder of the year, until next season's inevitable disappointment. It'll be hard for them to return to their real jobs (you know, the one that doesn't involve them standing on a street corner, causing car accidents, waving the blues and whites, holding a misspelled sign that reads "hokn 4 da Leafz"). The only people I feel bad for are those poor saps that work at the welfare offices. The line-ups are going to be pure madness now that these Canadian hockey fans have nothing else to look forward to, except that $45 dollars a month to spend on mustard stained, wife-beating T-shirts, and tacky neon bikini tops.

On a happier note, I'm quite enjoying our new currency (which looks like a cross between Monopoly money and Clown school flyers). It's not bad enough the $5 bill has a hockey poem on the back of it, but word is, the new $50 will have a scratch-and-sniff sticker that smells like beer. Ah, the 2 things that shape us as Canadians - beer and hockey. The thing we put our misplaced loyalties and pride into. No wonder the Americans contemplate fucking bombing us in "friendly fire" mishaps all the time. I would too.

Oh, and for all of you who bought the eye-sore of a flag to suction to your car, why don't you do something useful with your money next year? Perhaps feed a fucking homeless person instead of heartlessly cruising by them in your daddy's Pinto, screaming incoherencies out your window to these human beings that can't even afford to have any sense of spirit.

The only thing worse than this hockey phenomenon is soccer, when everybody suddenly becomes an annoying European. Is it so hard for people to actually think for themselves? For people to have their own independent thoughts? For people to not just jump on board the bandwagon because everyone else is doing it?

I AM (ashamed to be) Canadian sometimes.

- Star-Spangled Rob or Hollywood Rob (which ever one sounds more distant from the true north)

P.S. Just for the record people, the word is "bar" not "bawrr," eh.

Truly Outrageous!

2006-04-16T12:25:00.000-07:00

I’ll tell you why you shouldn’t download movies, TV shows or music from the Internet. Forget all those guilt-eliciting ads they show before movies that spew some nonsense like, “You wouldn’t steal a car so why steal movies?” Believe me, if someone found a way to make cars as accessible as films, they’d be stolen just the same. No, the real reason you shouldn’t download is because of the story I’m about to tell you. So pull up a chair, put another log on the fire, pour yourself a drink and cry with me.

So this gal I know (whose name, incidentally, rhymes with "gal") is a huge Jem And The Holograms fan. This was the show she grew up with. We all have those shows that were the staples of our childhood. Jem was hers. So my mission was quite clear: I had to find a way to track down Jem And The Holograms for her. I would have settled for an episode or two…anything. You see, I’m one of those people that actually gets a kick out of doing things for others. Think what you will about hidden agendas, ulterior motives or some need to ensure my spot in heaven, I find one of the most rewarding things in life is knowing that you were personally responsible for putting a smile on someone’s face. That’s really the only thing you can’t fake; the one thing that’s irrefutably yours. There's no other feeling like it.

So I tried to do things legit. I went to Amazon.com and looked up Jem. Turns out it was actually released on DVD for like 3 days before it was discontinued. I hate this whole concept of discontinued. What is this, some sort of sick supply and demand experiment that distribution companies like to perform on consumers? Either you release the product or you don’t. Discontinuing products actually generates and popularizes piracy. If you don’t want to mass produce the product, at least have an order form available on your company’s website that would allow people to order it directly from you. This way you could produce only copies you’ve pre-sold and not take a bath on over-stock. Anyway, knowing that it had been released (for literally 3 days), I then checked eBay.

Right, as much as I would have loved to have paid $200 per season for the show, I hadn’t totally lost my mind. Plus eBay worries me. I always have this image of some fat, naked, hairy guy rubbing his sweaty balls on the product before shipping it out. So I did the only thing that made sense next…I searched the torrent sites. I visited my usual haunts and came up with nothing. I then started visiting the seedier ones, the type of torrent sites where you find videos of women being perforated by horses. Still nothing. I finally came across one torrent site that had a listing for Jem And The Holograms Season 1 & 2 (20 episodes). I danced like the flames in a pyromaniac’s eyes! Joy of joys! I was already excited imagining the look on her face when I presented it to her!

I then checked the stats. 1 seeder, 18 leechers and 6.8 gigabytes!

Allow me to reiterate that: 6.8 GIGABYTES!!!!! (I grabbed my head in shock and shouted this number in the same manner that Doctor Emmett Brown did to Marty McFly in Back To The Future upon learning he’d need 1.21 gigawatts of electricity to fuel the DeLorean, thus sending him back to 1985).

Holy fucking hard drive Batman! Not that my hard drive is small mind you (the same line I once used to pick up this nerdy chick at a computers conference), but I have a film sitting on my computer that takes up 120 gigs as it is. Add up all my other files, programs, music, porn, viruses, etc. I’m down to my last few gigs and I don’t have an external backup drive. So I started rationing what I needed. I looked through my computer, figuring out what I could delete (i.e. did I really need the singing sheep exe?) and finally managed to make some space. Problem 1 was solved. Problem 2 was now downloading this torrent which was being seeded by 1 person. That meant if that person decided to move to Kuala Lumpur or perhaps do something less drastic like stop seeding or turn off his/her computer, us 19 leechers would be up shit's creek. So I decided that I would just leave the computer on and pray that the fans did their job keeping the motherboard from exploding. 2 weeks later and most surprisingly, the torrent was finished downloading. Sure there were moments when it seemed like all hope was lost, but it downloaded. I was a happy happy man!

With my blank DVDs by my side, I rebooted my computer so that it could take a breath before burning. I then opened up the folder to check out the quality of the episodes. What happened next proved yet again why there is no god. Instead of being bombarded with some cheesy retro musical animated goodness, I was staring at a live-action Japanese soap opera. Pause with me for a moment, will you? A FUCKING LIVE-ACTION JAPANESE SOAP OPERA! The bad news is that I now had 20 of these in my possession. The worse news is that they all came with subtitles…in CANTONESE!!!!!!!!!!

It's as though The Misfits found their way into my computer and sabotaged it. Oh man, I howled a string of the most shockingly offensive swear words that I had in my disposal from 28 years of accumulating hatred. In fact, my swearing was so loud and so profound, that when I left the house later that day, the neighbours across the street were standing on their driveway, frozen, staring at me, drop-jawed and buggy-eyed. The little girl, whose bicycle was flipped over onto the grass, without looking up at her mother softly said, “Mommy, is that…” Before she could continue, her mother placed her hands over her daughter’s eyes and screamed out, “For the love of Jesus, don’t look at him!” She then crossed herself and resumed frozen position. I got into my car and drove up the street. And there they remained, unmoved. And they stayed that way long until after I returned home.

So don’t download boys and girls. Not because it hurts the already thieving entertainment industry, but because you never know when some cocksnake motherfucker sadist is going to rename the file(s) and bamboozle some unsuspecting "good-intentioned" person like myself into downloading some utter donkey vomit. My hatred of humanity has only just increased from this.

Good Friday I'm In Love

2006-04-14T01:15:00.000-07:00

Ah Easter...the celebration of Christ's crucifixion at Golgotha on the cross, whereby he died like a common criminal (not like the prophesized "king of kings" that he actually never claimed to be while living). This is followed by the celebration of his "so called" resurrection that no one actually ever witnessed, but instead were merely told by Mark, one of his disciples. Let's see if I understand this. After Jesus was killed, his disciples were forced into exile. Now, when Mary (the whore) and Mary (the "virgin" - nudge nudge, wink wink) made their way to the Sacred Cave, Christ's body was missing. How is it that two women such as themselves would have been able to budge the massive and strenuous rocks sealing up cave? They couldn't have. The cave had to have been previously entered and the rocks previously loosened. So here's what I'm thinking. There have always been sheppards and there have always been sheep. Especially back in the age of miracles (the age before science) when people would have believed most anything you told them, Christ's disciples concocted this plan to deceive the simpletons into believing that he had risen from the grave. They entered his tomb, removed the body and spread word that there had been "Christ" sightings all over town. Again, none of these were ever documented by historians. It was all word of mouth (ever play broken telephone?) In fact, Christ is but a mere blurb in the Old Testament. Quite a paltry coverage for the alleged son of God. Amazingly God was able to create a full grown male from dust and female from a rib, but to produce a tiny little baby, he had to rape some nobody woman. The bottom line is this: the disciples created a lie around the ressurection of Christ. A lie, that somehow caught on with people's willingness to accept blind faith (blame the tyrannous Roman Empire for people's willingness to put their faith in a new set of spiritual beliefs to rally behind). The disciples had their own interests at heart (like all people do). They did this as a way of saving their own asses from exile. And we all know that men, especially when forced into exile and shame, would never lie to save face or their own ass. If people hadn't been that naive, this whole Christ story would have died when he did and I wonder if Catholocism would have ever seen fruition. But newly designated Christian groups spread like wild fire, setting up missionaries to convert people (note, this is the only religion that does this. I'm not knocking it. I think safety and strength in numbers is a tried, tested and true practice). You get enough people to subscribe to your bullshit, you have what is referred to as "organized religion." Again, the world needed a new religion, a new symbol. And as the saying goes, timing is everything.

But have times really changed so much in the past thousands of years? Nowadays, if you crucify someone you get to celebrate with 80,000 jolts of electricity running through your body. In any case, to mask the hypocrisy of Catholicism, Christians have decided to totally take the focus off the crucifixion and instead create more of a Hallmark holiday by marking the coming of Easter with an identity-confused rabbit, who for all intents and purposes, should be a chicken with all these fucking eggs he has in his possession.

The Easter bunny has its origin in pre-Christian fertility lore. The hare and the rabbit are the most fertile animals known and they serve as symbols of the new life during the Spring season. So good news for all you bestiality fetishists out there. You'll be happy to know that your best chance of getting a willing animal participant for all your sexual needs lies is the molestation or assault on either the genus Orystolagus Cuniculus or Lepus. But use a lot of protection or you're likely to end up with some cotton-tail sexually transmitted virus such as the calicivirus or the more common "you're a sick twisted fuck" virus.

The bunny, as an Easter symbol, seems to have its origins in Germany, where it was first mentioned in German writings in the 1500s. Is there anything the Germans didn't do? I'm totally convinced that if the Germans could put aside their need for mass annihilation and genocide for 5 minutes, they could usher us into a golden age whereby all disease would be cured, the famine crisis solved and people would be driving cadillacs to the moon. Anyway, the first edible Easter bunnies were made in Germany during the early 1800s. This was after years of just dipping live bunnies in tar and trying to digest them. These new tasty bunnies were made of pastry and sugar and good old German love (that white stuff ain't icing)!

The Easter bunny was introduced to American folklore by the German settlers who arrived in the Pennsylvania Dutch country during the 1700s. The arrival of the "Oschter Haws" was considered "childhood's greatest pleasure," next to a visit from Christ-Kindel on Christmas Eve and a visit from Daddy's Special Friend on Friday nights. The children believed that if they were good, the Oschter Haws would lay a nest of colored eggs. If they were bad, he'd just poo in their basket. And if any of you have ever had a steady diet of carrots and green pellets, you know that ain't a pretty sight or smell.

Originally Easter eggs were painted with bright colors to represent the sunlight of Spring and were used in Easter egg rolling contests or given as gifts. After they were colored and etched with various designs, the eggs were exchanged by lovers, romantic admirers and stalkers, much the same as valentines. In Medieval times, eggs were traditionally given to the servants at Easter. In the late 1960s, a new tradition began in Boston where eggs were exchanged as the form of hurtling objects, aimed at schools, houses, police stations and various neighborhood geeks. Amazingly, this tradition transcended Easter and has become an annual celebratory custom. Kinda shows us what people get out of things!

