Heartfelt Apologies and Other Bullshit

What I'm Reading Right Fucking Now

2011-11-10T13:53:00.001-08:00

I'm currently reading Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore.

In case you were unaware of his genius, allow me to present to you the following passage, which is of course not owned by me, etc.

The Romans covered themselves with olive oil before they bathed, so if the wind was right or it was an especially hot day you could smell a Roman coming at thirty paces. Between the olive oil they bathed with and the garlic and dried paste of anchovies they ate with their barley, when the legions marched into battle it must have smelled like an invasion of pizza people. If they'd had pizzas back then, which they didn't.

Evocative, thought-provoking, synesthetic, and hilarious, all in part of one paragraph. Now that is good goddamn writing.

Getting By In the Great Recession, Vol. 3: Fun with facebox and other Intersites!

2011-11-01T14:22:00.000-07:00

Here at Heartfelt Apologies and Other Bullshit, we love us some facebox.

Yawn not, gentle reader; toss not aside your iPlop, your ePad, or other portable Webbernet mochean*. For you know not the DEPTH of our devotion to faceboxes! You have never felt the all-encompassing joy that can be yours when you give of your best to the MASTER! YOU CANNOT KNOW THIS INNER PEACE--

For YOU have not given your all to GAWD!

I haven't either, really. I have given my all (or rather, Mary's, since I remain a no-good turf-cutting half-shant jackeen narrowback with no more right to live on God's clean Earth than a pus-ferret) to our cable company. They, in turn, give me Intranebs, which come into the house through a special pipe. This pipe, in turn, is connected to the eWeb Reservoir**. (I'm pretty sure that there's an elaborate array of pulleys and tubes involved at some point.) Thanks to all these devices and machinations, I am able to keep in touch with my fellow human beings and all those other creatures that use the Internetty, like animals who have been taught to type, the cannibal hill-tribes of my homeland, and Teabaggers.

Why have we done this rash thing, you ask? Why have we chosen to keep in touch with the rest of the world only through "social networking Intersites" and "the Twatter"? Why, in the name of all that's holy, would we even CONSIDER giving up our beloved smartphones? WHAT THE FUCK, IN FACT, IS WRONG WITH US?!?!!

Well, the short answer is, we're poor as shit and something had to give.

The DVR was the first to go, and all the fun channels with it. Then it was the smartphones; $300/month is more than any other single bill (except the house payment and groceries--and some ~~utter goddamn extortionist horseshit~~ problems we've had with one of our utilities deciding to stick us with massive surcharges during peak consumption months). The one thing we could not, and will not, cut, is the Nettywebs.

Teh Webberhighway means more to me than ever before. When you ain't got a phone and you ain't got much gas to get around, facebox and bloggin' and all that mess become vital to your sanity. If I need to get ahold of someone, I use facebox or the i-mail. (If I need to wrech to git aholt of someone, I still do that the old-fashioned way, with my fists.) If I'm depressed--bloggery. If I'm amused--bloggery. If I'm bored, well, facebox again, or Panterest. (Put up pics of your favorite pants! It's Panterest!)

In fact, I keep facebox open pretty much all day, whether I'm using it or not. This way, Mary can reach me if she needs anything, or if she just wants to chat. (I don't hover by the computer all the time, though; I have house-husband duties to attend to, like unblocking THE POOPY CHAIR. So if you try to message me and I don't respond in a timely fashion, don't be offended. I'm probably off using Doktor WC Kolben or emptying THE CRAP-YURT.)

Hairy things commit unspeakable acts inside this yurt.

Since I do spend rather a lot of time on the facebox, I find myself noticing things that probably would make very little impact if I lived a more "normal" modern life. And, being my usual bitchy self, I can't NOT comment on them.

1. ENOUGH WITH THE "I'm Not Cussin'" BULLSHIT. What the fuck is wrong with these people? "ROFLMBO" is not a recognized Information Superwebnet acronym. The phrase you want is "Rolling On Floor Laughing My ASS Off". If your particular brand of idol-worshiping forbids "bad words", or you're so determined to prove that you're a perfect parent that you try to make complete strangers believe that you say "shucks" when you stub your toe in the dark, may I suggest to you that you simply use "ROFL" instead? "ROFLMBO" is shameless self-promotion. It proclaims to the world "I could have said a cuss...maybe even the a-word...but I didn't, because I'm moral like that." Thanks, there, we're all really impressed by your example. In fact, I was SO moved by your actions that I shall, henceforth, leave off saying cusses forever, in the hopes that one day I might be just as elevated as you are. Hey, can we start a local branch of the No Cussing Club? There's nothing I'd like better than to hang out with other like-minded, God-fearin' folks who are just appalled at all the profanity in the modern world. They didn't used to have that profanity in my Grandma's day, you know, not a bit of it!

