MySpace Rollercoaster

I had become fascinated with all the zany, novelty profiles on myspace--everything from John Tesh and Kris-Kross, to William Howard Taft and Chairman Mao. I came by one for a Lawn Chair that was so funny I got inspired to create an inanimate object profile of my own.

One of the coolest things about myspace is how copyright infringement and libel goes basically unchecked. Fake celebrity profiles routinely make wild claims of their subjects drug use, violence, and sexual orientation. So, to put this lack of constraint to the test I decided to make a "Can of Coke" profile, knowing that two copyrights you don't ever fuck with are Coca-Cola and Mickey Mouse. I downloaded a picture of a shiny can of coke from google and set to work. I made my can of coke a twenty year-old knuckle-head from San Diego who was unaware of anything existing outside of the advertising and entertainment world. I made him have a secret crush on Jared from Subway and a homicidal hatred of Shrek. He laments the passing of his pet dog Pizza Hut. His favorite books werere The Davinci Code and "all the Harry Potters!". To try and attract some real attention I added in some mentions about coke's shady history of using child labor and how coke has been linked to osteo perosis.

I imagined cease and desist letters from Coke's lawyers, and maybe a book deal after my long and triumphant legal battle--of course, nothing happened for weeks. But one day I clicked on, and there was a friend request from a shiny can of Cherry Flavored Pepsi. Awesome, I thought, somebody else had the same idea as me and now they want to have a mock cola war! I accepted the friend request and clicked right over to check out Cherry Pepsi's profile.

I didn't know what to make of it at first. There were moving banners and all kinds of links. It looked like someone had spent money on it. I read the profile details (personality, music, hobbies...). It was all written in a twenty something, male voice but with an undeniable allegiance to Pepsi. To my shock and disgust I realized that this had to be a Pepsi sponsored site. I quickly left a very sober comment, "You have a lot of nerve...Pepsi has no right to free advertising...boycott this site". Then Cherry Pepsi Left me a comment, something to the affect of, "You're messing with Cherry Pepsi now dude! The one with more flavor. It's on!"

I was bugging. Pretty soon five or six other corporate sponsored soft drink profiles were requesting to be my friend. I tried messaging them privately, to speak frankly, person-to-person, about the situation. But all I got back was thinly veiled youth-market jargon with pop up ads included. It was chilling in a way. So I gave up and decided to purge the whole thing by removing all text and putting up a peaceful collage of roller coasters. That's when I got that strange and beautiful email from AMERICAN WE STAND.

American We Stand is the title of a profile of a kid in the mid-west who, I'm guessing, is autistic or has some sort of pathology going on. His entire profile consists of roller coasters and garish patriotic banners that don't really make sense. He writes in all caps and uses almost no punctuation. Makes for bizzarre reading.

I thought it was cool how, after the obnoxious episode with the soda companies, I was able to have this pure exchange with a kid who contacted me because we shared an interest in roller coasters. It sort of exemplified the best of myspace and the internet in general.

The Memorial Day Parade: What a Grand Cadence

Doesn't it sound march-y: "The Memorial Day Parade" sis-boom-bang!

Anyway,
Memorial Day made me think about the parade they continue to hold in my home town every year. I was a Cub Scout the first time I marched. Comming off of a very respectable third place finish in the soap box derby and my with Cub Scout uniform fairly loaded up with bright, crisp merit badges, I felt I had earned my position.

The magic began to fade a few years later though when I realized that kids were tossed into the parade for doing next to nothing. The Police Athletic League baseball team I was on was in dead last when we marched that year. Only about half of us had the proper, thick, polyster team uniform on, the rest improvised with the closest-to- sky-blue-tee-shirts they could find. Somewhere along the parade route it hit me what a cheesy photo-op it all was and how, well past the "precious" years (5-10), I was wasting mine and everyone elses time. Better just to tip out and go scam chicks.

It was tradition for each highschool class to build a float for the Memorial Day Parade. Maybe because it was the official year of grunge rock, or maybe because we were just ill tempered teens, me and my gang of savage seniors had nothing on our minds but sabotage. Our greatest Animal House-esque plans were formulated in vans and garages over bong hits and cheap kegs. It is both a blessing and a shame that we all liked the sound of our own voices, and the thrill of beer and marijuana, too much to ever actually try most of the things we planned that year.

This is what I look like

I don't know exactly what this accomplishes. I feel like, putting your picture up on a blog is sort of going the whole way.

