This is the only picture that pops up when you type "Meinphragm" into Google image.

It wasn’t the best review. It wasn’t the worst.

Here it is, if you want to read the whole thing yourself: http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/soundadvice/blogs#BlogPost-4417584

However, my readers, I’ve noticed, aren’t actually big readers.

So, instead, I’ll give you a play by play:

I went to this show and one of the performers, Meinphragm, was awful. Beyond awful.

His raps were so bad that at first I thought he was having a grand mal seizure.

I thought he had swallowed the microphone and was going into a fit of oxygen deprivation.

I thought he had been possessed by wack Milli Vanilli  ghosts. I called a priest to exorcize him.

Anyway, he didn’t like my review. He said I was hating on him. Meinphragm started a Facebook battle. He said that, ON HIS KIDS,  he was going to beat my ass. He even challenged me to a real life duel!

So as a man of God, a man of peace and a man of unflinching integrity, I wrote Meignphragm a video letter.

The last thing I need is a scar on this flawless mug.

I was a totally rapeable child, if I do say so myself.

I don’t know where this fascination with pedophiles came from. I was never raped, if that’s what you’re thinking. Or not that I remember, anyway. Although, once, when I was 8, our neighbor—a 14-year-old girl with short hair and a reputation for violence—pinned me down in the backyard and unzipped my pants so she could suck me off on a moist patch of grass. I can’t remember her name, only that she was incredibly ugly. The kids on the street called her Alleyway because her face was dirty and freckled, and she always smelled of cat piss.

“I’m going to kiss it,” she said, chasing me around an Elm tree. Her braces flashed in the sunlight. I didn’t know what the “it” was.

I didn’t run as fast as I could have and when she caught me I only pretended to put up a fight while she fumbled around with my belt and zipper. I remember the feel of her mouth—warm and wet—and I decided the sensation of her quick, dry breath against my groin, her chalky tongue combined with the meaty smell of her head was somewhere in between horrifying and religious. But it certainly wasn’t rape in any of its devious forms. And, frankly, the story doesn’t explain much, except perhaps my own ecosystem of sickness and perversion, which is another freak show entirely.

Anyway, I’d taken to searching the sexual offender database almost every day for the past four years, so I’d gotten quite familiar with it. It’s set up so you can search by location or name and there’s a map marked with blue dots to indicate where the offenders live. When you click on one of the blue dots, you see the offender’s picture, a physical description (including tattoos), their address and their crimes, which range from public indecency to kidnapping and rape. I always begin the search in my Del Paso neighborhood, which occupies a poor, gang-infested corridor of North Sacramento. A ghetto, in the classic sense. My neighborhood is riddled with so many blue dots that in certain places they’re stacked on top of one another. If you didn’t know better, it would look like a rich terrain of royal blue castles, when really it’s a sinister Disneyland of sexual depravity.

James :(

Recently, to my surprise, I found my neighbor, James (a sad looking black man who reminds me of every grade school janitor I’d ever seen growing up in Boston—fat, bald, and unimpressed with everything). His saggy eyes and ashy brown skin were never sinister, just tired, so his crime—kidnapping and assault on a minor—seemed to betray him.

And as it turns out, Salome lives just down the street. He’s a Native American with a Johnny Depp goatee and a ponytail pulled back like a Samurai. In his picture he’s wearing a tight necklace made of Buddhist prayer beads. Salome was charged with rape in concert with violence and oral copulation on a minor.

In my four years of clicking through the blue-specked map, I’ve examined almost every one of the 90,000 registered sex offenders in California. Sometimes, by accident, I’ll click on one I’ve already seen and remember him like he was a long lost relative. In four years, I’d acquired 90,000 frightening uncles.

And aunts.

The Jodie Foster of child rapists

It’s not just men who are sexual offenders. There are also women, like Tamara, the 24-year-old spitting image of Jodie Foster. Tamara was a counselor at Bridges after school program when she fell in love with one of her students, a young girl named Josephine. According to Tamara’s court testimony, she fell in love with the little girl and the little girl fell in love with her back. It was mutual, she pleaded. Tamara forged emergency release documents and took her out of school, so they could express their love sexually in a hotel room. Four years later, Tamara’s internet presence hangs over her like a noose.

So here’s where the story gets kind of messy.