My entire ass. Yes, I said ass, not "butt"! THE HORROR! You fucking pusillanimous dolt, you craven shit-goblin, you utter and complete taint! You are henceforth forbidden the use of Internettish slang until you can get the fuck over yourself. See you never.

2. SHARED FACEBOX ACCOUNTS. Oh, just fucking shoot me. Look, I have been married to the same wonderful woman for the last ten years. We dated for three years before that, and have been inseparable since at least late 1997. We continually surprise one another with new things to talk about after all this time, and new ways of looking at the world and all the bad-ass (sorry, "bad-butt") things in it. In fact, you could describe our relationship as one long conversation that started one day on a couch (oddly enough, said sofa was in an alley just off Chestnut Street). That conversation has never ended, and it will not end until one or the other of us dies. I love her more than anyone in the world except my son.

The thought of sharing a facebox account with one another makes us both want to puke.

This has nothing to do with her, or me, or our relationship. It doesn't even have anything to do with our friends (most of our closest friends are shared friends). For some reason, the whole idea just rubs us the wrong way. Just because you're married, or in love, or in lust--whatever--it doesn't mean that you become a colony organism. Sure, I've been part of "Rob & Mary" for a third of my life, but we have our own individual heads, and they each have their own semi-independent brains inside! (Well, Mary's does. I have a primitive little knot at the top of my spine.)

What, exactly, is the motivation for creating one of these "Dipshit&Ratfucker McAsscrack" accounts? Is it one of those "total honesty" things? You think that if you share a password that means your significant other won't use the facebox for clandestine hookups? Are you afraid that all the skanks you fucked in middle school are going to see that picture of you in Gatlinburg, the one where you've got on your fanny pack and your new Crocs, and they're gonna swoon, and start sending you indecent messages just because they failed to see that your status is listed as "married" on your info page? Is it something the megachurch recommended? Are you just lazy as shit? What the fuck?!

3. FARTVILLE. I have previously expressed my opinion on this subject. For those of you who might have missed this rant, please send the Supermation Infohighweb version of an SASE to my iMail, and I will forward you a copy.

Tune in next time for more e-Fun, CompuLaffs, and other stuff that's just plain InterNUTTY!

*Mochean: if you don't know what this is, you don't listen to enough Johnny Cash. I recommend "Delia's Gone" as an excellent point of reference.

**eWeb Reservoir: the huge pool of data that lies in the lowest caverns of your cable company's underground bunker, under very heavy guard. This pool's composition is a CORPORATE SECRET, but it is believed to be a lattice-work of completely pointless status updates hopelessly entangled with impenetrable nests of Korean panty-porn sites.

More Stuff About Poop (and the Waltons)

2011-10-30T21:45:00.000-07:00

You know, now that I’ve posted that last bit about THE POOPY CHAIR, it makes me wonder why there isn’t more attention devoted to the comic potential of crap-fouled pipes on TV sitcoms. I mean, this is exactly the sort of thing the Waltons never talked about last thing of a evenin' before they participated in their three-hour bedtime ritual of naming one another until they went mad. Well, except for that one time John, Sr. came home at 4 AM ripped to the tits on rotgut and some morphine he'd bought off Red Turner. Remember that one? Dear ol' Dad shat into the sink and blocked it clean shut with his opiated leavings, causing the dishwater to overflow the next morning, and he blamed it on John-Boy and beat his ass with a belt, saying he was such a lazy good-for-nothing piece of shanty Irish shit that he'd let his whole family drown rather than clean out the pipes like he'd been told to, and yes, he was shanty Irish, Pa hadn't even been in town from winter '15 to February '16, and he could count. It wasn't Pa's fault that Ma couldn't keep her skirt down whenever one of those dumb Paddys came around with a sob story and a half-pint of Jamesons'. Hell, John-Boy's real daddy could have been any one of two or three dozen dirty good-for-nothing Micks who weren't smart enough to take down their pants before they pissed.

And then John-Boy looked in the mirror and realized that he really was a half-pogue bastard, and he ran off to join the Army so he could get killed and hide his shame from the world. Yeah, anyway, on that one they did briefly talk about pipes clogged up with shit right at the end, when Mary Ellen remarked that in all the hullaballoo about John-Boy being a no-good turf-cutting half-shant jackeen narrowback, no one had remembered to pull the turd out of the sink. (They eventually made Jason do it, which is why he caught cholera and sickened half the town before dying, alone, in a shack outside of Richmond where no one knew him, which is also why he never lived to see the halfwit son he'd sired on his own sister Erin*.)