On the phenomenal blog, "go fug yourself"--I would put a link here but I'm too stupid to figure out how--which uses fugly celebrity photos for writing fodder, images of the two brilliant women who write it are conspicuously absent. Maybe I should have taken my cue from them. But do you really need to see pictures of cancer, Keith Richards, cub scouts and Oscar De La Hoya? I gave you fuzzy-David Blaine, isn't that enough?!?!

I know what I want to be for halloween

I'm going to be teratoma! The cancer with hair and teeth included! Surely, turning myself into a walking ball of slime, teeth and hair (with maybe a baby arm for good measure) women will find me irresistable. Parents will approach me to take pictures with their young ones to mark the occasion. If my teratoma halloween costume is as much of a hit as I expect it to be, I might just be filling in for the fire department santa clause this year on Christmass morning. It's all about the children.

Boners

I drove to Connecticut by accident yesterday on my way home from work. I drove deep into the state of Connecticut, sure, the whole time, that I would hit the Throgs Neck Bridge any minute.

I'll admit that I'm flighty, a daydreamer, if you will(insert link here). I have become profoundly lost in cars and on foot, on land and sea. But I always have an excuse, some kernel of logic waiting to be extraced from deep within the product of carelessness and stupidity. Would you like to hear my excuse?

No, I can't! I'm tired of excuses--It was bumper to bumper from the time I left work, I was surrounded by semis and couldn't see the road signs--I must accept it and move on.

The reason got lost comming home from work yesterday is the same reason I have no plans for memorial day weekend.

Litigious: how can such a pretty sounding word carry so much evil?

My coffe cup lid of choice is the old one, the tear away, perforated tab that leaves you with a good quarter-inch square to drink from. The alternative is the sippy-cup, Starbucks lid that just blows. My guess is that after the spilled-coffe lawsuit against McDonalds that awarded a plaintiff $2.9 million, big companies like Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts decided to go exclusively with the handi-capable, safety lids.

Another one is the door locks on my Ford shitbox--I forget what model I have. Every door locks automatically whenever the ignition is turned on. Were there that many kids and senile old people chucking themselves out of moving cars? Please. Coincidentally, It's when I leave the car running, to get my morning coffee, that I am most often thwarted by this bullshit safety feature.

Have you heard how they're installing voice recordings of anti-drunk driving messages in urinals? So, you go to use the restroom at a bar or night club, and the urinal tries to have an impromptu heart-to-heart about your drinking. I don't know, that might be the last straw for me. If I'm drunk, I can really see myself tearing some snobby, patronizing toilet right out of the wall and pissing on it's shattered face.

Why do I like to watch boxing?

"Jack Boughton, also known as 'the Father of Boxing,' developed the first set of rules for the sport and published them in 1743 as a RESULT FROM A BOUT WHERE HE KILLED HIS OPPONENT in 1741."

So, the sport of boxing was invented to keep people from dying in public fist fights. That's depressing. And it took one of the gladiators to actually care enough to bring rules and regulations to the arena. That none of the purse string holders cared enough, speaks volumes.

It's not like they're eating bugs for money. But then again, nobody dies from internal brain hemmoraging on Fear Factor. No one on The Bachelor is left punch drunk and bankrupted by embezzeling managers.

Boxing has evolved over the years. Referees have become more responsible, and criminal elements in management and fixing fights has diminished--as far as I can tell. Go back as recently as the forties and fifties and you'll see acknowledged mobsters sitting front row at fights that,in terms of sheer exploitive brutality, eclipse, by miles, anything shown on tv today.

I may have to consider this more. Sorry for the blue balls.

What's you're coolest visual for how small we are in the universe?

I might screw this up a bit but here's mine:

Put a dining table in the middle of a football field and spread a black table cloth over it. Spill (a few?) shakers of salt on the black-cloth dining table and spread the grains around. Then, line up enough similarly salt-covered, black-cloth dining tables, end to end, so that they cover the entire football field. The grains of salt are roughly the number of stars are in our galaxy alone.

Put a football field in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean...

Put an Atlantic Oceans-worth of football fields, full of black dinning tables covered in grains of salt...then check your blood pressure.

Late Returns--My Personal Worst

There are two movies from blockbuster in my breif case (are they even called that anymore?) and I know there is no way in hell I'm going to remember to return them today on my way home. I'll write a note on my hand. I'll stick a reminder post-it up on my computer screen. I will leave here at five o'clock and drive right past blockbuster as I giggle along to The Radio Chick Show.