When I get home from work I decide that I need to call one of the pedophiles. I can’t explain why, but I can try to explain the feeling: I open the refrigerator, see a jug of filtered water and then feel something break in my brain, like the little pocket of air that pops in your knuckle when you push at it too hard. So I sit at my computer and pick one name at random from the database. The name is Charles, a disheveled man with unkempt hair. In his photo he’s wearing a suit and he reminds me of a poor man’s Rush Limbaugh. His crime is lewd and lascivious acts upon a child. When I type his name into Google there are many results: he’s a writer, a pizza maker, a veteran, a lawyer, a mechanic. I narrow the search by typing in his area code next to his name. And there it is, Charles’s phone number—right in front of me, like an old dollar bill folded neatly on the sidewalk.

Now that I think back, there was this one time when I was nine and I lived in Boston with my mom and step-dad. They wanted me to learn how to swim, so they enrolled me in lessons at the local high school. I was a shy kid and didn’t like being around other kids my age, mostly because they were cruel and impatient. But my parents insisted that spending another summer traveling the city’s subway system by myself was unhealthy. I didn’t know anybody in my class.

Our teacher, Mark, was probably 30. He had a big nose and tiny eyes, like a toucan. He spoke in the thick Boston accent that my mom always warned me about.

“Be careful with the way you talk,” she said. “People will treat you differently.”

But Mark was unashamed of his.

“Down, out, togethah!” he yelled when he taught the breast stroke.

After class, all the kids would run into the locker room. We shivered as we changed. Some of the kids snapped each other with towels. And Mark stood there, in the middle of the room with one foot up on a bench, taking it all in.

One time, when we finished changing, he approached and asked me if I wanted a ride home.

“No thanks,” I told him.

For the next two weeks, he asked me the same question, each time with more urgency, until I finally told my mom, who shook her head and laughed nervously.

My mother patted me on the shoulder. “Keep your little pants on,” she said with a nervous laugh.

“She wanted it”

When the phone rings, my hands begin to shake and suddenly I don’t know what I’m doing.

“Hello?” he answers. His mouth sounds like it’s stuffed with jelly doughnuts. Charles’ picture is still up on my computer screen and his large red face and shoulder length greasy hair remind me of a grocery store manager. “Charles?”

“Yeah, who is this?”
 For a second, I forget. My body is light. My brain turns into steam that’s billowing out through my ears into the porous ceiling. Words finally escape through the teacup of my mouth.

“We don’t know each other. Sorry. I’m writing a story.”

“How did you get my number?” he asks. I imagine his thick jowls swinging as he speaks.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “It was on Google.”

“Stop apologizing,” he says. “It’s not supposed to be on there, that’s all.”

“Yeah, well I just typed it in,” I say. “And it popped up.”

“What is this about?”
 “I have to be honest, I saw you on the offender website. I wanted to ask you some questions.”

At this point, I’m fairly certain he’ll hang up. I want him to hang up. I’m not sure what I’m expecting from the conversation, but I’m fairly positive this isn’t it. But Charles doesn’t hang up. Instead, he sits on the other end of the line, presumably thinking. I can hear him breathing long, disturbing breaths.

“What’s this about?” he asks again.

“It’s for school,” I say, lying.

“School?” he asks. “Are you going to record this?”

“No,” I say, another lie.

“So you’re not recording this right now?”

“No.”

We end up talking for an hour. He’s lonely. He tells me about his life now that he’s on “the list,” which consists mainly of watching television and reading passages from the Bible.

“Does it help you?” I ask.

“Does what help me?”

“The Bible.”

“Oh, yeah.”

I ask him what it feels like to be outcast.

“It’s bad,” he says. “People spit on me when I’m walking down the street. They wait at my house. They threaten me.”

Charles tells me about his childhood: His mother was an alcoholic; he was a strange kid who didn’t get along with other kids; he was a bad student, but he liked to read. When his father died he cried, even though he beat Charles and his mother until they both ended up in the hospital.

“Right now I’ve stopped living,” Charles says. “I’m only existing.

He tells me about how he can’t get a job and how he only makes enough money by doing random odds and ends to pay rent. Sometimes he doesn’t eat for days.

“Can you tell me about the girl?” I ask.

“What girl?”
 “The girl,” I say. “The one you assaulted.”

