Flippin' Yo Lids n' Sheeeeeit.

Brother Nick sent me this link, so I thought I'd dick around with it. It WASTES IMMEASURABLE AMOUNTS OF TIME. So be careful. But I want to see what other people come up with (since you're all creative types with funniness and things of that sort). And I like to be entertained.

I really do.

Here's the one I did. I did another one, which liked MUCH better, but Flipbook flipped the script on me and the load-up barfed all over the place. So an hour's worth of painstaking work was burned to digital cinders, and replaced by something much simpler. Thems the breaks. Word to that.

A-lot of the other ones are just some fourteen year-old drawing pirates with big dicks, skull-fucking poorly drawn naked women, ending with the word "FART" written like chicken scratch across the screen (so fast you have to watch it like, fifteen times to figure out the plot and read the ending word) Here's a good one I found. Violence is the answer.

I want to see YOURS. (your flipbook, you dirty, dirty such-and-such)

Metabullshit Post. Yes, I suck. Uh-huh. Yeah.

Okay. So I haven’t posted much around these parts lately. That’s because I’m lazy and have a “work” problem (as in: I need to do work to pay bills and shit) + a “drinking” problem (as in: if I go out I drink. I go out a-lot. I drink a-lot. And the hangovers just bleed into one another).

But I write elsewhere. Namely: here. But they don’t archive things too well, and some friends have complained that they never catch any of my shitty writing up there. So, I dug all up in that bitch and found some links. If you’re tired of reading my crap, then stop torturing yourself.

Unless you’re into that kind of thing.

A-lot of what I do is just for information purposes. I originally intended to write with more of a satirical stance, but that style met some pretty strong resistance and has since given way to pretty text-book hack-journalism. If I continue writing for them, I will have to find some way to periodically return to my pointier roots. Otherwise, I will bore myself to death whilst simply pimping shit I like through their site. Which is not the point of the thing.

Regardless, for those who missed my Austinist post-things:

I did a book review for Ben Reed’s The Bow Tie Gang. Good fucking book, if you’re literate.

I relayed my experience at EXTRAVAGASM 2005. No one read the thing, because people honestly HATE sex. I don’t get it.

I got all controversial with this half-baked opinion piece on the Austin Smoking Ban. People get so touchy over this shit.

I got to interview local DJ legend, DJ Mel. I don’t really like interviews, so I asked him ridiculous shit. I feel that it exposes more of their true character, and Mel is as crazy as me. So it worked out.

I wrote an open letter to the shittiest freeway intersection. The shittiest ever.

I told the bats underneath the Congress Ave bridge to get a real goddamn job. Freeloading, flying rats.

And we wrote a little ditty about this fucked-up 5k we have here in weird-town. Keep Austin Weird! And really fucking hot! With some bacon and ice cream, but no beer! Alright! Super-sweet alright!

I say goddamn!

Fucking Mutated Expectations and Shit.

Every now and again, we as actors on a larger stage, the stage of happenings and going ons during the course of our lives, we breach the lines that separate our individual parts. That is to say, we start reading someone else’s lines, in a way. We don’t always know whose lines they are, or if that part is even meant to be played. But what can definitely be said is that we abandon our normal role, and take on some lines that just don’t fit our current selves. Perhaps the new part will stick, perhaps it will be wholly rejected. But that is not the point. I believe everyone does this sort of experimentation in personality, as a function of personal growth and progress. It is how one picks up new hobbies, changes careers, goes from being a soldier to a staunch anti-war activist, or survives prison by shanking fools in the showers from behind.

Alright, perhaps that last one is a bit specific and rare, but you should have seen the dream I had the other night. I was in this weird truckstop shower, trying to get some sand off of me, and had no idea what I was doing there. The shower was rather large, about the size of an average apartment bedroom, with hollow metal walls like those one would find for a toilet stall in a public restroom. A gap above and below the wall led out into the truckstop’s main room. Cement floor with a drain in the middle. Outside my shower stall, there were café tables set up in a larger room, with plasma TVs all over the place, like a sports bar of some sort. But it was truck stop, not a bar, and I was covered in sand, not overcharged tabs. The dream started with me vigorously scrubbing myself beneath a blast of hot water, nude as a bee.