Easter egg hunts are also part of a community's celebration of the holiday. The eggs are hidden in public places and the children are invited to find them. It is ill-advised to hide Easter eggs in a blender, a rabid dog cage, a grain auger or silo, near large pieces of running farm equipment, at the top of a rickety ladder, on a porcupine or skunk, in a rattlesnake den, in rat poison, in a box of razor blades, next to a loaded hand gun, in a liquor cabinet, in a discarded refrigerator, in a trashcan full of the family junkie's hypodermic needles, on the subway tracks, in an iron maiden (for those lucky enough to own one), near downed high tension power lines, near an uncapped well, in a tank of piranhas, next to an open mine shaft, under asbestos, in a woman's womb (however tempting to find), near a radioactive waste dump or in a badger den.

Easter egg hunting is also a form of non-discriminatory fun as it includes everyone from the handicap, to the mentally challenged, to those suffering from Alzheimer's (who just so happen, as a bonus, to be able to hide their own Easter eggs).

The rules of an Easter egg roll is to see who can roll an egg the greatest distance or can make the roll without breaking the egg, usually down a grassy hillside or slope.

Hmm...right. This is soon followed by other fun and equally rewarding activities such as "clamp the testicles on the doberman" and "changing granny's tampon."

The most famous egg rolling takes place on the White House lawn. Hundreds of children come with baskets filled with brightly decorated eggs and roll them down the famous lawn, hoping the President is watching them. Oddly enough, since George W. Bush took the seat of Commander-In-Chief, most of the children coming every year with baskets filled with brightly colored eggs have the strangest names. Names like Allah, Mustafa, Ahmad, Raheesh, Tasnim, Ghitbah and Habib. And even more strange, their eggs are of the exploding persuasion.

Anyway, a very happy Easter one and all (or at least to those that celebrate) and depending on how hardcore you are remember, Easter doesn't have to be once a year. In fact, you can have Easter all year round. All it requires is this easy, do-it-yourself Easter kit: 2 boards, 3 nails and a martyr!

Don't "Passover" This Blog

2006-04-11T13:05:00.000-07:00

Today, Jewish people everywhere frantically prepare for the holiday known as Passover. But what is Passover exactly? Listen up and I shall impart some theological gibble-gabble on all of you.

About 3000 years ago, the Israelites were enslaved by the Egyptians under the rule of the Pharaoh Ramses II because they, yet again, ran their mouths about being the "chosen people." Most, if not all Jewish oppression and hatred could have likely been avoided over the ages if the Jewish people would just accept the fact that there's no such thing as "chosen people." It's an arrogant and self-righteous belief. In my opinion, if your people have enough nuclear fire power to turn a continent into kitty litter, then, and ONLY then, do you earn the title of "chosen people" (but that's more out of instilled fear than anything else).

Anyway, Moses, a simple Jewish shepherd (who unfortunately was about 3 millennia too early to compete in the Charlton Heston celebrity look-alike pageant in Vegas) was instructed by God to go to the Pharaoh and demand the freedom of his people. Without giving the Pharaoh a chance to mull it over, God unleashed a series of 10 terrible plagues on the people of Egypt. But hey, if you had divine power, you'd probably look for every reason to abuse it also. The plagues were as followed:

1. Blood
2. Frogs
3. Lice (vermin)
4. Wild Beasts (flies...go figure that one out!)
5. Blight (cattle disease)
6. Boils
7. Hail
8. Locusts
9. Darkness
10. Slaying of the First Born.

Now aside from plague number 10, these are not that serious. Why I bet within a given week most, if not all of you, contract at least half of these. Ever gone camping? It's like boogie boarding back in time to ancient Egypt. Perhaps back then these plagues were more serious. I believe if God were to lash out now, these 10 Contemporary Plagues that I have compiled would do a great deal more damage than the infamous ancient and outdated plagues:

1. Being exposed to sexually explicit lesbian videos of Sally Struthers and Rosie O'Donnell
2. Explosive diarrhea on a first date with no known bathroom in sight
3. Having to shave a parent's crotch
4. Being a contestant on Faces Of Death
5. Watching Canadian art house documentaries
6. Forever having a nose itch so far up the nasal cavity that you're eternally picking your nose
7. Having your breath smell like baby formula always
8. Acting on an uncontrollable urge to yell "cocksucker" at the top of your lungs whenever you see a new face
9. Having large canker sores swell in the back of your throat so that every swallow feels like death
10. Being forced to stare at a chalkboard for long periods of time that have been fully erased except for one little smudge of chalk that someone missed and all the while not being able to do a damn thing about it.

Now those are plagues!

If any of you are like me, then you believe that everything written in the new and old testaments are tales and folklore that have been misconstrued, misinterpreted, revised, written and re-written with the intent to distort, manipulate and ultimately fly in the face of scientific fact in order to scare people into believing in spirituality, the underworld and attonement. Recently I read an article that said like all biblical tales, the 10 plagues of Moses' time easily yields to a scientific explanation. In the book of Exodus, the sky turned black and the river turned into blood and there followed the plagues of frogs, bugs, boils and the death of the first born. What we have evidence of is a volcanic eruption. The ash flew into the sky thus turning it dark. Mud poured into the Nile turning it red with silt, driving the frogs to the land where they rotted in the sun, which drew bugs by the billions and they carried typhus (boils) that swept death through the first born - the eldest children whose exposure was the greatest because they were the ones laboring in the fields. To quote C&C Music Factory, "Things that make you go hmm?"

The holiday's name Pesach, meaning "passing over" or "protection" in Hebrew, was first spoken by a timeworn senile-stricken geriatric whose teeth were not in quite right. It is also derived from the instructions given to Moses by God (who later instructed Moses to become the chair of the National Rifle Association).

In order to encourage the Pharaoh to free the Israelites, God intended to kill the first-born of both man and beast. Now what exactly was God's beef with the beasts? I'm not clear on what they did wrong and what killing their first-born would accomplish. Can you imagine two zebras trying every conceivable avenue to give birth? I'm talking everything from counseling, to aphrodisiacs, to ultimate guides, 10 step programs, Viagra, Kama Sutra, power pills, Bang Bros. porn videos...the works, finally giving birth and then having that baby zebra killed? And it's not like humans suffered from the untimely death of a zebra's first born child. It's not like there were interspecies arranged marriages between humans and wild horse-like African mammals and the death of the first born had tragic implications, the likes of which cried out: "What a scourge is laid upon your hate, that heavens finds means to kill your joys. All are punished." (A university professor once said to me that when you've started a thought you can't finish, distract people by quoting Shakespeare. Did it work?)

So to protect themselves, the Israelites were told to mark their dwellings with lamb's blood so that the angel of death (yes, they have an ANGEL for this kind of thing) could identify and "pass over" their homes. (This story was later mistold by Anti-Semites who claimed that the Jews put the blood of Christian children on their door to partake in some Pagan-like ritual. This is, if not a more interesting approach, totally false and absurd. However, Jews did and still continue to use the blood of Christian children to bake cookies for other Jewish holidays, observations and rituals).

Of course none of the 10 plagues worked as Pharaoh said, "Good, kill my son! Then maybe the slag I call my wife will have sex with me again." After hearing this, God sent an 11th plague that is rarely documented - the plague of carnal nymphomania. After being poked, stabbed, banged, humped, coitioned, fornicated, copulated, screwed, violated, sodomized, fingered, junctioned and horizontally mambo'd by every known courtesan, concubine, strumpet, harlot and ancient Egyptian whore pawing and lapping every pleasure nerve, orifice and sensory organ on his body, the Pharaoh was so delirious with orgasmic glee and testicular drainage, that he not only agreed to free the Jews, but he agreed to henna tattoo his ankles, shave the words "pimp daddy" into his unkempt pubic hairs and rename the pyramids Disneyland Egypt (this was before the god-less soul-suckers at the Walt Disney Co. sued everyone and anyone for the slightest copyright infringement or slanderous remark). The Israelites left their homes so quickly that there wasn't even time to bake their breads. This crisis obviously could have been avoided had the Israelites invested in the George Foreman grill. So they packed the raw dough to take with them on their journey. As they fled through the desert, they would quickly bake the dough in the hot sun into hard crackers called matzohs (which roughly translates to: even a homeless person would refuse to eat this unsalted cardboard shit). Today, to commemorate this event, Jews eat matzoh in place of bread during Passover (and then relish in the delight of heartburn, constipation, gas, hiatal hernias, esophagitis, peptic ulcers and other various forms of stomach rot, disease and ridicule).

Of course once Pharaoh realized that he no longer had the cheapest labor outside of a Thailand sweat shop, he immediately sent every single one of his guardians on horseback to chase down his slaves in a strange sea (that seemed a lot more vertical that day than usual. But if any of you have been to Universal Studios, you know how that was done). And since God hates equines as much as everyone else in the world, he decided to kill them all in the Red Sea. Rumor has it if you go swimming really late at night in the Red Sea, you can hear the scream of a thousand dead horses. (Not surprisingly, it is the same sound a Red Sea swimmer makes if he or she enters the sea with an open wound anywhere on his or her body).

Leading up to the first night of Passover, the home is cleaned and cleared of all yeast foods called hametz (which doesn't actually mean anything...it's just another excuse to give something a goofy name). The cleaning of the house also marks that special time when Jewish families find all those cool things that went missing over the year (like the 999th piece in their 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle that some thoughtless tit bought them years ago for a Bar or Bat Mitzvah). It is also usually the time when they find the exoskeleton of beloved pets and various other cherished dead things that mysteriously disappeared over the year.

The Seder plate (central dinner display plate) contains foods that have special meaning for this holiday: Haroseth (another name for spiced barf), parsley dippled in salt water, roasted egg, burnt shank bone and bitter herbs. It's clear that the Seder plate contains a smorgasbord of the most indigestible foods the human body is capable of absorbing and a sick twisted mind is capable of imagining.

During the Seder, 4 glasses of wine are poured to represent the 4 stages of exodus: Freedom, Deliverance (another word for freedom), Redemption (yet another word for freedom) and Release (are you beginning to see a trend here?) It's my belief that someone just came up with a serious of synonyms for "freedom" as an excuse to get drunk on cheap wine. A fifth cup of wine is poured and placed on the Sedar table. This is the Cup of Elijah (no no, not the kid that played Frodo), it is an offering for the dead prophet Elijah. During the Seder, the door to the home is opened to invite this creepy ghost prophet in. And no on thinks it's strange that they're inviting a dead person into the home to sit at the table, drink wine and share out-of-date sandal fashion tips with the family? Yeah, that wouldn't fuck up any small children! And only a desperate and pathetic moron leaves their front door wide open in a day and age when various madmen kidnap small children and rape teenage girls right under their parents' noses. Granted, any madman would take one look at the Seder and deduce that these people are certainly more deranged than he is and would proceed to "pass over" to the next house with the hot teenage girl in the sexy tube top and lacey thong.

Finally, the youngest child (who would rather be on the Internet downloading transexual anal porn and posting hatred on chat forums) is coerced into asking 4 timeless questions:

1 - Why is this night different from all other nights? (Answer: because on all other nights, your aging 106 year old grandmother with various facial hair isn't sitting at the table causing everyone great worry that at any given moment the formaldehyde in her blood is going to dry up and her heart will wither into a crispy nugget and we'll be inconvenienced by our "close family" facade by having to drag her dead ass to the hospital).

2 - Why do we eat only matzoh tonight? (Answer: because of all the races that hate the Jews, none hate them more than other Jews. Jews find ways to torture their own. Also, McDonald's doesn't cater to kosher folk with 99 cent Passover Big Macs).