“She was 13. My wife’s daughter from another marriage,” he says, pausing. “You know, men have certain impulses. We can’t help things. The girls now wear all kinds of short clothes, tank tops.” Charles tells me how she’d come home at night and they were alone together. The aloneness is what broke him. It was unbearable, he said. She was suggestive. He insists that he didn’t rape her. It was consensual, he says.

“She wanted it?”

“The crime was absolutely wrong,” he says. “No ifs, no ands, no buts, no excuses—but there has to come a time when the pound of flesh has been exacted. With a registered sex offender, that pound of flesh doesn’t exist.” I can hear the frustration growing in Charles’ tone. He wants me to understand. He’s expecting a high-five.

“The daughter, the one you raped, does her mother still talk to you?”

“She wants nothing to do with me,” Charles says. “But I don’t blame her.” When I hang up with Charles, I look out the window. As the sun begins to set, I watch two men smoke cigarettes and talk outside the pornography shop across the street. One of them is so obese that his stomach hangs from his opened jacket, over his belt and it covers his groin. The smaller one gestures wildly with his hands and they laugh. The fat one holds his hand over his heart. The men flick their butts onto the street, get into a rusted pickup and drive off toward the freeway.

World’s Greatest Grandpa

I open my laptop to another offender—Roger—who lives just a few blocks from where I live, though I’ve never seen him in real life. He was born in 1948, but his wispy white hair and thin brittle skin are deceptive. He looks older—demented, even. His jaw bones form sharp angles and he wears the chin of an old boxer. When he was younger, he might have smoked a pipe and imitated Sinatra while his wife put down her magazine and rolled her eyes in the bedroom. He might have been handsome—an athlete who kept a girl in the library and one at the bowling alley, just in case. Or perhaps he was a family man, the kind of guy who’d steal a bouquet of flowers from the cemetery on mother’s day. He has a tattoo of a skull and crossbones on his forearm and one of a lightning bolt on his neck. Under his list of crimes, it says 288, which is the California Penal Code that means he’s been caught having sex with a child. I close my eyes and imagine how he was once a child. It’s almost impossible to picture a child rapist as a young boy, so I keep trying. I think about how he carried books in his backpack, how his eyes were blue but now they’re darker, the color of wet concrete, like he’d been crying for the entirety of his 62 years.

“This is me,” he says, his sharp lips expose the rawness of his bloody gums. He’s choking back a ball of tears, trying to muster a truthful smile. “It’s not so bad,” he says. “Right?”

This is the actual place, which I found on the internet. If it was scratch and sniff you'd be smelling a shit odor right now.

George was a prick of a landlord, one of those old white people who was too into history, especially the Civil War. I’m not even sure which side he rooted for. He wore overalls and an engineer hat and he yelled every time we saw each other.

This is not actually George, but it is what happens when you type "old white man with beard" into Google.

“You’re a loser,” he said once. Actually, more than once. Maybe a hundred times. I was kind of a loser, though, so I didn’t really take it personally. I lived on the third floor of his old teal green Victorian that looked nice on the outside but inside it was infested with cockroaches. The building smelled dead and sour. The window that faced our neighbor’s house was the one I liked to sit in to smoke cigarettes. The neighbor was an old lady. Her hair was orange because she dyed it that way and she was always outside watering her plants. Under a certain light the sun would shine through her thin orange hair and onto her scalp and her head appeared to be on fire. This one time, I was in my window smoking a cigarette watching her tend to the garden. She took care of each stalk, each leaf each flower petal individually. It was impressive, the attention she gave to every plant. She was out there for hours, most of the day, with her fingers touching each part of every flower. One day she looked into the windowsill and saw me sitting there, smoking.

“Aren’t you afraid that you’re going to fall out of that window?” she yelled up to me.

“No,” I answered. “Are you afraid?”

“I don’t care what you do,” she said, and went back to her plants.

I flicked my cigarette down into the little walkway between our apartment building and her yard.

“Hey,” she said. She carried a hose that was spewing water. “Where are you flicking those?”

“Down there,” I said, pointing to the walkway.

“Don’t you have an ashtray?”

“No,” I said.

“If you need to smoke, get an ashtray.”

“My bad,” I said.

I noticed that when she stared at me her mouth looked like a cunt.