So I was in there, scrubbing myself down, with my eyes closed. I was thinking about how weird it was to just have a shower stall out in the room like it was, wondering where my clothes might be, or how I got all sandy to begin with, and then I opened my eyes to see some dude walking through my shower stall/room, fully clothed. He passed through an arm of the shooting water, getting his pant legs wet, and was paying absolutely no attention to the fact that I was already in there. Under normal conditions, I would have totally lost my shit and probably busted out the most awkward wet-and-sandy-windmill fighting technique ever witnessed in any truck stop bath house, ever. But this was a dream. My word, it was definitely a dream. DUUURRREEEEEAM.

For starters, my penis was easily a good foot long, flaccid. Crazy thick too, like a pork loin. Not that I’m hung like a wine cork in real life, but I’m certainly not packing anything of equestrian proportions. So when I looked down and saw the thing, the stranger who was passing through also took notice, and he stopped next to the stall door, staring back at me in awe.

What the fuck?

I have no idea what it was that my mind was parsing through, or what it was trying to reconcile, but he and I just stood there, staring at my Johnson for a few seconds. When I looked up, he was smiling, and there were two other dudes looking over the top of the stall, trying to pretend that they were watching the plasma TV mounted on the wall above my shower. One of them stepped down out of view, walked over to the door, opened it, and peeped his head in, smiling like the other intruder. Real creepy-like.

Uh, WHAT. THE. FUCK? Seriously, this time.

There was a definite air of homoeroticism involved, which in all honesty, I’m cool with even in real life. I feel comfortable enough in my own understanding of the difference between my own feelings of attraction and the mere reflection of those imposed upon me. Not that I am the subject of such things on a regular basis, but whenever it has come up in my real life, I believe I have handled it with respect and decorum. Even though these dudes were much more aggressive in their stance than any I have experienced, it played out the same, for the most part. But it all felt as if it could degenerate into a jailhouse-communal-bathroom situation at any moment (don’t drop the soap, son!). Of course, in dreamland, we are all super-something-or-other, if we aren’t victims. Apparently, I was not playing the victim role in this dream, because I just folded my arms and said something along the lines of “hey, guys, I’m trying to get this sand off me, would you mind staring at some other dick, somewhere else?” Just as I imagined they would, they all scurried off with real embarrassment. Again, I’m not going to pretend I know what this dream was trying to make me privy to. But it might have something to do with unabashed confidence, even in the face of obvious reasons to be embarrassed or intimidated.

Because soon after that, the guys that scurried away must have gone around telling everyone of my bathing escapades, because a growing crowd had formed to watch me shower. Looming over the stall walls, peeking through the door, and some were just hanging out in there with me. They all started out with a menacing sort of tone, a kind of “come on now, squeeeeeel! Squeeeeeeeel!” sort of presence to them. But I checked each one individually, with a cold stare, or some snarky words about whatever jacked up gear they were wearing (typical truck stop garb: filthy work boots, padded vests, old jeans, whatever) or their potential pathetic penchants for banging one-legged, genetically limited boys. And they quickly backed down after being confronted. Then, women started to join the mob. Teenage girls and hormonal fifty year old ladies. Just as lecherous as the trucker dudes. For whatever reason, I remained calm and just continued to concentrate on the project at hand: get that fucking sand out of my various cracks and crevices, all the while wondering: where the hell are my clothes?

For those who don’t know me, I’m not an exhibitionist by normal definition, and I am certainly not the type of person who would stand for this type of deification. I mean, these trucker dudes and random ladies were slowly morphing into a benign crowd like one would find at a PTA meeting. And I was their sole focus of curiosity. Me and this inhuman slab of shlong swinging between my legs. Somehow, I had earned their respect, and they were staring at me like I was supposed to answer some existential question for them. They were highly expectant, and I realized it, but didn’t care. I was intent on solving my own sand problem. Fuck them and their ridiculous expectations. I owed them nothing, and acted accordingly.

Eventually, I got all the sand off of my skin, and was done with the shower. I still did not know where my clothes were, where the sand came from, where I was, or where I was supposed to be. But as soon as I turned the water off, the crowd dispersed, and only a few remained. It was almost as if I had just finished some sort of stage show, and there were some people milling about, hoping to meet me, the performer. All I wanted to do was get out of there. But they sort of crowded me in, keeping me in the stall, chit-chatting with me about inane bullshit. I even knew some of their faces. People I had worked with in the past, or friend-of-friends from current day. But I had no feelings of shame or embarrassment. I didn’t even think to ask to borrow an undershirt or anything. I willingly complied with the rules of pointless banter and fielded comments and questions about the weather or politics. Newborn nude and dripping wet. Whatever.