3 - Why do we eat bitter herbs? (Answer: because it rapidly causes flatulence and the release of other gastrointestinal gases and lower body secretives to ensure you don't get laid any time during the holiday season. I mean, when was the last time you EVER saw a Passover-themed adult film?)

4 - Why do we dip our foods twice? (Answer: so the women, like in every other sexually oppressive religion, have twice as much to clean up at the end of the night, while the men all sit around and pat themselves on the back for doing jack shit).

Like most Jewish festivities, Passover is a time when Jews are made to feel guilty for something that happened a gazillion years ago. For those that celebrate this holiday, try something different this year...don't. God doesn't exist. And if there's even a small chance that he does, believe me he hates you!

Happy Passover to those who do indulge! I gotta run. There's a burning bush outside that eagerly wants a word with me and it doesn't seem too pleased.

2006-04-09T12:27:00.000-07:00

I am taking off the day to develop a growth potion, which, if successful, will allow me to grow almost 100 yards high.

Seemingly there is no benefit to this potion other than the obvious joy of being able to use an elephant as a paperweight and a crocodile as a pair of scissors.

Will keep you posted.

And the Oscar goes to…

2006-04-07T13:26:00.000-07:00

Me! For my short 1997 film The Klown (with the K flipped horizontally in a pretentious attempt to come off more artsy than I actually was).

Okay, this email’s a little late, but for some reason people still ask me if I think Crash was the best film of last year. Well guess what? It wasn’t. Not by a long shot. Crash was good, but not great. Crash is the type of film they make you study in film school screenwriting because it’s filled with every little nuance and cliché that a writer uses to manipulate the audience into caring. Seriously, this was a very very over-done film that tried way too hard to come off as ironic and socially profound but only ended up emitting this feeling of pathos. The actors are fantastic and I appreciate the way the stories intersect with each other. But the bottom line is (and this is what I told people who asked me if they should watch the film back when it was in theatres): “If you’re racist, you’ll love it.”

As for Brokeback Mountain, I finally got around to seeing it. Beautiful cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto. The story was just slow-moving and awful. The only reason this movie garnered as much hype and heat as it did was because Hollywood is a very liberal community and for a country on the verge of treason, this movie flies directly in the face of the conservative views of George W. Bush. Like a bratty little kid who doesn’t get its way (i.e. its candidate lost its election), Brokeback Mountain was an attempt at a jab to the ribs or a sticking out of the tongue to democracy. If you want to ensure an Academy Award nomination, just amass some controversy behind your film. Find out what’s taboo at that time and get on it and fast, because if you don't, some Republican-hater will beat you to it.

(Side note): This is what troubles me about the Oscars. It’s so obviously political and yet no one realizes how insulting that is. Remember the “all black” year? When Halle Berry won for Monster’s Ball and Denzel Washington won for Training Day? This was such a farce and an obvious farce. What exactly was the message being conveyed here? Yes, after almost a century of cinema, we the people of Hollywood accept and acknowledge black people as more than song-and-dance acts or wide-eyed simpletons, saying “Yes Mammy,” or “No Sah!” The truth is the Oscars are just another cog in the machine. Its purpose is to satisfy and reflect white peoples need for social interaction with its own ethnic group to which a black person has no part. The largest and richest audience is young white adults (who the Academy is constantly trying to appeal to by hiring some hip comedian as MC for the night). Awarding any ethnicity (besides foreign film) to anyone other than white necessitates a departure from generic conventions and will cause less people to go to films in the future. The almighty buck is more important than an accurate and positive representation of a multicultural world and an honor in artistic excellence. It was a total sham! And yet people just ate it up. However, by honoring both Halle Berry and Denzel Washington, Oscar could sit back, take a financial hit, but pat itself on the back and make sure it wouldn’t have to do something of this magnitude for years to come. I mean Denzel Washington? Once upon a time he was a fantastic actor. But if I have to see one more movie with him playing the “cop-with-an-edge” I’m gonna castrate myself. Talk about typecasting. And I’m sure they could have found a far better African-American woman than Halle Berry to award this "ground-breaking" Oscar to. I think Angela Bassett should have won back in the day for her portrayal of Tina Turner. The only African-American who deserved the Oscar that night was Sidney Poitier. In fact, he deserves an Oscar every night! But the fact that they made that night such a political agenda actually cheapened his life-time achievement award.

As for the others: Capote, Munich, Good Night And Good Luck and Walk The Line, I never did see Good Night And Good Luck. I find George Clooney smug and arrogant and he tries to come off as this knowledgeable political virtuoso exposing topics that people don’t like to hear about. Well Good Night And Good Luck is about 50 years too late, wouldn’t ya say? Back when McCarthy was going ape-shit on the world, most of Hollywood hid, cowered or pointed fingers to save its own ass from being blacklisted. And guess what? The same thing would happen today. However, today there’s no threat of communism amongst Americans. Today it’s safe to make a film like this and say in retrospect (50 YEARS LATER), hey, we might have been a little wrong. Good job Clooney, way to get us thinking! I really enjoyed Munich and felt that out of the 5 poor choices here, this one probably should have won. But don’t even get me started on why Hollywood hates Spielberg. Walk The Line was fantastic. Unfortunately for poor Joaquin, Ray had won the year before. Jamie Foxx was excellent in Ray, but Joaquin Phoenix was excellent as well and he got shafted because the two films were so close together. I mean, the man transformed into Johnny Cash. Whatever! I understand why Capote had to win for best actor. An assured Oscar statue comes from playing a retard. Do this and you will win.

While I’m on the topic of movies, lemme give you a run-down of my 5 favorite films this year and my 5 most disappointing films. I say disappointing not because I hated them, walked out of the theatre and sulked because I’d never have that time or money back again. I mean disappointing in the sense that I was looking forward to these the most and they let me down. There are still elements to these films I enjoyed. I've even bought them on DVD and will buy the rest when they come out. I guess I just built them up as being the be-all-and-end-all and then when I saw them, they didn’t live up to the expectation I created for them. And I’ve given most of them a second chance, this time unbiased, and they still disappoint.

Top 5 Disappointments Of 2005:

5. Land Of The Dead – okay maybe I’m being picky but this was the master himself, George A. Romero, returning to the genre that he invented: zombies! After seeing 28 Days Later and the remake of Dawn Of The Dead and knowing that you could create fast-moving and actual threatening zombies, Romero opted for his original slow-moving idiot zombies. The beauty of a Romero zombie flick is there’s always some underlying social theme to the film (whether it’s anti-consumerism, anti-military or in this case, anti-class division). But the zombies just seemed so…unimpressive. I found myself waiting for something that said “George is back!” but that something never happened.

4. The Notorious Bettie Page – I saw this at the Toronto film festival and I couldn’t have been more excited. Bettie Page has and always will exude sex appeal in its rawest form for me. She will forever be "THE" pin-up girl. Gretchen Mol WAS Bettie Page. I couldn’t believe it. The film was beautifully photographed and well acted, but it lacked something that a biopic needs: a story or expose. This film was made without Bettie Page’s involvement, hence anything really interesting or profoundly secretive about her life is lacking. There’s one incident at the beginning where we learn why Bettie takes the road she takes, but after that the film becomes an hour of us watching her being photographed by various photographers. What the fuck? Great, so she looks sexy and provocative. But where is her life's story? I learned nothing in this film that I couldn’t have learned by reading a small biography paragraph on any number of Bettie Page sites on the Internet. The film touches upon the Senate Hearings on Indecency & Smut but never actually returns to it. This film is merely a long overdue nod that quickly becomes visual eye-candy for die-hard Bettie Page fans. But anyone actually wanting to know about the person will be as disappointed as I was.

3. The Piano Tuner Of Earthquakes – another film festival screening from those masters of stop-motion animation, the quirky Brothers Quay. I love stop-motion. I consider Jan Svankmajer and the Brothers Quay to be the masters. Their short films are haunting and surreal and I was eager to see how that vision would translate to a full-length feature. Wow, what a kick in the teeth. I have a lot of patience for films, especially abstract films. I don’t need to be spoon-fed a plot, I enjoy trying to put the pieces together, but there has to be pieces to put together. Otherwise I feel as though the filmmaker is laughing at me as I try to decipher metaphors and symbolism that don't actually mean anything and are weird for weird's sake. Individually, each frame of this film is a painting that should be hung in a gallery. Put those frames together and this is just a train wreck of a film. It just gets completely lost in its own obscurity and unfortunately is way too abstract even for me. Sometimes things that work in 5 – 15 minute pieces should just stay that way. Otherwise the charm tends to fade.

2. Corpse Bride – I always felt uneasy that Tim Burton didn’t direct The Nightmare Before Christmas. It’s painfully obvious that he was involved in that film from beginning to end and all the characters are based on his vivid and bizarre imagination. But director Henry Selick really got the short end of the straw on that one as few tend to acknowledge his genius on that film. Regardless, I absolutely love The Nightmare Before Christmas. To me, that was Tim Burton and Danny Elfman at the peak of their creative game. So, naturally, hearing that Tim Burton was returning to stop motion animation in the director’s seat with Danny Elfman by his side and the extra special addition of Johnny Depp in the lead, how could I not soil myself during the first trailer? I thought this was going to be the best movie ever! Tim Burton returns to the musical macabre! I left the theatre so angry. The story was so utterly weak. This man couldn’t tell a love story if it bit him on the ass. The music was so forgettable. It’s like it was strung together last minute using rejected pieces from Sesame Street episodes. I can’t remember, nor do I care to remember, any of the songs in the film. None of them stuck with me like the tunes in Nightmare did. Even Johnny Depp’s second incarnation of Ichabod Crane couldn’t save this film. Tim Burton relied on his usual character actors to breathe life into this piece but it was dead to begin with. I felt the only thing this film had going for it was that people like myself would be duped into thinking it was going to be the next Nightmare Before Christmas, and so story and music were sacrificed because of that. A cheap and pathetic reason to make a film.

1. Mirror Mask – Neil Gaiman is my God. I own everything he’s ever put his name on as a writer. If he wiped his ass on a piece of toilet paper and wrote the word “eat my shit” on it, I would spend my life savings on eBay purchasing it. I remember listening to the commentary track on Neverwhere. It’s obvious that Gaiman hated the way the BBC interpreted his story. In fact, he hated it so much, he wrote it in novel form just so he could tell it the way it was meant to be told. So, hearing that Neil Gaiman had teamed up with long-time collaborator and illustrious genius Dave McKean and the two of them in turn teamed up with the Jim Henson Company (a company responsible for some of the most memorable films in my childhood), I had an orgasm. Finally this was Neil Gaiman’s chance to tell a film the way he wants it to be told. If anyone’s going to take his words and do them justice it’s Dave McKean. If anyone’s going to take McKean’s visuals and do them justice, it’s the Jim Henson Company. The recipe was perfect. What could go wrong? I still ask myself that question months later. The story about a little girl who wants to run away from the circus and join real life sounded good on paper, but the film itself was slow-moving, painfully uninteresting and filled with characters I could give two shits about. Visually, it was breath-taking, but still, the CG looked kinda washed-out and muddy at times and the animal/character inventions were really not all that impressive. And I understand that Dave McKean is an avid jazz musician, but what a poor choice of music to accompany these visuals. We needed something more magical, more other-worldly, more circus-like. To me, this was supposed to be the best film of the year. I dragged many people to see this at the one theatre playing it. At the end of the film, the ones who were still awake looked at me with the look of “You fucking owe me BIG TIME!” Heartbreaking, really.