If you add 250 years to this girl, she would look exactly like my old neighbor

The next day, I got an ashtray. No, I didn’t. But I set a Budweiser can near the windowsill and ashed my cigarettes into that. When I smoked my cigarettes my neighbor didn’t look at me anymore because I had my little makeshift ashtray and that made her happy, I suppose. I still watched her tend to her garden and I realized that it was annoying how meticulous she was with her plants. She treated each one like it was an infant and I knew she didn’t even have kids. If she did have kids I bet she wouldn’t have harassed so much about about my cigarettes. She would have understood that kids are capable of much worse than littering.

XXX

The guy in the room directly across from me was named Josaih– a black guy who wore these really intricate braids. He wasn’t very interesting. He was a rapper, actually, a really good one. He could rap his ass off. He would go to rap clubs, take the microphone and battle other rappers, but in real life he was stupid as fuck. He didn’t understand social cues. Like, he would see a

This is not Josiah, but it IS a man with intricate braids. He, too, looks like he fucks a lot.

girl who he liked and even if she was with her boyfriend, he’s sit down and talk to her. And he’d get her number, too. That was a bad example of his stupidity because that just sounds like he was some sort of Casanova, which he was. He fucked quite a bit. Sometimes I’d walk into his apartment and he’d be fucking. He had no rhythm or style when he fucked, like a big black tugboat, putting through the sea. Anyway, he introduced me to his friend Mike, this goofy-looking white guy. He dressed preppy and looked like he worked at a country club. But he wasn’t preppy at all. In fact, Mike loved to do drugs. Hard drugs. Right when I met him he got really into speed. Me and my Filipino girlfriend went over to his apartment once and we did a big bag of speed together. We were so high that night we could barely stand. Mike kept pacing around the apartment, asking if he could fuck my girlfriend.

“I’m fucking horny,” he said. “It’s killing me.”

He was wearing this hideous salmon colored Polo shirt tucked into his chinos and he looked like a young investment banker, whacked out of his goddamn mind. He paced around the house for about an hour and then put on some porn and jacked off on the couch. But his dick wouldn’t get hard so his penis just flopped around in his hand for a few hours while me and my girlfriend talked.  When we left, it was about 6 a.m. and Mike was still on the couch, sweating, tugging at his red, raw cock.

Under that pink sweater, his heart is beating 4,000 times per second and beneath that crop job is a raging chino boner

XXX

I knew it wasn’t good when I heard George coming up the stairs.  For such a withered old man he had a lot of power in those footsteps. Especially when he was ascending stairs. Clonk, clonk, clonk. He banged on the door.

“Open up,” he yelled. “Get the fuck out here.”

I put on a pair of boxers and opened the door a crack. George slammed the door with his elbow into my big toe. I jumped up and down and he stepped into my room. George looked around with his hands on his hips and surveyed the room while I stood on one foot and massaged my hurt toe. His engineer hat was so fucking ridiculous that it took all my sensibility not to laugh out loud.

“Don’t you have any self respect,” George asked, in a way that told me it wasn’t a question.

“I guess I do,” I said, picking up a few Bud cans off my chair and placing them on the floor so I could sit down. My toe throbbed.

“Mrs. Boleto said you gave her a hard time,” George said. His hands were still on his hips.

“Mrs. Boleto?”

“Your neighbor, over there, in the house next door.” He pointed in the wrong direction, across the street where the bar was. “Don’t give me hell, too, you little shit.”

“I didn’t know that was her name,” I said. “Honest. She doesn’t look like a Mrs. Boleto.”

“Why are you giving her a hard time?”

“I wasn’t.”

“Don’t lie to me,” George said. His face was red and I could see large purple veins in his red nose. “You flicked your cigarettes on the ground and told her, “I’m bad, I’m bad.””

“No,” I corrected him. I explained to George how I had said “My bad,” not, “I’m bad.” I told him how it was supposed to be an apology.

“Oh,” George said. His face softened and his hands came off his hips.

“I even made an ashtray,” I said, pointing to the can on the windowsill.

George didn’t look at the ashtray. He just stood there, shaking his head.

“What an old fucking bag,” he said. We stood there, in my dirty little room, for what seemed like five minutes, watching Mrs. Boleto down below, hunching over her little infant flowers.