The dream ended with me requesting that everyone leave my stall so that I could figure out where my clothes were, and whether or not the absurd swelling of my procreative member was the result of something medically scary. Everyone smiled and shuffled out or lowered themselves from the top of the stall walls, wishing me luck in my quest. Fucked up sand-washing-big-dick-exhibitionist dream: fin.

Now how this relates to my little theme here, is the question of role, and expectation in an individual’s life. The occurrence and results of mutation in personality.

In the dream, I acted completely different from what I would have done in real life. Probably different from how anyone else would act as well. The situation was absurd, and there was a thick expectation from the crowd around me. Expecting what? I didn’t know. And I didn’t care. Whatever they were waiting for me to say, or do, was not going to come from me willingly. And that was a conscious decision that I was actively making throughout the events that played out. It was like a dry-run, staged by my mind, for situations (albeit much less ridiculous) that I would (and have) inevitably encounter in my real life. Situations where I would be challenged, however subtly, to comply with expectations imposed on me beyond my own abilities or willingness. This happens to everyone in life, and how we respond to these situations is a powerful molding agent for the mutations and expectations of our own personalities. It is one of the many ways in which we grow and change throughout our limited time here, together. Perhaps my brain is trying to shore itself up, or bracing itself for something it perceives as immediately threatening.

I would have had to buy new pants if that dream was my reality. I like my pants as they are. But thanks, my little mind, for the opportunity to see the other side, if only in a dreamland truck stop. Somehow, there’s no irony in any of that.

What the? Who? Whatever Man.

Dash of this, pinch of that… some streaming consciousness (mental feces) pouring your way here today. That’s what the pen demands, so that’s what gets up.

Sometimes, I’m just fucking drained. I have nothing left to give. Maybe it’s my diet. Maybe it’s those dabblings in random excess. Maybe it’s my natural disposition: to be tired-dirt-spent.

Nah. Not that last one.

I hear bananas are a “natural mood enhancer”. Whatever that means. Some moods shouldn’t be “enhanced”, in all honesty. I’ve already had one today, along with three cupcakes and nachos. See what I mean about the diet thing? Not exactly stable. I have a banana sitting on my desk right now. Brown dotted. Curious little dude, wondering when I’m going to peel and destroy him with my teeth.

Then I will make him into poo. The good poo, of course.

My memory has been dealing me worse and worse here recently. I forgot two good friends' birthdays this past weekend. TWO. And even after I realized it, I kept forgetting to DO something about that. I neglected to DO anything to make it up to them.

This is becoming a rather nasty pattern with me. One that I feel is a bit of a departure from my previous self. I’m all about progress and change, but some changes work against what I would classify as progress.

And this whole forgetfulness-gone-everything is more on the steaming bowl-o-shit side of my preference scale. I rarely lean that way intentionally.

Still working on my books. The process is fascinating, but I’m trying not to write about it because that’s what the vast majority of writer’s with blogs WRITE about: the process and frustrations of writing. It’s beyond masturbatory and frankly, it makes me grind my teeth.

So I won’t read that last paragraph ever, because it proves my hypocrisy AND it makes me grind my teeth.

I need another happy hour like I need more hair around my asshole. Wait, no, that’s not right…

Christ? Christ!

*POOF*

Respect Where It's Due -

-
The trials of Lycan would be appropriately raucous, booze-fueled, and terse. And that’s just the judge I’m talking about.

Lessons can be so Broad.

It’s always better when there are mistakes to make. Lessons available for those who desperately need them. Desperates like us.

It was an hour into “high tide”, that time of night between sleeping and waking for Average Joes, between “last call” and “get the fuck up”. Two to four A.M. The window of opportunity. We climbed through it regularly, without questioning it, as if pre-destined for such things.

The three of us made our way to a rather rough neighborhood, minutes from the hold. This was a neighborhood which, oddly enough, we would have been apprehensive about entering during the light of day. A poorer neighborhood, with all the signs of a rental/transient population: overgrown lawns, fallen mailboxes, sans-wheels-automobiles at the curbs, broken glass in the street, and packs of stray dogs. But thieves will thieve, and thieves thieve from each other. Where better to find a meta-collection of goods than where the thieves sleep? This was the faulty logic of our pursuit.