That sure was a good episode. End of season 4, I think. I always wondered why people made such a fuss about All in the Family being controversial when on the same network you had gritty stuff like this broadcast every week.

*According to Camille Paglia’s Television and Sexuality: The Apollonian/Dionysian Disconnect in American TV Characters of the 1970s, the name “Erin”, being the Gaelic name for “Ireland”, is an encoded message to the viewer that Mrs. Walton had, once again, been screwing the shanty Irish at the time of Erin’s conception. Paglia is said to have hated the show, but that didn't stop her from devoting 50,000 words (mostly rude ones) to it in her still-unpublished behemoth of a first doctoral dissertation.

Getting By In the Great Recession, Vol. II: The Thing What Come From the Poopy Chair

2011-10-27T13:44:00.000-07:00

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS IMMATURE TOILET HUMOR AND IS NOT RECOMMENDED FOR FAMILY VIEWING

When last we visited the world of Heartfelt Apologies and Other Bullshit, the presence of a malign spirit had been detected in the house...

The Strapping Son is going to KILL me for this one when he gets older.

As you discovered during our adventures last time, my heir tends to eat a great deal of meat and flour paste. White flour paste, that is, with cheese. (This may or may not indicate that he has been possessed the hell out of by the loa of Papa Damballa--see yesterday's post.) After all, he is only seven, and seven-year-old boys aren't big fans of vegetables. By the way, I don't want to hear how you managed to convince your five-year-old to eat Tamil vegetarian curries, or whatever, because I have tried EVERYTHING on this kid, and nothin' works.

Despite his less-than-ideal food customs, my son is pretty damn healthy. He has a touch of eczema, and allergies, but his years in day-care and the public schools have boosted his immune system wonderfully. I mean, just look at him.

Yeah, he does kind of look like Kurt Cobain.

There is one thing, though. For those of you who studied "science" in Kansas or were homeschooled, it might interest you to know that the human guttyworks requires a little outside help to efficiently do its job, which is stoolin'. This help comes in the form of "roughage", or "dietary fiber". Eat enough "fiber", and you'll be as regular as clockwork. Eat too much, and you'll piss out your ass, as they say in certain branches of the armed forces. Eat too little of this "fiber", and you'll be havin' trouble crankin' out the cables, as Mr Anderson used to say on Beavis and Butt-head.

Eat NO "fiber" AT ALL and you'll visit horror, destruction, and the very foetor of the Pit upon your household, your municipal sewer system, and the sanity of the man whose job it is to deal with THINGS WHAT COME FROM THE POOPY CHAIR.

Because you see, even the most "fiber"-free individual fecatory units will eventually make their way out of the guttyworks. If this happens when you're outside, or on a bus, or in the Vatican, or in a spacesuit complete with space-diaper, it won't matter all that much. If, however, you are in close contact with THE POOPY CHAIR when the "fiber"-free individual fecatory units begin their reeking march toward an appointment with destiny, the aforementioned IFUs may just decide that they like the interior of THE POOPY CHAIR so much that they never, ever want to leave.

Never, never ever, never ever, never ever-- I'm sorry Ms. Jackson, I blocked your looooo....

Space Ranch (our fantastic mid-century-modern home that we're honest to God going to fix up in period-appropriate style one of these days) has, like so many houses 60 or more years of age, very narrow pipes. Thanks to our small pipes, every drain in this house has blocked up at one time or another. We used to have a home warranty, which meant we could get the services of a plumber at a discount. Alas, those days are long gone. It could be worse; I've learned a lot about dislodging the vilest of substances from vital pieces of plumbing, since I had no choice. (The Interwebs helped me discover all sorts of fascinating things having to do with recalcitrant sinks and toilets. Some of them were even on home repair websites.)

So, this is what you do with a naughty POOPY CHAIR.

1. Determine the nature of the problem. In this case it was pretty straightforward, since the Strapping Son informed me of the blockage right after it happened.

2. Begin to swear vigorously and with great imagination. I think my remark at this point was "Motherfucking goddamn sumbitchin' piece-of-shit cocksucking whore of a toilet", or something like that.

3. Go to the kitchen and put the kettle on. Yeah, I'm serious. You are going to want some tea (probably with bourbon in it) after you're done, or when the gagging has become so bad that you have to leave before you add a layer of vomit to the horrid brew in THE POOPY CHAIR. But that's not the main reason for putting the kettle on. One of your allies in taming THE POOPY CHAIR is hot water just under boiling temperature.

4. Wait on the kettle. Check Pinterest and facebox, let the dog out for the three hundred and seventy-fifth time that day, prepare teacup. VERY IMPORTANT: light a scented candle or stick of incense and place it on the toilet tank or sink at this time.
If you're feeling squeamish, proceed to step 4(a) before continuing.