XXX

George made me the building manager that night, which meant that I was in charge of sweeping up once a week, collecting rent and making sure the other tenants weren’t fighting or smoking drugs in their rooms.

“You’re the most responsible one I got,” George said. The other tenants were drug addicts, like I was, but they were happy being fuckups. My saving grace was that I was wholly uncomfortable with who I was. Or at least that’s what George told me.

“Look at you,” he said. “You’re crawling in your own skin. You can’t even look me in the eye. All Kwan down there does is look me in the eye, the creepy little bastard.”

How many Asian guys would do this? None. How many Asian guys do this with some methamphetamine up their nose? All of them.

Kwan, the Asian man who lived in the tiniest apartment on the first floor was the kind of guy who you see on the street and say, “Where does that guy go at night?” He was a speed freak. He’d wake up every morning, snort some speed he kept in a Karmex container and then set off with his huge boombox and stand in the middle of downtown blasting A-HA. And then, every night at about 9:30, he’d come back to his tiny apartment on 23rd & L. That’s where he went. On my 22nd birthday, we broke into his apartment, snorted all his speed and replaced it with crushed up Aspirin. On the second floor was Bernt—a Swedish guy who, for all practical purposes was normal. But there was something odd about him. He had a job that he’d get dressed up for every day, but he seemed off, like he might have a little boy fetish or something. When there’s a normal, productive member of society living in a halfway house, there has to be something he’s hiding. Something big. His name was pronounced “Bay-r-nt” but everyone called him “Burned” and he’d flip out and tell them to fuck off and eat shit and things like that.

So I was the manager of that kind of stuff. When George started coming by the building every now and then, it wasn’t to scold me, but to give me fatherly advice. “You know how you stay out of jail,” he said to me once.

“No.”

“Quit acting like an asshole.” And then he smacked the back of my head.

One day, he came over while I was sweeping the hallway downstairs. He watched me for a second before he grabbed the broom out of my hands.

“Didn’t anyone teach you how to properly sweep?”

“No,” I said. “It seems pretty easy.”

“It’s not easy,” he said. “Watch.”

I watched him sweep. Like he was angry at the ground. Like he was trying to sweep a hole into the goddamn earth.

XXX

When I finally moved out of that place, I cleaned my apartment so thoroughly that it looked better than when I moved in. I even painted. When I was finished both my hands were bright red and my palms were covered in blisters. When George came in for inspection he stood there with his hands on his hips and said, “This is beautiful. I didn’t know you had it in you.” And then he gave me my deposit back in cash, patted my back and almost said something. But he didn’t. He just grabbed my shoulder so hard that it left a bruise.

A few years later I was talking to an old friend and we got to the subject of 23rd & L.

“Did you hear about George?” she asked.

“Bramson?”

“Yeah.”

She told me that one of the foreign exchange students who lived in one of the spare rooms in his mansion came home after school one day and found George sitting in his favorite chair wearing only a pair of his tighty whitey underwear, clutching a bottle of Jack Daniels. She wasn’t surprised because that’s how she often found him when she came home after 4 p.m., but usually when she came back he’d tell her to stand in front of him while he barked orders like “clean the sink better next time” or “come here and let me massage your neck.” But this time he just sat there so she went up to him and saw that his eyes were open but they weren’t looking at anything. He was just sitting there, dead, clutching his whiskey bottle.

“And then what happened?” I asked.

“What do you mean what happened?” she said, confused. “He was dead.”

“But what about the student?”

“She went back to Japan, I guess.”

“Did she say how his face looked when he was dead?”

“What do you mean?”

“Was he smiling?”

“What are you talking about?”

I don’t know what I was talking about. George died in an old leather chair with his hands wrapped around a bottle of whiskey. And that was it. It seemed so simple, but I didn’t think it should have been.

If you sue me for stealing this picture I will fuck you up with a knife.

The awkward Safeway checker looked like an extra from Revenge of the Nerds. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. Cherubic, maybe, is the word. His cheeks were red and fat.

“How’d he die?” he asked.
“How’d who die?”
He pointed to my Ol’ Dirty Bastard t-shirt, the one  with the date of his birth and death.
“Ah, yes,” I said.