My Top 5 Films Of 2005:

5. The Constant Gardener – no film has made me think this much in a long long time. If Crash had been this thought-provoking, then it would have deserved best picture. I understand the agenda behind this film, but really, it shows you just how frightening the situation in Africa is to us blinded and blissfully ignorant Westerners and it shows us the horror behind what giant, monopolistic drug companies are capable of doing. Great performances and one of those films that when it ends, you’re left sitting in the dark, unable to move or get up, and just thinking.

4. The 40 Year Old Virgin – I saw this film at a time when I needed to laugh and boy did it do just that. This movie fucking slayed me. There were moments when I couldn’t breathe I was laughing so hard. Tears were streaming down my face. And it wasn’t the slapsticky humor that you’d get out of a Will Ferrell or Jim Carrey flick. This film had heart and a lot of it. Someone recently told me that the film was just a giant propaganda piece for abstaining from sex because Steve Carell is part of some ultra-Christian group. I don’t believe that at all, and even if it is true, go fuck yourself for telling me that. This film rules. So much better than that Wedding Crashers flick that fell apart half-way through the second act.

3. Sin City – wow! This film started and never stopped. And I was worried too. I love the Sin City comics. They have this neo-noir flare to them that I feared only worked in comic form. After watching Michael Madsen try to speak the Frank Miller dialogue, I thought for sure this movie would suck. Turns out Michael Madsen just sucked in this role. Once you get past that scene, the movie takes you on a roller coaster ride, stuffs you full of amphetamines, penetrates every available orifice on your body, then leaves you wanting more. I felt so invigorated after this movie ended, I could have watched 3 more hours of it. Robert Rodriguez has always been hit or miss with me. This was a definite hit! I can't understand why comic book films are so hard to get right. As much as I liked Batman Begins, I still felt that it was fucked up. Batman is a DETECTIVE! Why can't one filmmaker who steps into the director's seat for a Batman film acknowledge this? We'd get a wicked mystery film with a superhero as the gumshoe. Who wouldn't want to see this? Oh that's right, the toy companies when they're trying to push their products to children. That's why Sin City works. It had integrity and didn't bend-over or sell-out in order to sell movie tie-in's. Hell, Rodriguez quit the Director's Guild just so Frank Miller could co-direct. That's ballsy.

2. Everything Is Illuminated – I was surprised at much this film touched me. You constantly shift between these great dramatic moments and then these great moments filled with dry humor. It’s a shame more people didn’t see this film. There aren’t enough personal and humanistic stories anymore and this one excels. This is one of those movies that’s not in your face or over-done and if more people saw it, I think more people would understand why there’s so much miscommunication and misunderstanding in the world. Really a powerful film. One of the reasons I love film so much is because of films like this that can elicit such strong emotions from you. The book was really good, the movie I felt was even better. That's a rare thing.

1. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang – yes, I know, an usual choice, but this was the most clever and entertaining film I saw last year. I’m a huge Raymond Chandler fan and I find that there aren’t enough good mysteries set against the backdrop of Hollywood anymore. The difference between this and some hard-boiled detective story is the comedy. Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer are fantastic in this film that really keeps you guessing until the end. I love when a set of events domino into each other without getting too absurd or lost in complexities. This film has style and wit, with a narrator that talks to you, the audience, in a humorous and beguiling sort of way. I can’t say enough good things about this film and I don’t wish to talk about it without giving things away. See it when you can. It’s hard to come up with original concepts anymore. It’s all about taking existing ideas and trying to put a unique twist on it. This is exactly what this movie does. Guns, girls, murder, intrigue and the city of angels! Really, do we need anything else?

Fucking Weather

2006-04-04T22:45:00.000-07:00

What is it with Toronto weather? This is exactly why people snap. I saw a guy last week walking around a parking lot wearing ear muffs and some sort of sweater that looked like a shaved Wookie, he was doing the breaststroke with his hands and peering into vacant cars. I always wonder what makes someone decide that's how they're going to spend their evening. What drives a person to that point? It's the weather. It has to be. There's no other logical explanation. It makes us crazy.

It was finally becoming warm and sunny here again. And suddenly, today, snow and hail! HAIL for fuck sake. And bitter cold. And then really sunny with hints of warmth. And then more hail and finally snow again.

Toronto changes seaons hourly. We take weather hits the likes of which would have caused Noah to curl up into a fetal position, rock back and forth and chant a series of calming mantras. At what point does the city get sanctioned as a no man's land and marshal law is declared?

Oh wait, I'm receiving word that city hall had this message delivered to it earlier:

Mortals,

Until my daughter Persophene is released from Hades, her younger brother Glacius will continue to plague your city with snow and ice.

Sincerely,
Demeter

Evidently, a misconception was made and Toronto has been mistaken for hell. Why can't the Gods all get along?

Feeling Poetic

2006-04-01T15:30:00.000-08:00

Some of my favorites:

"I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet."
- William Butler Yeats

"To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour."
- William Blake

"And sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea;
What are all these kissings worth
If thou kiss not me?"
- Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day
In a vision, or in none
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream."
- Edgar Allan Poe

"I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me."
- Gerard Manley Hopkins

"I dwell in possibility..."
- Emily Dickinson

"In the pale light of the moon,
I play the game of you.
Whoever I am.
Whoever you are.
All sense of where I am, of who I am and where I'm going, has been swallowed by the dark.
And I walk through the stars and sky.
A trinity of dreams beneath the moon."
- Neil Gaiman

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind
And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind.”
- William Shakespeare

In a Wonderland they lie
Dreaming as the days go by
Dreaming as the summers die.
Ever drifting down the stream
Lingering in the golden gleam
Life, what is it but a dream?
- Lewis Carroll

Good, Fast, Cheap

2006-03-31T12:36:00.000-08:00

There’s nothing quite like making a film. The moment you see an idea you had one sleep-deprived night reflecting back on you on a large screen in front of a crowd is truly more divine than the trinity, more beautiful than the birth of Mars, more profound than the vigil of Sir Galahad, more bewitching than the seven seekers of knowledge gathering the unicorns.

I’m always happiest too when I’m making a film. For some reason, I enjoy working myself into a coma. I enjoy the quick turn-around time that gives us all little chance to recover. We become like mummies on a chain gang, sleeping for a few hours at a time in a rejuvenation tank. To me, making a film is like turning impossible goals into a shimmering reality. But I don’t make films that often because (a) it takes a lot out of you and (b) I have to really love the material to want to devote all that time and effort to it and (c) a little concept my cinematographer is always yapping about. He says making a film takes into account 3 principles: good, fast and cheap. You can always have two but one has to suffer. For example, if you want to make a film fast and cheap, it won’t be good. If you want to make a film fast and good, it won’t be cheap. And if you want to make a film good and cheap, it won’t be fast. I fall into that latter category. I want to make a film good and cheap. And for that reason, it usually takes me several months to shoot it.

When I was in school, I used to make short films. They were either over-ambitious films that, admittedly, didn’t work or short visual congeries of confusion; that same level of confusion one would find if she or she tried to study the mating habits of plastic lawn furniture.

When I left film I was bitten by the bug to continue making films. Of course, funding these films was not easy. When government grants, commercial producers, private investors and money from rich, obscure relatives fell through, I would max out my credit card. The problem was, every day I would arrive home to find some ostensibly innocuous envelope from VISA. Much like a Palestinian entering a pizzeria in Jerusalem, the benign exterior harbored impending doom. My doom manifested in the form of threatening letters reminding me to deliver several thousand dollars by the end of the month should I ever want to see my knee-caps and loved ones again. In time, I became overwhelmed with debt and ended up contracting scurvy from having to resort to a diet of plain couscous and free popcorn from movie rental shops as a way of saving money. I decided, no more films until I had the proper funding.

And life was plunged into darkness.

And I began massacring actors just because I missed the hodgepodge feel of grisly thespian flesh between my fingers.

And then the voices came instructing me to do their bidding.

And then I woke up naked somewhere, covered in goat semen, shouting mispronounced phrases from the Necronomicon, assured that an ancient prophet or some higher power would offer me sanctuary in Shangri-La for this immoral act.

Hey, what can I say, not being able to follow your passions does strange things to one’s emotional spectrum. The constant anxiety treats my quintessential personality like the ever-changing Jekyll and Hyde, alternately elating and despairing (minus the primate-like behavior, giant growth spurts, bad breath and burgeoning desire to commit grotesque acts of limb-severing homicide – except on actors, of course).

I’m happy to say that I’m taking up the directing seat again and soon. I recently made a contact that initially started speaking about having me shoot a film for him. I thought it would be nice to return to my roots for a bit and take up the role behind the camera as cinematographer. He had also mentioned something about having me direct a short film for him. Directing shorts doesn’t really give me that same level of excitement it used to. They’re very limiting in terms of who sees them and where they can go. However, after a meeting with this company, they’ve decided they want to shoot a few shorts with the same theme, only given a different flavor from different directors, and then package them together. Interesting idea with a lot of potential for coolness. So, I’ve agreed to do this. Over the next year, I will be directing and writing 3 short films for them. The first theme is “dark fables” – a theme right up my alley!

My production begins in June with a film called Fables.

And now you know everything about my week. What did you do today?

Mi Familia

2006-03-28T13:05:00.000-08:00

I'm in one of those moods right now that's hard to describe. It's the same sort of mood that captured tourists in the Congo feel sitting in a circle drawn from twigs and sand while their tour guide's head rests securely on a spike in the center of this circle, and they're being danced around by torch lights and sharp daggers, while their captors drink the blood of a virgin gorilla in an attempt to harness the power of Akonadi, all the while hissing tribunal chants and voodoo incantations in an unrecognizable form of mystical gibberish that sound like the music of Enya (which is actually good).

Does anyone else ever feel like that?

(Speaking of which, why are there never any good incantations anymore? Or even magic potions? Or spells at the very least?)

So anyway, I really have nothing to blog about but I'm in a writing mood nonetheless. So I'm gonna talk about my family (unfortunately without the appropriate visual material. Wouldn't want to scare any of you).

We begin with the elder, decrepit folk:

My grandmother Yetti was born in the fortress of Sighisoara in Romania. She was inducted into the Order of The Dracu in 1436 by the emperor Sigismund. Shortly after, Yetti became ruler of Wallachia, launched a campaign against the Turks along the Danube river, was personally responsible for the mass execution of over 100,000 people and was finally brought down somewhere near Bucharest in 1476. Her remains had been on display in Constantinople up until about 1931, when they mysteriously disappeared at sunset. Yetti enjoys poker, walks in the moonlight, metamorphosising into bats, wolves and mist, solitude, eternal darkness and she never drinks wine.

My grandmother Mary was part of a Polish dark arts scientific experiment back at the turn of the century, using futuristic extraterrestrial technology called the granite bridge formula. This experiment was designed to see what would happen if human DNA found in the Broca’s area – the small area of the human brain responsible for the production of speech, was successfully combined with the mortifying sound that a Mack truck makes when it blows its horn. The result...Mary!

Saul is Mary's husband (not my grandfather). Saul is Romanian. For some ungodly reason Romanians have this unhealthy act of giving their children the same first name as their last name as Saul's real name is Strul Strul (also known as Strul squared or the square root of Strul to the power of 2 or Struls). Saul is an intense gentleman with the wisdom of Yoda and the experience of Geronimo. He has an eye for the arts and a nose for cocaine. Yet Saul is an eccentric fellow who’s favorite pastime includes hanging out in boy’s change rooms with a pinhole camera and a framed 8 x 11 inspirational picture of John Wayne Gacy.