Three days from now I will remember the two movies in the side compartment of my gay-carry-all-hip-bag-thing.I will read this blog and give myself a verbal slap on the wrist--"dummy".

By the weekend they will have become a source of shame and I will cringe just looking at them. I will promise myself to drop them off while out getting a hair cut or running some, more serious, errand. To make that trip across town (on a saturday no less!)for the sole purpose of returning videos would be to suffer an indignancy on par with the time my mother made me give seventy-five dollars I had found on Plandome Road to the local church!

My personal worst for late returns is somewhere around three weeks. Think I can beat it?

There are many like it but this one is mine...

My new Ipod Nano,I call him Timmy, is suffering from symptoms common to many new Ipod Nanos. He's been fatigued and has difficulty concentrating. Often, he's only well enough to make half of an album cover photo appear in the "Now Playing" window. I've tried to talk to him about it but when I do he simply shuts down. The specialists tell me he'd have a good chance of making a full recovery if we just cleaned out his whole system. Though I don't want him getting get any worse, I am fearful of trying the procedure on my own. I should have just bought the warrantee.

Wild Horses and the Tiny Hairs on my Arms

I just watched "Gimme Shelter",the Maysles Brothers documentary of The Rolling Stones 1969 tour that ended with the infamous free conert at Altamont. I knew Altamont was bad but not that bad. From the pitiable naivete of the event organizers to the bad trips and beat downs, Altimont was a virtual black hole--Woodstocks evil twin. It remains a great example of how wrong things can go when people try and duplicate something organic and miraculous.
For all "Gimme Shelter"'s chilling violence and despair there is one scene, just before the halfway point of the movie, that made my arm hair stand up and sway gently. It shows the Stones, at the absolute height of their powers, working in the legendary Stax recording studios:
The scene begins with Keith Richards lying on the studio floor in a semi-heroin nod. Everyone else is gathered around the control board listening back to a scratch recording of what will become the album version of Wild Horses. Normally, at this stage of the recording process, a band would be listening critically, suggesting sound level alterations, smiling at the good parts and wincing at the bad. But in this room no one budges. They recognize that what is being created is special, that a deal has been struck with good fortune and the moment is calling for solemnity.
The scene ends before the song does. The last shot fades out on Keith Richards still stretched out on the floor. But he is awake with his eyes closed, mouthing along to every word of Wild Horses, like a mob boss at the opera.

When Sex Abuse Humor Goes Too Far

I received this office email the other day about a woman--let's call her Mitsy--at the social services organization I work with. It was to celebrate her being promoted:

"Mitsy has been with the agency for 18 years, starting as the Supervisor of the Child Sexual Abuse Treatment Center and developing this into the nationally renowned Treatment Center for Trauma and Abuse."

You should understand, the email was a full page of text. It was really a page long ode to Mitsy. Mitsy Mimosa III. Buried in the second to last paragraph was this:

"Mitsy has a special ability to provide vision, offer leadership...In her new role as Assistant Executive Director, the entire agency will be ‘touched.’"

Touched? In soft quotes? To me this was an obvious, well placed, bit of low-brow office humor about child molestation. The guy who composed this cheeky little memo--let's call him Tabitha--is second or third in command of the organization which makes me hesitant to ask him what he meant by his specific word choice. What if I'm wrong and I come off looking like a fan of jokes about pedophelia? Tabitha would be none to pleased.

Will David Blaine dissolve inside his tepid snow globe?

If he insists on conducting endurance tests instead of performing magic, he should go jerk-off on his own time. Nobody wants to see a guy go all gummy and listless over the course of a week while children die of AIDS. Since when did "toughing it out" become a note worthy spectacle?

You know he's only doing it for the chicks.

Daydream Vaccination: Meditations on Casual Friday Part I

By Friday, the nine-to-five office worker becomes critically susceptable to the affects of daydreaming. His mind, like that of the marathon runner approaching the finish line, becomes inextricably drawn to fantasies of what fabulous rewards await him on the other side of five o'clock. And just as the runner is offered small, objective manifestations of his fantasy(i.e., paper cups of water and manic cheering) that spur him on in the last leg of the race, the office worker is offered the permission to wear jeans and a sweater on Casual Friday. It seems that tangible objects, like jeans and sun visors, that are associated with weekend respite and thus the stuff of daydreams are acting as a bulwark against the ravages of daydreaming and utter non-productivity.