I explained to him that ODB had to be at a recording studio on the opposite side of the country from where he was. So in order to board a plane, he swallowed his bag of crack cocaine, as not to be arrested for transporting narcotics across state lines. With the crack safely inside his stomach, ODB boarded the plane. Once his plane landed, he must have forgotten all about the crack he swallowed because he got to the studio, started recording a song, began to sweat profusely, clutched his chest and then he died rapidly of heart failure.

The checker looked perplexed.
“Really?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
He stopped placing groceries in my bag, pushing my box of Fig Newtons into his chest. He appeared to be thinking.
“It’s a solid lesson,” I said. “If you think about it.”
“What is?” the checker asked.
“You know, not to swallow crack.”

He finished with my groceries and I left the store. Walking to my car, I thought about ODB and about how I had once smoked crack with a homeless man in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, where I lived. My girlfriend had gone on a trip and I was drunk. And bored. So I walked outside, told a homeless man that if he got us some crack, that we could smoke it in my apartment. I gave him 40 bucks and watched as he disappeared around the corner. I waited for ten minutes and figured he was gone for good, but just as I was about to go to the liquor store, he came stomping up the hill with a shit-eating grin.

It’s really easy to find homeless pictures on Google

He opened up his dirty hand and there were two baggies, with two large rocks of cocaine. They carried a yellowish tint. They look like canine teeth.

“Do you have a pipe?” I asked.

The homeless man looked at me as if I’d asked him if he was ever a boy.

We walked into my apartment and sat down on my couch.

“It’s nice in here,” he said, staring very hard at my television set.

I watched him rip open the plastic and break off a piece of cocaine. His fingers turned the drug a dark brown.

“You have to have a piece of steel wool in there,” he said, holding the pipe up to the light.

“Like a filter?” I asked.

“A what?”

“Forget it.”

He stuffed a bunch of crack in the end of the pipe.

“Do you have a knife?” he asked.

“Oh, fuck you,” I said. “If you think I’m going to give you a knife.”

“I’m not going to stab you with it,” he said. “I’m going to use it to stuff this shit in.”

“Can you use a spoon?”

“Sure.”

He gave me the pipe first. My hands were shaking.

“You need help?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“You never smoked this shit before?”

“Nope.”

“This shit is bad”

“Yeah.”

He held the flame up to the pipe.

“Now suck,” he said.

When the smoke entered my lungs, my head went light. A burst of fluorescence exploded in my lungs and spread out through my chest, my groin, my legs, fingertips and exited through my eyes and ears. My brain felt like it was made of gentle electricity. My heart filled with love.

We sat there, smoking, talking about shit I can’t remember now. We smoked until the crack was gone. The only thing I remember is that he told me he’d steal me a bike later that night. For my hospitality.

I walked him out to the sidewalk.

“What kind of bike you like?” He asked.

“I don’t know.”

“A red one?” he asked.

“A red one,” I said, and I  watched him limp strangely back down Hyde Street.

In the Safeway lot, I slammed my door shut and started the car. But as I was pulling out, I saw the checker running across the lot toward me. I rolled down my window. A security lady stood right behind the checker.
“You need to come with me,” he said. Most of his fingers were curling into my car. I rolled up the window on his hands and he jumped back. He looked frightened and angry. And a little bit sad. I put my car into park.

“You need to come with me,” he yelled again. His voice wavered and his forehead was sweating.
I got out of the car and went with him. On the walk back to the store I asked him if my card was declined.
“Nope,” he said.
And then I remembered the employee in the fruit aisle who seemed to be following me to the banana section.
I wondered if they thought I was stealing. And if that whole conversation about Ol’ Dirty Bastard was an excuse to stall me so they could get the security wench.
There was a huge line at the checkstand. A couple college girls were standing there, looking at me like I’d just knocked over a bank. I pulled out my debit card.
“Are you gonna pay for our groceries, too?” one of the girls asked, flirting.
“Yes, but I’m not paying for that,” I said, pointing to her box of Tampons.
The security wench stood next to me scowling while the checker fumbled around with his cash register.
Finally, he printed out a receipt.
“There you go, Mr. Clark,” he said, smiling.

I looked at the receipt.

“But I’m not Mr. Clark,” I said.

