welcome to the no-spin zone and junk.
the House allegedly gave the greenlight to anti-price-gouging legislation this week. you know, in regards to the fucked up petrol situation? in short, the bill would target anyone (gargantuan corporations as individuals? not again!?!) seeking out an "unfair advantage" in the energy market or who charges "unconscionably excessive" prices. of course, texas-republican-fuckface Joe Barton argued that the language of the bill was vague, that he didn't know what "unconscionably excessive" means.
of course you do you twat!
it means that gasoline's becoming a fucking luxury item. it means that over 60% of heads that make less than $35k a year feel that the meteoric pre-summer rise in prices is a serious problem. and there are a lot more cats making that amount, or less, than Barton and Co. would like to admit.
Congress wants to break up the Big Five oil companies, seeing trust-busting as the only way to rein in prices. of course "independent" analysts and other asshole "experts" rebut that this is the wrong way to go.
so, in essence, we lose either way.
either Congress is desperately out of touch on this issue (much in the same way they are with most everything else), or the "experts" are on the take, and will fight to the death to maintain the supremacy of the Grand High Exalted ExxonMobil and Its Ordained Auxilliaries.
of course, one can say that, adjusted for currency exchange and measurement discrepancies, we pay a lot less than all of europe (think 6-8 bucks a gallon, adjusted of course).
but fuck that. British Petroleum is like fucking nitroglycerin compared to our watered down nonsense. and besides. last i checked, no one has busted their balls as thoroughly as the U.S. to get in on that cut-rate hookup. fucken at-cost. fucken saudi arabians pay less than a dollar a gallon. subsidies. but then there's the whole beheading thing. ouch.
so i guess my question is, what does it take to get people in this country pissed off? en masse? it surely isn't getting jerked by enormous corporations. and let's face it: the only reason most of us began to oppose the war was because we were "losing," not out of any sense of decency or astuteness.
the children have been telling you to wake up for quite some time now. what do you say we give em a listen?
our man sits quietly in the upstairs bath tub,
filled to the brim, all lukewarm,
puffing away on his stolen hashpipe, and look,
there's a fly on his dicktip,
he's thinking of the working girls of the delta,
and he watches silently as the fly traverses
its fleshy foreign territory,
being a professional killer, he's left with no other option...
down periscope!
slowly at first, so the survivor of an animal
doesn't know what's happening,
quick, quicker, quickly now into the filthy depths,
his thin lips grasping that pipe,
watching that insect scramble maniacally,
it doesn't make the logical choice,
a billion years of instinct ignored,
no way! it just sorta hangs on, just kinda stays there,
legs soaked, wings coated in dead skin and soap bubbles,
didn't see this coming, you fuck!
jerry springs out of the bathtub, satisfied with the setup,
watches the poor bastard slide down the drain in a rush,
you might have seen a smile on those wrinkled lips,
were you there, that is.
30 years in the same fucked up game,
and lord knows how he managed to pull it off,
blew a guy to pieces with a 105mm gun
in khe sanh on christmas one year,
there's hope for you yet you tank jockey,
put our tax pounds to good use,
trounce all that you see and hear,
and if it runs, it's VC!
three cheers for the pink mist!
hip-hip, boom!
hip-hip, ratatatat!
hip-hip, what's that smell?
two nights in a row. what they'd call a recurring dream maybe? whatever its label, i'm thoroughly haunted. yet, last night's version was a bit less edgy.
the deal is as follows: there's kasai, watching the night's news broadcast, we see that the coalition forces are being handily defeated in the streets of baghdad. i mean real-time, super nintendo type shit; the poor bastards are disappearing onscreen like so many super mario goombas.
so, seeing this, my friends and family tell me that i have to ship off and suit up for war.
despite my protest, i'm put on the next bus for fort meade or wherever.
of course, this isn't a dream for so many out there, but as far as i'm concerned, having to go over there is abreast of going to prison and committing murder. three things that are absolute bad news and that i hope never come to pass. so needless to say, this dream shook me up upon sunrise.
now everyone knows that reading/hearing about someone else's dream has the tendency to bore you to tears (except in the case of an artist like michel gondry's vivid films and music vids).
but it's last night's sequel that makes the trip worth the price of admission. because i mean come on, everybody loves unicorns, right?