It was absolutely miserable-hot outside. We were breathing boiling water, suffocating our bodies as we suffocated our souls. And even at two in the morning, I was sweating behind my knees while wearing shorts.

The other two would be doing the run. I was to keep at the wheel, at the ready, at long-range lookout. Kalm was the front man for this venture. He had the skills and the good eye for potential property, so he would spear-head the run. The other, Breaze, was not as polished as Kalm. Breaze had been out of the action for a couple of years, but was really hyped about his return. He really wanted to jump into things, even though he was out of practice. His almost explosive desire to be involved was infectious. So Kalm accepted his excitement as resolution to put in the required effort.

Best of intentions, really.

Three streets in, I found a perfect wait-spot, somewhere near the end of a quarter-mile block. Beneath a broken street lamp. Killed the engine, they exited, and I turned the radio down to a whisper while I settled in to wait. But I was a tad apprehensive about Breaze's re-virginized run.

“You guys got this? Breaze, you alright with watch-out? It’s no joke.”

I was a bit worried that Breaze didn’t completely understand the nature of what it was we were doing. The problems are never with the law. You can talk your way out of that. It’s with bubba-joe-Nguyen and his Gloc. You can’t reason with him, even if you speak the same language, so you NEED to see him coming from a mile away. Having no guns or intention to hurt anyone, we had to avoid anyone who might.

“I got this shit. My eyes work. Let’s do this shit already.”

Rather cavalier, but Kalm didn’t even acknowledge it as he opened the back door and set out onto the wet pavement, without any illumination from the bulb-less interior light. He never bothered to hurry anyone when he set in to work, he just went. And anyone along had to keep up. That was his way. Breaze was never much for other people’s ways, but he silently respected Kalm’s record, and followed with proper step.

I sat in that sauna for a month if it was fifteen minutes. I had never relented my watch-out position to anyone else before, so this was something a bit new to me. The waiting around with top-forty radio crapping out Counting Crows was pride-ruining and ulcerous to me. But Breaze needed the opportunity to stretch a bit, and that was his right. So I silently sweat out the wait, dragging on my Marlboro, imagining what it would feel like to have air conditioning on my greasy face.

After maybe twenty minutes and three smokes, I noted two figures crossing the street behind me, in my rear-view mirror, approximately fifty yards back. They were moving with haste, and I could see Kalm’s bag of tricks in his silhouette. Breaze was close behind. They crossed, headed my way, back into the shadows against the houses on my side of the street.

“Sweet…” I thought to myself, “now we can get the fuck out of here and get some coffee. Breaze got to turn something, so he should be…” My thought was interrupted by the appearance of two more figures, perhaps fifty feet behind Kalm and Breaze, also heading my direction, but too far back to note any detail.

“Shit-shit-shit-shit-shit!!!”

I went ahead and started the car, trying to give a subtle hint to my co-conspirators to haul some ass, if they weren’t already aware of the potential pursuers.

Again, there is little that worries the common thief beyond the normal pitfalls of Average Joe living: slipping on wet tile, dropping something heavy on your toe, and paper cuts. But the one thing that scared us more than death itself, was the potential to suffer at the hands of some pack of potentially fuckmental vigilantes. Especially in the kind of neighborhood we were in. Khmer Rouge type shit. I always imagined car batteries attached to the tip of my dick in my daymares.

They didn’t heed my engine running, and just strolled right up all lazy like. Kalm got in the back seat, and immediately asked “why is the car running? It's really loud, man.” Breaze took the front seat, and before he could shut the door, we were floored and forward.

I was a bit upset by the whole thing. “DIDN’T YOU SEE THOSE TWO PEOPLE COMING UP BEHIND YOU?!!! I mean, FUCK!!!”

Breaze was pretty nonplussed. “Nah. Did you see anyone Kalm?”

Kalm seemed to understand my displeasure with the whole thing. “No, I didn’t see anyone, but I wasn’t looking either.” Very matter-of-factly: “That’s the look-out’s job.”

Breaze: "Hm."

I was livid. All the blood in my body rushed to my right foot, to get us the hell out of there.

There was a bit of silence draped around us as we pulled around and through the labyrinth of a neighborhood, pawing our way to an exit. Any exit would do. Screeching around corners, the radio tapped out Utah Saints “Something Good” while I seethed, Kalm probably considered the meaning of life, and Breaze shrugged it all off. The drive home was insufferably quiet.