My middle sister's names is Candice. Once every millennia, the demoness Naamah, Agrat daughter of Lilith and the fallen angel Mahlat, successfully mates with an organism of the same gender, in this case a human female, to give birth to a hell-spawn with the potential to bring forth the end of the world. Candice, or as we like to call her, the princess of darkness, is that human female.

Josh is Candice's husband. Josh was born in a cobbler’s basement, forged out of wood and brought into this world through the love shared between a man and a fairy. Of his many endeavors, Josh has been swallowed whole by a whale, sold to a traveling side-show circus and on many occasions, has turned into a jackass (or donkey). But little Josh still believes he’s a real boy. He's a compulsive liar but only does so because of what "grows" from that. He tries to compensate for his short comings, if you know what I mean!

My eldest sister is Melanie. She was born 8 and half months premature. She is actually a freaky looking, underdeveloped 32 year old foreign exchange student from New Guinea. Her illustrious jobs include washing the bibs after meals at Red Lobster, teaching line dancing at the local Bowlorama and mass producing children at an alarming rate. She has 3 kids (2 girls and a baby boy with another child on the way). Like Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn or Charles Dickens’ Pip, my nieces and nephews are innocent and adventurous children with smiles like cold water in the desert. How I envy them! The sights they've yet to see, the trials and tribulations they've yet to face on the ultimate adventure that awaits them in a few years time: the journey to find their real father!

Mitch is Melanie's husband (and yes, the father of her children...I think). Mitch just got over an ugly lawsuit with the estate of Jayne Mansfield for stalking, transvestinal copyright issues and necromancy. During the day, Mitch stands on street corners dressed as a burlesque dancer, handing out fliers for cults. At night, he’s hard at work trying to perfect his wit with word games. Mitch obsesses over his own name. He sits around trying to come up with acronyms, amalgamations, syntax, malapropisms. The other day I overheard him trying to come up with rhymes for Mitch, like hitch and twitch and kitsch. And speaking of words that rhyme with Mitch...

My mother Susan is one of the kindest and most gentle people I’ve ever met in my life. When I was a baby, she put me on her lap and told me three things that would forever shape me. 1 – things that are different aren’t necessarily bad, they're just wrong. 2 – one of life’s biggest problems is that not enough people name their pets after common household snacks. 3 – it’s a small world after all, but for a midget, it’s all eye level. My poor mother deals with her own little dementia day in and day out. When she was a little girl, a Canderian witch put a spell on her that has never been lifted. To this day, every morning at 1am to 5am, she turns into Juansalo Ramirez, the gay outlaw Latin superhero who crusades against the forces of tyranny and oppression.

And finally my father (and probably some poor illegitimate child’s long lost father as well) Fred, who, like most Neanderthals, lived over 40,000 years ago. While staring at a strange monolith one day, he was fortunate enough to fall into a lake of ice, whereby he became cryogenically frozen until sometime in the 60s when a group of hippies, tripped out on acid thought it would be cool to thaw him out by throwing candles and burning sticks of incense in the water. Luckily for us, he has mastered most of the modern day homo sapien formalities. He does however find it difficult to walk without dragging his knuckles on the ground and occasionally grabs small animals from the wild and devours them whole.

I love them all.

I really do.

Well most of them.

Come to think, I can't stand the lot of 'em.

Bloody wankers.

2006-03-26T23:34:00.000-08:00

To think of inspiration is to think of a single thought. But how is it possible to isolate a particular focus on a vision that may not even exist in this time and space that we hold true to our existence? What I do is I jump from thought to thought, collecting each as I pass GO and slowly distribute them among the masses of feeble-minded electrodes flowing through my cortex that thirst for inspiration. And when all is said and done, I still feel stupid and void of thought so I close my eyes and allow my mind to wander beyond the threshold of non-existing visions and I find myself tip-toeing to the edge of a reality on a diving board, hovering thousands of feet above a cesspool of fictitious realms of fantasy and nonsense. I search my pockets for my nose-plug and bathing cap but I soon learn that I am naked...so I do the only thing that makes sense and I search my pockets again.

Finally, coming to terms with the fact that I am unequipped for this abyss of inverted reason, thousands of feet up, I look behind me and realize that all I have known for the past twenty-eight years has been documented in an autobiography written by a total stranger and shelved just out of reach for me to justify. So blindly and somewhat foolishly I take the plunge into, what I cautiously call, the unknown and I allow the waves of absurdity and obscurity to crash over me as I float down the stream towards an enigma of surrealism and the theater of the grotesque. I have been baptized by my own inanity, that of which others might refer to as insanity. I lick my arm in this cesspool of pure imaginative cognition and it tastes so sweet...almost like sugar. I lick my arm once more and I notice a section missing from it. It is sugar. Suddenly I feel myself being stirred around, caught up in a whirlpool of nausea and disorientation and I look up only to notice a giant, life-sized me stirring myself in a tall paper cup of deep black coffee in a run-down decrepit diner, halfway between Cape Fear and the Heartbreak Hotel.

I stare deep into the inky liquid I am about to ingest before adding one more lump for taste. And the lump cries out to me, "Stop stirring so vigorously for you're bound to drown me with the rest of your sorrows." But I understand the impossibility of this whole situation because my sorrows have fins and Olympic medals in swimming. So I place the oil up to my mouth and take one sip before recalling that I am sick of coffee, it is all I ever drink; I think I would like to try something new...I think I would like to try some tea. So once more I dive into my own twisted thoughts and I am taken far beyond the rainbow of conscious understanding. Now I've never seen the rainbow from behind before but it supports my theories that rainbows are only made up of one color when you disregard the superficiality of them and truly get around to looking at them. The backside of rainbows are much like the backside of water...only the novelty wears off with the excitement.

Again I feel my breathing slow to a pendulum-like procession, and I gasp for air as I notice I am hanging beside a pair of old gym socks in Davey Jones Locker. So I close my eyes and project myself to a time and place much like this one only different. Everything is so peaceful...there is absolutely no disturbance with the tectonic balance of tranquility. I find myself spying a crystal lake. There is a duck in this lake with a piece of bread in its mouth and there is an ant in the bread and there is a fly trying to eat the ant and everything is in balance as it should be. But instability soon finds a way into the ideal and it conquers the peace in this world as a fisherman pulls up nearby and tries to kill the fly with his hands. But he is a mutant and does not have hands.

And now I begin to fear myself. I fear what I am becoming with such dark and solemn images: the suicidal Walt Whitman. I do not want to be the depressed, aging artist, standing on a street corner, clad in a Hawaiian shirt, black socks and sandals holding a cocktail umbrella in one hand and a toy raccoon with a shirt that says hug me in the other hand. If experience has taught me anything...I will never hug that raccoon. I just can't allow myself to get close to anything right now. I've got to keep my edge. And above all...I have to find some tea.

But there is no tea to be found as I envision a cement truck on a gravel road with a flat tire, cruising at 100 miles per hour. There is no gas in this truck and it's being driven by a blind girl scout from military school with empty pop cans on both hands and feet and in the passenger seat is God, rapping to the tune of Smurfs Adventures. And I realize, hey if it's good enough for the creator, it's good enough for me. So I add theory number 88 (just like the keys) to my ever-growing list and I practically convince myself that cartoons are the foundation for our existence but then I remember just how little faith I have in God, but I like the number 88 so much because it's such a round number that I am willing to sacrifice my beliefs and faiths for shallow and phony reasons and to save face. After all I'm only human and sometimes I regret my abandonment of theology in these strange times.

So now I'm swimming upstream once more for I have survived the deep undertow of madness from naturally induced mind altering hallucinations. A sweet feeling of joy and luck has come over me at this moment. So to keep this feeling alive, I cash in my chips and find myself sitting around a small square table without corners. Joining me at this table is the Boogie Man to my left, the Closet Monster to my right and the unexplainable smell rising from my sink directly across from me. And the four of us are engaged in a staged, stalemate game of poker where the deuces are wild and so are the rest of the cards and the sky is the limit. And I realize, I haven't had this much fun since I strip-searched a fuel tank and went mini-golfing with an armed band of killer monks just the other day.

But no one cares. They're more interested in the private, bizarre and perverse side of me. The side I don't like to show in public. But I am a man for all seasons and I understand what the audience wants to hear so I satisfy them as much as I can by enlightening them with tales of moldy bananas and a 25 cent gro-aliens and ways to amuse past world leaders with nothing more than a hammer and chisel. But still no one cares. If I told them I could grow and spit mushrooms out of my ears and fly through steel walls sideways, they'd still be more interested in the latest prime time ratings sweeper, crap-o-vision that consumes my social qualities.

I reserve judgment on harsh comments but it is my belief that everyone must be crazy. I myself am not crazy because even if I were to wear a dress and a false mustache, dentures shaped like Lucky Charms and call myself Lars, I'd still be getting the best of both worlds and I’d be doing it with style and a hint of passion.

I now find myself in irons in this cesspool of fantasy and imagination and as much as I'd like to see my sails raised, the sad truth is...I am not moving forward and have not moved forward for a very long time. I know what you must be thinking...what now brown cow? Well I'm not so sure myself. The water has gone stale and it’s evaporating at a rapid pace and I still crave my tea. But as soon as this is said, a gust of wind hits me from the fifth direction (you know, the one that doesn't appear on any conventional maps or composes). I grab hold of the wind and fly off into the distance with it. Ironically I find myself looking through the magnifying end of a rather large telescope and I see a jaw-less dog walking on the moon, singing in perfect harmony with Beethoven's Ninth. Our eloquent and quite mysterious canine friend soon stops for a nap and begins slobbering over a dish that says how much wood would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood, written in Braille. In the dish is a mouse without eyelashes wresting John F. Kennedy in vinegar over some broad named Ginger or maybe it was Mary-Anne? The dog stares straight at me in an eerie and almost familiar way and says, look on the ground, it's a bird, it's a plane...no, it's a dead spider on a hacksaw with a sign that says “Help Me." But nobody is helping it because it is dead. I am appalled by the cruelty and inhumanity of this scene because even if something appears to be dead, it doesn't mean that we should just turn our backs on it; it might only be wounded temporarily or just hurt inside.

I take my quarter out of the telescope and thank myself for not putting any money into this cheap piece of scrap metal to begin with. Then I am upset because I wasted my time and precious moments on something I already knew.

I begin to crawl like a someone who crawls through the final few miles of this long and twisting lazy river of fantasy and inspiration. Before I am ready to give up and sink to the bottom like a dead balloon, I catch a glimpse of an island mirage protruding right below me. So naturally, I situate myself on the island, accept the hospitality, crack open a coconut and converse with the local. He is a kind fellow with three kids, one of each kind. He turns to me and tells me that the words "do you believe in magic?" really just means "do you believe in weird shit?" Now, on any other day, this information would have moved me to the point of laying an egg, but all I could think about on this particular day was what if Alvin and the Chipmunks really existed and how would that change the face of music as we know it and what moral implications would have to be considered in attempting to exploit these genetically-altered rodent-like creatures and would they scare people or would we find them all cute and cuddly and accept them into our culture? Then I remember David Seville's The Witch Doctor and all my chipmunk questions seem to fade away in a quagmire of ooh eeh ooh ah ah's, tin tang walla walla bing bang's.

My concentration is soon invaded by this feeling of nostalgia for something I can't remember. Then I feel something in my nose and after a moments thought, I realize it is only my nostril. Then I wonder if I would be disappointed in seeing a big fish come and eat this kind fellow who helped me out and showed me the support I feel I've been lacking for most of my journey. But before my thoughts turn to actions, I sit myself down and listen to an old tale this fellow has to tell me before he forgets himself and I have to remind him who he is. I pull up a sofa and clear my head of any brains and three dimensional objects that resemble the letter Y. The fellow starts talking in a monotone, squeaky voice much like his own. He tells me about this man, who happened to be a woman, who happened to be a man, who tried to tame a freak sheep in a petting zoo one day at the 67th parallel in the center span of the universe. But the sheep soon got loose and was holding the ring master at gun point. And on his head was a hood ornament, and in his gun were blanks...but that's only what the sheep said...they really weren't. But who in their right mind would believe a sheep?