now in the first chapter, i woke up before i got to iraq, so i was spared that portion of the nightmare. in the second ride, however, i actually did get to the desert, riding atop a glistening unicorn named duke, not unlike Bellerophon atop his trusty steed Pegasus.
arctic mane glistening in the noon sun, chaos all around, yet both ride and rider remain calm in the face of VBIEDs and tanks shrieking and dead kids and body parts and blast walls and such. delivering all from the shitshow that is Iraq.
really triumphant stuff.
further examination shows that the unicorn's presence can be attributed to a rather simple chain of events. attempting to fall asleep, i began to reminisce, to think of wild and dangerous days. particularly, i began to reflect on those raucous sunday nights that one spring, poisoning ourselves with roxies and booze as we eagerly awaited TimeMachine and Dollar Bill's radio show "Wizards and Unicorns: A listener's guide to Dungeons and Dragons" on 88.1 WMUC.
Yessir, good times those, the hosts beasting out with us beforehand, then retreating to their broadcast post to disseminate the gospel of D+D, all the while spinning everything from Mighty Mighty Bosstones' "Knock on Wood" to Broken Social Scene's "I'm Still Your Fag," the latter being edited during play of course. really good stuff.
on account of the dxm trouble (see earlier post: "What More Can I Say?"), the thought of unicorns prancing about meadows, obeying their wizard riders, triggered somewhat blurred closed eye visuals. that's right, months after the fact, i'm still tripping. that's why i try not to think of horrible things like abortions and date rape and the holocaust when i'm trying to fall asleep. difficult though, as i watch a lot of R-rated movies and black metal music videos. and snuff films. sometimes, the fun never ends.
the lesson, because there always is one: don't do drugs or whatever, unless you've got something to hide. then by all means, do as many as you can get your hands on, at all times.
said the army recruiter, via email, (sgt. marcia ramode) to a gay black man trying to join up:
"Go back to Africa and do your gay voodoo limbo tango and wango dance and jump around and prance and run all over the place half naked there."
haha. it wasn't bad enough that recruiters, falling far short of their quotas on account of a FUBAR war, were caught soliciting sex from potential recruits, among other violations? then they had to come with this noise? i love the Arnold Schwarzeneggar-esque "there" at the end. nice touch ramode.
i hadn't had extensive experience with the gay community until my year and a half stint at IKEA's corporate office, with about 90% (not an exaggeration) of the 300 or so employees there being either female or gay males. while some of these cats were certainly flamboyant or eccentric (think miss jay on top model flamboyant. yeah i watch top model, what?), i certainly didn't witness any voodoo, not even from the carribean cats that worked there. though there was some limbo and tango dancing at the winter party.
but in this sargeant's pleasant missive we see a few things of note. most striking of all, we see the kind of hatred that starts well early, maybe with an uncle that can't keep his hands to himself and also happens to be gay. maybe with a drunken, be-slippered (word?) mother who spent every waking moment of her life either boozing or falling down or cursing the faggots or the niggers or some other large group of people who've done nothing to her. the kind of fury that begins in the youth, under the tutelage of some fuck up adult, and never really dies away. these fucks are everywhere. i hear that was adolf hitler's trip. yeah.
additionally, amidst the talk of don imus (which will be more or less hushed thanks to the VT nightmare), america is all of a sudden reexamining its stance on racism and hate speech and blah blah blah. nike even took out a full page ad in the nyt: "thank you, ignorance. thank you for starting the conversation." with that monolithic swoosh above the bold print.
what? wtf?
i love a fresh pair of nikes like any other red blooded american male, but fuck! starting the conversation? so after a pretty terrible human rights record over the span of four or five centuries, we're just starting the conversation? christ.
i love when this kind of thing goes down though. everyone all of a sudden going all hypersensitive to the feelings/sensibilities of all human beings (except the rappers of course, they don't give a fuck about a ho), really concerned with the plight of the country's underclass or whatever. people acting like racism went extinct, then reemerged in small pockets like a persistent virus; an event truly warranting ceaseless press coverage.
then three weeks pass, customary media fatigue, and back to our daily routines. gotta get paid, gotta get laid, gotta get made. "racism doesn't exist anymore. this is america."
major social changes take generations, so if we're just "starting the conversation," the prejudice and biases that typify our _____-ist (fill in the blank children) culture will be fleeting memories in about four or five centuries. cheers.