Mistakes are made in any effort to polish one’s craft. But mistakes in some professions carry a much, much heavier consequence when committed. Such is the line that I was (and still very much am) a little shy to stagger around with any level of careless abandon. Paranoia is a thief’s saving grace. Paranoia in every respect and shape. The more, the safer.

After reaching the hold, without saying much to each other, we set upon organizing, cataloguing, and prepping the garnered goods. Amongst the pile of things we had to rummage through were personal items such as sunglasses, pocket knives, compact discs, lighters and cigarettes. Pretty standard lot for a pull of that size. This particular batch contained a rare find for those times: a pack of Thai Cloves. All the writing on the pack was in Thai, but Kalm knew what they were, and did not communicate that to me or Breaze. He played a bit dumb on what they were.

Perhaps it was his effort to diffuse a potentially friendship-disrupting event, as he could tell how pissed I was at what I felt was reckless carelessness that put us all in the menacing sights of retributive harm (car batteries attached to dicks). I was still fuming over the whole debacle.

So he recommended that we smoke some of the cloves. A pinched Zippo lit a single stick up, which we passed between us for a good twenty minutes (cloves forever-burn like cigars) while we continued to cut and crimp errant wires, documented model numbers and tested functionality of components. Business as usual.

But after that twenty minutes passed, we found ourselves laughing hysterically at the whole thing. We joked that the phantom pursuers were part of a competing crew, that was following us around for sloppy seconds. For the remaining change left in ashtrays. We laughed and laughed, forgetting the previous discomfort that clouded our evening, not but thirty minutes prior.

The next thing I remember is waking up, still on the floor, with a butchered CD player on my chest. Breaze was sitting up, against the wall to my right, still passed out. Kalm was snoring, lightly, in the entryway to the bathroom, tools still in his able hands.

Those cloves are no joke.

We never discussed the grievous error made the night before, ever, in any capacity. But we did discuss the cloves, repeatedly, over the turning years. They seemed to trump the more irritating elements of the evening.

We never smoked Thai Cloves again.

And we never asked Breaze to join us on such expeditions in the future. Eventually we would have to learn that it wasn’t the execution by Breaze, or details such as the brutal effects of Thai Cloves which were the problem. The problem was much broader than that. Broader than our narrow minds could possibly fathom at the time.

Always broader it seemed. Always.

San Fran's North Beach - Broadway

When we hit Broadway, looking for some place decent to stay, I was not aware of just how little some things have changed in San Francisco. I had read about the insanity that surrounded the city back when it was in the grips of the opium dragon’s teeth, during mid-to-late 1800’s, but I had assumed that lifestyle had been replaced by technophiles and aging hippies. Eh, not so much.

Broadway in the North Beach district, in year 2000 of the Christians, was definite evidence that the tendency of San Fran to dip into addiction had not been pushed out by internet or hemp developments. Standing on the street, trying to find the storefront of a youth hostel we were told was nearby, I noted a man lying on the sidewalk across the way. To the left of him was a porn theatre, to the right was some closed shop, presumably a liquor store. He was eagle-spread on his back in front of an alley opening, resting his head on the sidewalk curb. He was indeed alive. Well, in some sense he was alive. I could see him squirming a bit, loosening the rope on his trousers so he could piss. While still lying down.

The stream moved its way to the gutter, along and through the dirty cracks of the pavement. Passersby simply stepped over the urine flow, as if they had some sort of auto-sensor for such things. I watched in awe, alone, at how this man was comfortable enough to LAY in the middle of a sidewalk, in front of a public alleyway, as if this was normal and acceptable behavior. And on top of that: he was so relaxed with it all, that whipping out his dick to relieve himself in front of anyone interested to watch was of no concern to him.

Fascinating.

I realize that there is a segment of every population, in every major city, which falls under the definition of “homeless”, and I would guess that this man would fit the requirements. But in every other city I have visited, before and since San Fran, I have never seen one produce any sort of excrement or urine like that without any fanfare, police intervention, or at least some mild scolding from a local business owner. Nothing. He finished pissing all over that little piece of civilization, and rolled over, just slightly, to fish something out from beneath him.

And it was then that I was truly taken aback.

He sat up slowly, stretched out his left arm, and plunged a syringe into it… like, no big deal.

I have a thing with needles. And by “thing” I mean: desperate fear.