Now I've heard a lot of fibs in my time and I knew something wasn't quite right with this one; this man was a liar. I knew a sheep that always told the truth. So suspiciously, I asked this fellow if he could spot a cup of tea. The local got very angry and said: "You don't like the coffee? I brewed it special just for you. That's good beans there y'know. Straight from the mountains. People like you can't appreciate what they've got until it's too late. You always have to be different don't you? Always craving something more?"

Now I've rocked around the clock with Bill Haley and his Comets and I know for Whom The Bells Toll because Hemingway told me and I've seen all of Bergman's B-movie features and I've read books about sex and books about the Roman Empire and I still get them confused on a good day, but never in my life have I ever been this insulted. So I pack up my grit and dive back into the water but this time the water has been diving into me without my knowing about it and I sit there at a table again expecting to play some poker, but it's not that kind of table and how can I poke her when I don't even know her? Instead, I am playing with a doohickey and reciting lines from Jabberwocky as the Mad Hatter and March Hare sit across from me looking on in amazement, yet staring at me in a way that makes me feel self-conscious, as if I have mustard accumulating at the side of my mouth. But I think, hey this is it, this is my chance for tea...even if it is mad. And besides, it was the best mustard! Finally I can sense success at hand and this is my opportunity to seize it or I shall live out the rest of my days as a failure...always wondering why I didn’t keep my posterity. I look towards my new friends and I ask them politely, where exactly the Dormouse is for I can't seem to see any sugar containers around and isn't he usually the one that serves the tea? And the Mad Hatter and the March Hare reflect for a moment in a team huddle and then without provocation whatsoever, they point to me in a moment of haze and suddenly I find myself craving cheese and running from a barrage of alley cats. And I begin to wonder if this is what happens when you reach the end of your thoughts. So painfully and without reservation I scream out and confess my love and desire for coffee and the fact that I hate tea and all it has to offer. And I lick my arm once more only to taste the sweet nectar of sugar coated skin cells. And I float onwards towards the fountain of insanity, the fountain I once believed to be called inanity, until I slowly sink under the cesspool of fantasy and I wake up in reality only to find myself dead and drowning in my own ingenuity.

V For Virtuoso

2006-03-22T15:22:00.000-08:00

A whole slew of unrelated thoughts are currently penetrating my mind right now. The first is, what ever happened to that Ruby-Spears animated Superman series from 1988 that was on Saturday morning? Why does no one remember this? Why have all traces of it been eradicated? Especially in a time when the new Superman movie is coming out and every bit of Superman-related property is getting the DVD treatment, why has this one been swept under the rug? Did it somehow employ animation techniques and subliminal messaging to corrupt our young minds?

Second, why don't I read more Philip K. Dick? Lurid pulp covers aside, this man really wrote profoundly on the eroding sense of reality and in a day and age of picture books for 2 year olds like The Da Vinci Code, I think that thought-provoking literature is rare. Plus I really like the term "Phildickian." I can use it openly without sounding dirty.

Third, OH MY GOD! Spike Jonze is making a live-action film of Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak - a favorite childhood story that to this day has boggled my mind. I'm sure there's some underlying connotations to the book that I have yet to uncover and that worries me.

Fourth, what the hell did WHAM! actually stand for? Remember that cheesy early 80s pop group,? They belted out such memorable tunes like "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" and "I'm Your Man." I checked every FAQ page I could find regarding George Michael and WHAM! It seems as though there is no mystery behind the name. It isn’t English slang for anything, nor is it an acronym (I sincerely doubt it means White Heterosexual Atheist Males). So, it would appear not all mysteries are that mysterious. I think they just liked the name WHAM! And what happened to Andrew Ridgely? Did he have a career after George Michael left? Am I gay for even wondering this?

Fifth, why was Carnivale canceled? Nothing was resolved. The show was brilliant. It had style, stellar acting and a mind-blowing premise. It’s like Twin peaks all over again. HBO renews every ass-wipe piece of programming, but something different, dark and clever comes along and they shit-can it. I’m afraid for the people of Earth. When American Idol or The Apprentice can surpass 4 seasons, it’s time for mass annihilation. Time to start anew.

Finally, I can't get over how much I loved V For Vendetta. I own the comic and have read it a few times and was seriously biased by its author, Alan Moore, describing the screenplay as "rubbish." I felt that there was no way the chilling beauty of it could ever be captured on screen (especially because it was being adapted by the hacks known as the Wachowski Brothers). But hot-damn and a bucket of pasterized lard, this movie took me, uncorked a bottle of chartreuse, put on some Barry White, unbuttoned my clothes, laid me down gently and proceeded to fuck me sadomasochistically! I loved every second of celluloid that danced across the screen in 24 frame-per-second intervals. It was ridiculously good. It gave me chills.

Even more entertaining was the ditzy little blonde number in front of me (who was clearly dragged by her boyfriend as a way of paying her back for taking him to see Failure To Launch). She laughed at inappropriate spots, was getting noticeably frustrated at simple concepts like "fascism" or "hegemony," and clearly missed the point at the end when she turned to her guy with a look that would make someone with a name like Dummy McDumbass feel smart and said, "I don't get it." He made brief eye contact with me and sort of grinned in that smug 'Secret Boys Club' way that alludes to "Yeah, I know, my girlfriend's as stupid as a freeze-dried turd, but look at her; she's hot like the devil's anus." I nodded in agreement. There was also this gal in my row who squirmed uncontrollably the whole film, shifting positions every 10 minutes or so. It led me to believe she was suffering from some sort of yeast infection. I trust the good people from the Department of Hazardous Material will see to it that theatre 10 at Colossus is dealt with accordingly. Or do I have to dress up in a porcelain mask and black cloak and blow up the large UFO-like structure as a symbol of hope for all those who suffer the atrocities of bearing witness to squirming patrons?

I may have missed the point.

The Evil Known As "Cuddling"

2006-03-20T11:50:00.000-08:00

You have to cuddle after sex.

Whether you go an hour or a minute, it’s too insensitive not to cuddle. And the thing is, you have to make a conscious decision to do it. That is, if you actually care about the girl you’re with. The problem is this: there’s really nothing else to do after sex. I mean immediately after. Sure, you can eat or shower together or have really forced Richard Linklater-like conversation or smoke…but if you’re just lying there inert which is usually the case, you have to cuddle. You’re totally out of options. You can’t have sex and then decide to have oral sex. For the girl it would be like sucking on a desiccated gummy bear and for guys it would be like sticking your tongue in a black hole in space…you’d have no idea where it’s gonna resurface. Too messy! What are your other immediate options? A massage? Sure, that sounds like a good idea especially if your performance was lacking, but the pressure to give the massage of your life would be too overwhelming (considering she’s already disappointed in you and a massage is based both on physical execution and emotional mind-set. You’re starting at a disadvantage). Plus, after a guy blows his load, he really wants nothing more than to sleep, close his eyes, meditate or be left alone long enough for his testosterone levels to replenish to the point where he can go back to being a typical male asshole. See a guy’s afraid to really open his mouth after sex. The uncertainty of what he might say is just too risky. You’ll never have your guy more honest, caring and open than just after he’s squirt.

You have to cuddle. It’s the trap.

And the thing is, a guy always has to fart when he’s cuddling. It doesn’t matter. I mean, everyone farts. That much is true. It’s natural and healthy for the body. But when you’re out and doing stuff, you can always make a fart blend into your environment but when you’re alone, especially in an intimate scenario, it ain’t gonna blend and it's just gonna horrify your partner. And it never fails. You always have to fart. It's nature's cruel way of messing with you after a good thing. And it’s not like you can just let one rip. It’s not like she’s gonna laugh it off. You don’t wanna scar the poor girl. You don't want her to associate sex with you and farting. You don't want her to run off and tell her girlfriends thus limiting your chances with the female population in general as word spreads around the sewing circle. So what do you do? Well you consider getting up and using the whole “I have to pee” excuse but you know any movement, regardless of it, is gonna bring out the fart. So you lie still and you try to get her to leave. You ask her, “Do you want something to drink?” primatively thinking the subservient side of her will offer to go get it if you're both parched. The answer's always no. So you try to get her to pee. You push down on her bladder or tickle her or something and she either gets angry at you or confuses this act with you wanting to go again, like it’s some form of foreplay. Then you’re really fucked. So you think of anything to make excuses for her to leave for a few seconds, but the cunning part of your brain has turned off so you usually end up saying really stupid shit like, “Can you grab me a comb from the bathroom?” And she asks why you need a comb right now and before you have a chance to stop yourself you say something ridiculous like, “It’s for my dolly. I like to brush its hair.” And she looks at you in such a way that if she were to think you were creepy and weird, that would be flattery by comparison.

So you hold it in. And the more you hold it in the worse it gets. You feel it turning in your stomach like a cement mixer. And it’s no longer just a stomach rumble, it becomes like a thermo nuclear device welling up in your belly. You try to squeeze the sphincter muscles in your ass so tight in the hopes of easing it out silently (much like you’d deflate a balloon with a pin by sticking it into the pinch mouthpiece). But the fart always ends up coming out like shrapnel or the 4th of July fireworks. So you store it and suffer the internal damage, the cold sweats, the hallucinations, the week-long constipation, the fever and delirium.

And then there’s cuddle talk. Girls say some fucked up cutesy wootsy shit when you’re cuddling that actually lowers your masculinity and more times than less makes you question your own sexuality. She’ll tell you how cute you are, how beautiful you are, how she loves the little grooves beside your mouth or the squinting of your eyes, the way you quiver, or the way your Adams apple bobs up and down when you swallow out of breath. How do you reciprocate? Especially when your most potent sexual hormone has been depleted? “You have pretty titties!”

Don’t make us sound more stupid than we already are. A guy wants to be told things that actually matter: like the release date for the new Van Damme movie or some clip you downloaded off the Internet that showed a blind nun from military school with hooks on both hands kicking the shit out of God.

Oh…and why do girls try new things when cuddling? Like braiding your chest hair or draping their leg across your balls? Don’t you realize that shit hurts? And she sighs something like, “This is so perfect, I could just stay like this forever.” Meanwhile, in about 2 seconds, your testicle is gonna collapse from the pressure, your body’s gonna convulse and vomit’s gonna spray out of your mouth like the little girl in The Exorcist.

There’s no solution to this cuddling crisis. Unless your practice abstinence. Sure you may live a healthier life but you'll lose your fucking mind!

Happy St. Patsy's Day

2006-03-17T11:52:00.000-08:00

What exactly is St. Patrick's Day? All through university and high school, I just thought it was another boorish excuse to yet again get as liquored up as humanly possible before ending the night dry humping some questionable species of human at the pub until it became abundantly clear that the zipper was causing irritation and not that person's willingness to act as some sort of primal scratching post. This was of course topped off by an alarming amount of puking outside the club. Good times! As if we need another day out of the year where people make excuses to go get drunk. It seems every day is becoming some sort of excuse.

St. Illiterate's Day
Roommate 1: Dood im lyke toetaly faeliing englash.
Roomate 2: Fuckin' A! Let's go get smashed.