“Are these your purchases?” he asked, pointing to the receipt. Fig Newtons, DayQuil, Raisin Bran, lettuce …
“Yeah,” I said.
“OK, I’m sorry, Mr. Clark.”
I wasn’t quite sure what happened. As I left the store and crossed back into the lot, a white truck with a McCain sticker on it’s bumper nearly ran me down. I jumped out of the way and watched it speed into the street. It was completely dark outside. A homeless man asked me for a quarter and I told him I didn’t have anything. I guess I was lying.

Here’s a weird phenomenon about seeing Bright Eyes live: There are bro dudes—like the kind of real beefy-ass bro dudes you’d see in a movie about fraternities –crying. But they’re not just crying. They’re angry crying. Rage weeping. Whatever. Take, for instance, when Conor Oberst started to strum the first bar of this song, “Poison Oak”:

Yes, it’s pretty song, but when the first few notes floated from the speakers, the bro dude right behind me turned to nobody in particular and yelled, “I’m about to tear up. I don’t give a fuck!” I half-expected him to take a wild swing at the beautiful notes floating above his head like monarch butterflies that were turning him into such a raging pussy. Charming, right? Perhaps, but not at all unique.

Right after this song:

I looked up and there’s a bro dude—the kind of bro dude who’s fat, but still wears tight shirts because in the right lighting his man boobs kind of still look like pectoral muscles—charging right at me with his fists clenched, “I fucking got emotional!” he proclaimed.

I had no idea about this phenomenon and I was speechless.

Anyway, the show was good. Bright Eyes did a ton of songs from their new album, The People’s Key, which is a heaping pile of shit. I heard in an interview that Oberst wanted to shed the stripped down folk thing he became famous for. And the result is this new wave, poppy form of blandness with a few disco breakdowns in the middle. It’s not pretty.
This is one of the more tolerable songs from that album:

Sure, there were parts that were cringeworthy, like when Oberst lifted up his shirt to show the screaming bitches his nipple, or when he stopped the music to rant incoherently about politics, “Like, Obama, is like, uh, not, like, uh, like, living up to, like, his promises, like, Guantanamo, like you guys are from Silicon Valley, right? Like, use your money to fuck over the tea party,” or some shit like that. It’s a good message, but I think the best thing you can do for the progressive cause is to shut the fuck up and strum your tunes.

It seems like most of the show was spent waiting around for the band to play songs from I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning. And when they did finally get around to those songs, Oberst sang the living shit out of them. There’s something about that wavering falsetto that lowers to a growling whisper that can reach into your chest, pull out your heart, hold it up to the moon and make you say, “HOLY FUCK, I’M FUCKING CRYING!”

I don’t remember where this post was going. I guess I’m just writing this so that I start posting again.

Some news: I have a book coming out. Here’s the cover:

I don’t know how my publisher got Jimmy Santiago Baca and Jose Montoya to say nice things about me, but I’m assuming he threatened them with physical violence. Which I’m all for.

Also, check out this video from HellaTV:

NOMENCLATURE featuring Josh Fernandez from HellaTV on Vimeo.

I don’t know why that didn’t embed the video, and that’s another reason I hate websites. They take ideas that are in my head, make them impossible to execute and then turn out half-assed and shitty looking.

My book will be available from R.L. Crow Publications on May 1. I’ll post the Amazon link when it’s up.

We know Julian Assange as the Internet activist/ founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website that’s most likely put a bounty on his head.

Speaking of Assange’s head, is it me or is he growing some of the strangest color hair known to Earth? Is that shit white, blonde, gray? What the fuck?

Anyway, Assange is arguably the most controversial man in the world because of his willingness and ability to lift the veil on some of the world’s most horrifying secrets, like his publication of the Afghan War documents (a collection of internal U.S. military logs from the War in Afghanistan) in July 2010.

But there’s one missing piece to the Assange puzzle.

Julian Assange: grey/white/blonde head

Assange is a master of high-profile leaks, but let’s see what happens when I leak all over him: Assange isn’t Assange at all. He’s James Dyson, inventor of the bladeless fan and the Dyson vacuum:

Busted, you pasty bitch.

To the Associated Press: I’ll take my paycheck in $1 bills (if you know what I mean).

Ugh, so many questions.

But instead of riveting photojournalism, I bring you some leftover shots that I forgot to put up a few months ago.