St. Melodrama's Day
Girl 1: And then Sharon told me that she heard from Katey that he gangbanged the entire sorority. But he says he still loves me and that the other 30 meant nothing to him. How can I stay mad?
Girl 2: Fuck him! Let's go get smashed.

St. Moron's Day
Patient: My ear infection is getting worse. At first I thought if I just didn't use my left ear the pain would stop, but now it hurts to swallow and blink.
Doctor: You're a fucking idiot! Let's go get smashed.

St. Too Much Information Day
News Anchor 1: Despite Mr. Henderson's recent success at cutting off his own arm with a steak knife, he probably did not need to cut off his scrotum and testicles with said knife.
News Anchor 2: For the love of fuck! We NEED to go get smashed.

And so on...

The truth is St. Patrick's Day is just another shit slurry of conventions floating around in our brains that we process in an attempt to make meaning for our existence. Let me share with you some of my learnings about St. Patrick's Day.

Patrick was alive before any of us were pooping our diapers and suckling our mother's teats. He made a damn fine slave; a quality of slave so unrivaled that it sparked several Slavery Abolitionist movements across the world when slave traders realized they would never get the same pleasure flogging and degrading another man in quite the same way it felt with Patrick (proving that no one ever really forgets their first). At 16 Patrick considered himself a Pagan. Get that? A self-proposed Pagan. And who says you can't label yourself and still make an impact? So being a Pagan, he decided to conduct sermons to convert people to his beliefs. And wouldn't you know it...it worked!

And now an angry and jealous sidenote: UNBELIEVABLE! Every time I put my faith in a new system of beliefs I never try to coerce people into following blindly. Like I had this idea once where men should all have their genitalia replaced with a .45 and two hand grenades and women would have intelligent vaginas, complete with a GPS navigation system. But I never tried to impose my will onto others. Maybe that's why there's no holiday named after me? Is falsifying observance forced onto others really what it takes to gain recognition in this life? Fine then. From this time forth it is my will that all of you shall grow your toenails hideously long - so long, in fact, that they protrude through the front of your socks like menacing claw puppets. One day there will be a national holiday to celebrate this tradition and it shall be known as St. Needs-A-Pedicure-And-Fast Day.

So anyway, Patrick's actions pissed of the Celtic Druids (who just so happened to pop up everywhere back in the day, much like that Polkaroo character) but never seem to be around much more these days. Some of the lore surrounding St. Patrick's Day includes beliefs that Patrick raised people from the dead and converted Pagans. Though originally a Catholic holy day, St. Patrick's Day has evolved into a more secular holiday. This happened around the same time that the Catholic Church realized it could invest in the booming green beer market, thus further thieving the public of its hard earned cash and reaping the benefits from any establishment carrying a liquor license out of even more money a year in a vain move to construct several eye-sore abominable monuments to itself). Just you wait and see. These Catholics are really good with revisionist history as a way of propagating their lies. It's only a matter of time before we see some "authentic" Renaissance paintings showcasing the baby Jesus chugging a Guinness with priests (and this is what I love about these paintings because priests never existed when Christ was a baby because Catholicism hadn't been invented yet) with their arms entwined around each other's shoulders in what appears to be a ballad of "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling."

So basically the bottom line is Patrick did nothing that warrants a holiday named after him. When Filocalus was writing the Christian calendar, he just wanted to fill in that month-long void between Valentine's Day and Easter with a national holiday. Unfortunately it seems the Hallmark thugs got to him first via the time machine they secretly stole from H.G. Wells and were thus able to bully Filocalus and bend him to their will. (They probably passed themselves off as gods by doing the whole "pulling my thumb-off trick." Back in the 4th Century, that's the type of thing that would have made others perceive you as a god. Today it's just something your grandfather does to freak you out when you're a toddler).

The traditional icons of St. Patrick's Day are even more unsettling.

1. The Shamrock - a three leaf clover meant to symbolize the Trinity. It also means Nirvana. But now that most people have tired of the vinyl and black leather ensemble pieces of The Matrix and have lost interest in depressed and suicidal Seattle grunge bands with minimal talent at best, they have turned to a more conventional and recognizable association with the shamrock - Notre Dame football. Amazing how we always seem to exchange one insignificant symbol for another. I think that's why our evolution is on hold. Bring back the spiritual metaphors, for the love of hell!

2. The Blarney Stone - a stone set in the wall of the castle tower in the village of Blarney. Kissing the stone is supposed to bring the kisser the gift of persuasive eloquence. Legend states that an old woman cast a spell on the stone to reward a king who had saved her from drowning. (Sure, another fucking old woman casting another fucking spell. Where are these miracle-weaving hags these days to cure cancer or world hunger?) Kissing the stone while under the spell gave the king the abliity to speak sweetly and convincingly (thus ensuring that women were more interested in his charming personality than his kingdom and all the riches...suuuure). These days it's difficult to reach the stone. Kissers have to lie on their back and bend backward or downward, holding iron bars for support. If this isn't the biggest sham! What has life amounted to when you reach that new level of pathetic desperation and have to make out with a rock? How can things have gotten that bad in your personal life? I draw the line at heavy petting with inanimate objects. And really, are we to believe that tongue-tango-ing with a rock is going to give us the eloquence and charm of a witty repertoire to woo whomever we deem striking? I'll tell you what it'll give you: cyanobacterium, endolithic bacteria and various blue-green algae spores forming in your mouth that should ensure your visit to Ireland is not only a memorable one, but a permanent one.

3. Leprechauns - little old men who are shoemakers for the fairies (because even in the world of make belief there are blue collared workers). They usually stand about 2 feet tall (the perfect height for oral sex). Treasure hunters can often track down a Leprechaun by the sound of his shoemaker's hammer. Legend states that if you catch one, you can force him to tell you where he hides his gold (they don't tell you that you have to employ various means of CIA-like torture before the Leprechaun breaks). Apparently there are no evil Leprechauns (like the one from that shockingly offensive B-movie). So are we to believe that little proletariat imps are going to be happy to just hand over their retirement bonds, RSPs, residual equities, money masters, children's college funds and entire life savings to anyone who happens to hear the sound of a freakin' shoe hammer? Leprechauns are fabricated little scapegoat characters, discovered amidst some drunken, alcoholic, schizophrenic and psychotic hallucinogenic rage that most lunatics try to hide behind in court under the guise of "insane" as their excuse for slaughtering family members. That's what you get for drinking green beer. A dialogue, if you please:

Human: Holy shit man, you're a Leprechaun!
Leprechaun: Aye.
Human: I don't feel so good. I think I had too much to drink.
Leprechaun: Thas juss yer airlocled head swoonin' me lovely. Have yeeself anoother roond.
Human: Wait, aren't you like supposed to show me some gold or some shit like that?
Leprechaun: All in due time, laddie.
Human: SHOW ME THE MONEY!
Leprechaun: Aye, aye, gallery entertainin' I'm shore.
Human: I'm just messing with you little dude! It's that movie with Tom Cruise.
Leprechaun: A gom wee geebag if 'ter ever was one. So you is after me pot o' gold?
Human: Damn straight!
Leprechaun: I reckon ye first must do somethin' fer me.
Human: Sure thing dude. You need me to help find your lucky charms?
(Human breaks out into uncontrollable, snorting-like laughter).
Leprechaun (mumbling to himself): I swear now, if that ain't the stalest fookin' jest mine ears are subject to from the ages. Fook General Mills. Fook their frosted marshmallow cereal-producing arses to the copper gates of Hades and beyoond.
(Leprechaun notices Human studying him strangely. Leprechaun is nervous).
Human: That's it! I totally know who you remind me of. You're like that ewok dude! That freaky little ewok in snazzy green threads.
Leprechaun: Ewok?? Why of all ye bloody nerve! I'll have ye know that that there George Lucas fella is nothin' but a bleedin' demon wearin' human flesh, he is. Ewok! Why I ought-ta. Never ye mind. Nay, to get me gold is easy. Alls I be requirin' is fe ye to kill yer fam'ly, slice 'em up in their sleep and feed them to the neighborin' doogs. Ye can tell the authorities that Flint Flannigan the Leprechaun told ye to do it!
Human: Aflaminghomosayswhat?
Leprechaun: Bleedin' hell! I'll kill 'em me damn self ye useless git.

4. And finally, school children have a little tradition of their own. They pinch classmates who don't wear green on this holiday. First off, wearing green is strictly a North American custom as the colour green is not popular in Ireland. Green is connected to the old green flag and a time when Ireland was NOT free. Way to rub it in, huh? And second...children pinching each other? I don't buy it. Not in this day and age. Kids can't get away with the simplest pecks on the cheeks in schools today without being slapped down with litigation in compliance with the requirements of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 stating that any prohibited acts such as discomposure, malaise, vexation, dejection, annoyance, irritation, infliction, mortification, chagrin, eslandre, solicitude, distress, affliction, infelicity, tribulation, extremity and prostration will be culpable under the generic legal term "sexual harassment." That's why kids just opt for pre-pubescent quickies in the locker room and under the stairs between classes. It saves them all the bullshit that comes with justifying their innocent, child-like affections.

Anyway, for those of you that still don't care and are into that hocus pocus, happy St. Patrick's Day regardless to you and yours. May you have a wet night and a dry morning (like anyone needs a holiday for that)!

From The Vault

2006-03-16T15:35:00.000-08:00

One of the principles behind this blog is that I don’t really wish to talk about people in my life. I don’t mind talking about myself, after all, this is MY blog, but I’ve chosen to leave out the day-to-days, to respect people’s privacies. Today is one of those days where I’m going to open up the vault and present a rare glimpse into the past. Since I have been out of contact with this person for several years and I recently unearthed some gems, I thought I’d share a story with all of you. I was cleaning out one of my closets and I stumbled upon the holy grail! Now, when a relationship ends, I usually burn all traces of that person’s existence (pictures, letters, gifts – unless it was a really good gift – etc). I just find it unhealthy to dwell on things best left in the past. So anyway, I stumbled upon a grey folder. I opened up the folder and I was suddenly transported back several years ago when I was dating this girl named Sophie. Sophie was a fantastic person through and through. She was a little young and naïve, but there was truly nothing she wouldn’t do for me and I admired her for it. But Sophie really wanted me to be ga-ga in love over her and the fact of the matter is, I don’t do ga-ga. I’m the type of guy that prefers not to tell someone I love them, but show them instead. Some girls need the security of constant “I love you’s” in their lives. Sophie was one of them. And the thing is, it was a hard fit considering the type of person I am and the type of person she was.

For example, I’ll never forget the day we were strolling around the Toronto Islands and we came upon a tree that had dozens and dozens of initials carved into it encompassed by little hearts. Sophie looked at me and before she could even say anything I told her I was on it. I pulled out my keys and proceeded to carve a small heart with the initials R.L. + R.L. into the tree trunk When Sophie saw the final product, she cried for about an hour. At first I was all, “You're not really upset, are you?" But after about 20 minutes of her sobbing, I realized I had actually done something that she perceived as really bad and I felt horrible. I mean, it was a joke.

Luckily my remorse usually only lasted about a day before I was up to my old tricks again. Sophie used to wait at work for me to pick her up every day. There she would spend the day writing little love sonnets and drawing adorable pictures of me which I would then callously vandalize the first chance I could get when she wasn’t looking or when she was helping a customer. And every time I would end up saying the same thing, "I'm soooo sorry baby, I just thought it was funny." She never got me.

I mean, I like affection, I really do. But there's affection and then there's insanity. I don’t know how many times I’d come to her work place and there would be an alarming amount of Sophie + Robert hearts waiting for me on post-it notes, prescription forms, discarded cardboard and notepad paper. More than usually she would take on my last name too…scary. So this forced me to be creative every time I wished to deface one of these hearts in terms of how I could totally demean the image. Sometimes I would add on to the picture of "R.L. + S.F." with an “= Forever Hatred” or sometimes I would take the “t” in Robert (when she used my full name) and draw a picture of Jesus crucified to it with a word caption that read: “Why Sophie? Why did you do this to me?”

So anyway, one of the things I found today was this picture she drew for me a long time ago. When I first met Sophie, I had Elvis-like hair. I cut it really short very soon after I met her and always regretted doing it, claiming she killed the king. So she gave me this one day (click to enlarge):

Cute, right? So in typical Sophie fashion, no good deed goes without immediate recognition and she asked me to draw her a picture in return to consumate our love. Now let me just state that I’m pretty good at drawing things. In fact, this is how some of my art looks when I actually put in the effort:

But for Sophie, I wanted to mimic her style...show her the juvenile ways of her approach. I am so glad I kept this drawing! For some reason, she refused to accept it. I can't imagine why. But seeing it today, I almost cried laughing so hard. Sure, it's one of those "you had to be there" moments, but...well, just check it out:

Now come on! What girl wouldn't find a guy who drew this for her amazing? If I were a girl, I'd be enamored.

Here’s another example. Sophie had this guy who was vying for her attention. She kept telling me about him as a way of inciting jealousy. Of course, being the non-jealous type that I am, I kept telling her to be with him, so the whole jealousy thing sort of backfired. One day she got more bold and she showed me a poem that he wrote her. His name was Inky by the way. INKY! The boy didn’t stand a chance. This poem was called “Alone.” And it was all about how he was alone without her and suffering. She thought it was very romantic. I thought he might actually have a vagina. This guy did know how badly I could hurt him and yet he still insisted on trying to court her. Anyway, I decided to play Sophie’s sick little game and reciprocate with a poem of my own called "Alone." Again, I cannot express to you how happy I am that I found this. I thought this gem was forever lost. Naturally I wrote it in the same style that Inky’s poem was written. Unfortunately I don’t have his poem, but this should give you an idea of the type of writer he was based on my mock version of his poem:

ALONE

I sit alone under a dark sky and wonder where you are tonight.
There is a moon in the dark sky because it is night and night's tend to have moons.
But tonight, I am alone and I cannot see the moon, so it is dark.
(Did I mention I am alone?)
It is so dark now and I am thinking of you.
I need your light and your glow to illuminate my night.
Your light burns bright and brings radiance and sunshine to the loneliest of souls.
Come to think of it, why is there a light emanating from your body?
That's kinda strange.
I wonder...Perhaps you are an alien.
An alien sent, not from space, but from heaven.
But then, I am an alien too.
I am alien to a world filled with meaning and compassion.
This world I speak of is yours.
Let me into your world.
Unlock the door.
Invite me to stay for fried chicken and watermelon.
We can run in the grass and sit by the bushes.
But not too close though because we might cut ourselves on the prickly branches.
But even if we bled, I would be there to mend your wounds just as you are here to mend my broken heart.
Well, it's not really broken in the literal sense, because if it was, I'd be dead.
But I am dead and alone on this moonless night because I yearn for you.
I want you.
I want to love you and to have crazy monkey sex with you.
Oops, did I say that out loud?
I have to stop writing everything I think.
But I can't because...I think of you always.
It's the truth. The truth I say.
My therapist told me that the truth would set me free but I burnt his house to the ground and he lost the family cat to the blazing flames.
The blazing flames of my heart burn ferociously for you.
That's my truth. But truth distorts facts.
Hey, facts rhymes with packs...well, sort of.
But the fact is...I love you and I need you to love me.
But until then, I am dark and empty.
And I am alone.
And the moon is gone.
And I think I'm coming down with head-lice.

And what do you think happened after I gave this to her? She was angry that I mocked Inky.

The bottom line is, I wish this blog had a point. But it doesn’t. I just got a really good laugh out of some of these old memories. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not laughing at her. I'm not that sadistic No no, I liked Sophie…a lot. Unfortunately I met her at a time in my life that I like to refer to as the Dark Ages – a page that has been ripped out of the biography of Rob and placed on the fire of extinction to burn there for all eternity. So unfortunately I ended things with her rather prematurely. She had to suffer for my indiscretions and lack of emotional stability at the time. I do miss her now and then and I’m glad I have these memories to fall back on and while the ones I’ve shown you may present me as some horrible monster, there are more “good” memories in this folder than these cheeky ones. But this blog is about parody and attempting to entertain you.

If anything, finding this folder has made me rethink the whole “burning all traces of that person’s existence” once the relationship ends ordeal. Because years later, I might look back on it with fond memories and good blogging material!

No More Eating After Midnight

2006-03-15T10:26:00.000-08:00

No I'm not a Gizmo. Eating after midnight doesn't grow spores on my flesh that mutate into green, lizard-like creatures with sharp teeth and claws, channeling some fiendish personality into manaical acts of destruction and mayhem. It gives me weird dreams.

Last night I dreamt I was sitting in the Java Lounge, sipping shots of this Beatrice raspberry lemonade that I used to be addicted to and having a conversation with an earwig that kept insisting that it was trying to take a leak in it’s version of a urinal and I was giving it stage fright. So I got up to move to a tiny booth and sitting near me was a space man, an acrobat, a two-headed serpent, a talking monkey and a small little boy wearing a kite. There were other faces in this place, twisted, desperate and vague. There were other voices too, bitter, unyielding and unloved. For unknown reasons, I felt totally at ease with this crowd, as though I had been hanging around them forever. They all had weird names though that I can't remember, but you know the type I'm talking about, the type Douglas Adams would have invented where there's an apostrophe in it (like Shar'jsm Golth - some shit like that). Anyway, I'm sitting there, same as usual and suddenly I begin sliding through the entire lounge (which is really just one room - but for some reason, this time it is a series of different themed rooms – like this slanted room us Torontonians used to have in the Science Centre…it was like that). And I'm sliding through them as though I'm being pushed by a fierce wind. I have absolutely no control over this movement. I'm sliding extremely fast but everyone is moving in slow motion. I finally end up in this room that is shaped like a bus (probably because it was a bus) and sitting there with me is an entire trainee team of roller-skate 50's-style waitresses all with thick New Jersey accents and hair curlers (I doubt I'll ever be able to stomach the term "hun" again) and also present is this bus driver I once had. His name was Lemon Baines. You don't forget a name like that. He kept insisting that it was pronounced Le Mon, not lemon. But I knew better.

Anyway, Lemon turns to me and tells me very militantly that I need to embark on a journey across the galaxy, on an intergalactic star cruise to bring back a gift to Earth. When I asked him what the gift was, his response was: "The concept of hug-a-handicap day" - a day that would go down in infamy such as New Years day, Lincoln Day, Memorial Day, and so on. Suddenly, I'm in a very bright room surrounded by an infinite amount of wheel-chair bound people, all coming towards me with their mouths sewn shut and their eyes the colour of marble. I'm dressed like some reject from Battlestar Galactica and for some unholy reason Slimer from the Ghostusters was there chugging wine like he did in the movie. Finally, a figure emerges out of the swarm of wheelchairs and it's my dad dressed as Zorro. He tells me we must fight, but 30 seconds into it, he's lying on the ground doing physiotherapeutical back stretches and I’ve turned into some little girl on a quest to find cookies through a twisted mansion made of lollipops. I battled a cookie monster, giant sock monkeys with spears, a witch and large puddles of spilt ice cream that spoke upwards from the ground like some trippy Jim Henson production.

I don't quite remember the rest but I do remember a large mirror that, when looked through, I could see my reflection refelcting the little girl's reflection. I also remember something about inaudible scratching noises that only the magical pixies floating in the air could hear, which induced pixie nausea.

Weird!

Rest In Peace David

2006-03-13T18:34:00.000-08:00

Every moment is rare because it is a moment you'll never have again.

In time all is lost in the silent forever.

Time itself is no longer even a memory.

There is no comfort and so we busy ourselves with the task of ignoring our mortality.

So live without regret. Your legacy is you.

Sleep well my friend. You were a consummate dreamer. An ambitious hero. An ever-growing young god at play.

You will be missed.

"Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live." - Norman Cousins

Got Rid Of Milk?

2006-03-11T12:25:00.000-08:00

Who was the brain fart that decided making songs about milk would actually give people the urge to drink that pasteurized opalescent saliva? For some reason dirty white hicks rapping with a cow in the background doesn’t convey that same level of cool that, say, Usher performing lewd acts of dry humping with the Swedish bikini team does. I’m more inclined to buy whatever the hell he’s selling. Just check out these lyrics:

"Straight to your bones, from the farm to the fridge. We know what you want ‘cause we know how you live. Moooooo. We got a big bad Bessie with the M.I.L.K. We be chillin’. Ooohhhaaooh. Want milk? Uh huh Uh huh, I said. More milk? Uh huh Uh huh. Come on. Want milk? Uh huh Uh huh, I said. More milk?"

It doesn’t even fucking rhyme?

And now the Dairy Farmers have a new milk song, with some shameless Pussycat Dolls wannabes spewing the same nonsense. The bottom line is unless you actually advertise the product as such: Milk – now with cocaine; I seriously doubt anyone’s going to be swayed by these embarrassing attempts to elevate milk to some pop culture-like status using sad and forgettable ballads.

What the Dairy Farmers have to realize is that everyone equates milk with something they were forced to drink at a young age because of this fear instilled in their heads that their skeleton wouldn’t develop properly and they would suffer from osteoporosis or end up looking like something some Victorian anthropolist would have deemed a new species of sub-human. Milk became that thing that you would put in your cereal to dilute the taste and then when mom wasn’t looking, make deals with your siblings that you won’t tell if they don’t tell that you’re pouring it out into the sink when mom goes to change the load of laundry.

There are many other ways to get your calcium intake. Three glasses of low-fat milk adds up to more than 300 calories to your diet a day. Not to mention cow milk is responsible for other such problems such as lactose intolerance, faltulence, gastrointestinal distress, increased risk of ovarian cancer and prostate cancer, anemia, allergies, heart disease and insulin-dependent diabetes. And dairy products may actually cause osteoporosis, not prevent it, since their high-protein content leaches calcium from the body. As well, milk contains no fiber or complex carbohydrates and is laden with saturated fat and cholesterol. It's contaminated with cow's blood and pus and is frequently contaminated with pesticides, hormones and antibiotics.

But you don’t see that on the Got Milk? mustache ads do you? You don’t see Michael Jordan sporting the Pearly Sanchez defecating into a colostomy bag or Britney Spears injecting insulin into her ass cheek.

So what’s the solution? Stop trying to convey this idea that milk is cool. It’s not cool and never will be. Stop the juvenile gimmicks like a milk carton that “moo's.” Putting a microchip and small wire in a milk carton is the type of thing that gives terrorists ideas on how to strike out at unsuspecting Westerners in day schools. The Dairy Farmers need to realize that the only way they’re going to sell their tainted products is by employing the strategy that most advertisers have adopted: feeding off the public’s insecurities and creating fear. The next Got Milk? ad needs to give consumers a glimpse of a future without enough calcium intake. A future wrought with arthritic pains, oxygen tubes and IV lines extruding from every exposed facial orifice and some sort of metallic pikestaff intertwined around their wrists to aid in mobility (which has been reduced to that of a limping amputee).

If you really want calcium, try a supplement. Sometimes the "natural-straight-from-the-source" approach isn't actually the best. However, if you just can’t part with the sperm-like consistency that your morning lactaid brings, try soy milk or rice milk. You might live longer and with better colon control.