This is Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s son. He performed with the Wu-Tang Clan in place of his father, cuz his father’s dead. I don’t know his name. He probably doesn’t have one. ODB seems like the kind of guy who would forget to name his kid. It’d be funny if his name was Matt, though. But not that funny.

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This is Method Man. I have a lot of photography friends, nerds, who would tell me all about how this photo sucks and about how much better their photo would look if they brought their $90,000 Canon EOS ID with a lens made of unicorn retinas. Well, that’s what I used, too, assholes.

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This is A Tribe Called Quest. But I’m too pissed off at photography nerds to talk about a rap group. When I was little, nerds were different than they are now. Now, it’s cool to be a nerd, but when I was little, nerds were  drooling sociopaths who showed up to school in suits of armor and tried to probe girls with their wooden swords. That’s what David did, at least. One day, David showed up in a suit of armor and the next day he was gone. No one ever saw him again. The other day I saw a girl wearing an I Love Nerds shirt, but she was studying for a test at junior college. That’s like Justin Bieber claiming Crip. Leave it to popular culture to fuck up some pure shit, like nerds. And rap music. Ta da!

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This is Q-Tip, from A Tribe Called Quest–my favorite group of all time. Never mind their shitty albums, like the Love Movement and Beats, Rhymes and Life. Before rap died a miserable death, they were the shit. Now they’re older, getting fatter and not nearly as interesting, but Q-Tip and Pfife are like Sonny and Cher in my book. Do you know what’s insane, though? I was just looking around on Facebook and I found a kid I went to elementary school with back in Boston. I think we were in fourth grade when I saw him standing in front of his apartment. I was across the street, really far away, so I thought I would throw a rock at him. Just to scare him. So I found a rock and threw it. The rock hit him right in the center of his forehead, split his head open and he went to the hospital. He ended up getting like 10 stitches. I felt really bad. But I also felt a little bit good because of my impeccable aim. One step closer to becoming a ninja, I thought. Anyway, the dude is now a Hasidic Jew. Beard and everything. He looks really nice. Trip out, Facebook. Trip out.

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Snoop Dog. I don’t really give a shit about Snoop Dog.  I think he felt that vibe, though. I’m pretty sure he realized that people who really listen to music didn’t want to listen to hours of Snoop doing his bullshit pop songs. So for this performance, he performed Doggy Style in its entirety, which was really rad. If you remember, when Snoop first came out he was this little gangbanger who looked like a hungry-ass preying mantis. Now he’s just a parody of himself. From all the reports, Snoop wasn’t even a real Crip. He was just a scrawny weirdo who wanted to be in a gang. Which reminds me that I used to want to be in the Latin Kings. I knew a dude who was a Latin King and when I asked him if I could be in his gang he laughed and told me to go write a book. He called me a nerd. And then I thought of David, from elementary school, and how he wore armor and carried a sword that he used to probe chicks with. Man, that dude was cool. I wonder what he’s up to now.

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It’s come to my attention that I’ve won 2nd place in Sacramento News & Review’s annual Best of Sacramento Reader’s Choice awards.

First I’d like to say, hey, fuck you, readers. Would it have been so hard to propel me to the first place position? I mean, come on, Sacramento’s not that big of a city. How many people voted? 5? 6? I bet you I was an infant’s vote away from taking home the big one.

So, who, you ask, won the first place prize?

None other than the SN&R’s Cosmo Garvin.

Garvin’s a great dude and all, but, come on. The guy could benefit from a fact check or two. I mean, Garvin’s a 23-year-old Guatemalan kid who drives a Firebird to work. What does that tell you about his journalism talent?

Hm, that might be the wrong Cosmo Garvin. But, that’s not the point. The point is, well, there are two points.

The first point is “fuck you, readers,” which we already established.

And the second point is, how do you expect me to brag about how talented I am if I get second place in everything?

What else comes in second place in everything?

China?

Breaking news: China is stewing in its own pollution and everyone will be dead there soon.

Look, all I’m saying is that I don’t want to be the Serena to Cosmo Garvin’s Venus Williams.

Really?! He looks like a business-casual-Elvis wiping mustard off his chin!

So, why second? Is it that I only update my website once every five months? Fuck you!

Is it that I only write about things that are gay and/or the band Slayer? Fuck you!

I think that’s it.

By the way, if you were wondering, this is what a real journalist looks like (which is kind of like a sexy pterodactyl):