4(a). Fetch a do-rag or scarf. Saturate it with cologne or perfume. Keep this in your pocket until you reach step 5, at which point you'll want to tie this around your mouth and nose, Western-movie-bandit fashion.

5. Pour tea, set timer. Proceed with all dispatch to THE POOPY CHAIR. Pour remaining contents of kettle into THE POOPY CHAIR. Unfortunately, you're going to have to look inside it, because otherwise you're gonna wind up pouring near-boiling water on your feet. (Reminds me of something my college roommate's really stupid girlfriend did once...) Smack the lid down on that sumbitch and LEAVE! LEAVE NOW! Shut the door behind you.

6. Wash hands. Wait on timer to go off, finish preparing tea. Drink some of it. In my case, go outside and have a cigarette to calm nerves and put off the dreadful things that are about to happen.

7. Fetch disposable vinyl gloves. (Don't waste your dish gloves on this.) Replace scented biohazard mask (if using) or pull shirt over lower half of face, like you used to do in school when someone committed rectal bioterrorism in class. (I'm talking about YOU, Unterborn.) Proceed to the indoor privy.

8. Got those gloves on? If you don't, put them on now. Approach THE POOPY CHAIR, speaking softly and calmly to it, so that it won't bite you, gore you, or (Gods forbid) vomit. Lift the lid. If you're really lucky, like "I go to Vegas and come home with more money than I had when I arrived" lucky, the hot-water treatment may have done the trick all on its own, and the bowl will be empty. If so, squirt some Terlet Duck up in there, give it a few swipes with the Unmentionable Brush, and consider yourself fortunate. Go buy a lottery ticket. If, however, THE POOPY CHAIR is still in a revolting condition, proceed to step 9.

9. Fetch Doktor WC Kolben. (Thanks to Google Translate for this one. It's pronounced "Vee-Tzee Coalben". Of course a toilet plunger would have a German name. If you need to ask why, you are a happy innocent who knows nothing of the Perversions of the Axis Powers.) Dr WC Kolben's methods of persuasion are usually sufficient to convince all but the most recalcitrant of POOPY CHAIRS to behave themselves. Insert Dr WC Kolben into THE POOPY CHAIR. A few good, hard thrusts and your POOPY CHAIR should be clear. Still nothin'? Proceed to step 10.

10. Well, fuck. Repeat steps 5 through 9. If you have still not achieved complete dominion over THE POOPY CHAIR, proceed to step 11.

11. If you have a septic tank, you should already be in possession of a wonderful substance called "Rid-X", or some other form of bacterial/enzymatic agent that likes to eat crap. It will eat crap even if the crap is (relatively) fresh and not in a septic tank. If you don't have any of this, go buy some. (If, like us, you are broke-ass, you may proceed to step 11(a).) Pour some Rid-X into THE POOPY CHAIR. Close the lid, close the door to the indoor privy, and put some police tape over the door. If you only have the one indoor privy, now may be the time to inform your household that they're going to have to shit in the backyard. Hell, the dog does it, it won't kill them. Or the whole family can take part in a fun project: making a honey bucket!

11(a). Get some baking soda, 1-2 cups of it. Pour this into THE POOPY CHAIR. You'd think that this will help with the stench. Yeah, no. Because next, you're going to pour vinegar in there. Yup, you heard me. This is the poor man's version of the Rid-X treatment. Pour in the vinegar slowly, because when the vinegar and baking soda meet, they're gonna froth all over the place. I probably should have mentioned that you ought to be wearing your improvised biohazard mask when you do this.

12. Wait 8-12 hours.

13. Be sure you're wearing the biohazard mask, liberally replenished with cologne, before you go back to THE POOPY CHAIR. Especially if you had to use step 11(a), because in that case you are going to be greeted with the delightful, appetite-enhancing scent of pickled shit. (I haven't been able to go near a pickle since the last time I used this technique.) Mask firmly in place, you must now resume the use of Dr WC Kolben. You should be done now. If, however, you're STILL stumped, and you've still not gotten enough money to call the plumber, there's only one thing for it...

14. Doktor Klempner Schlange, also known as "the plumber's snake", must now be employed. I own one of these (problems with THE POOPY CHAIR are common enough around here that we bought one after the home warranty expired.) If you don't have one, ask around; one of the neighbors will, or one of your friends. They may even be kind enough to show you how to use it (don't fuckin' count on it). Dr Klempner Schlange is a very, very unpleasant thing to have to use; you are, after all, willingly forcing multiple feet of flexible wire into a wad of turds. And you're gonna have to clean the good Doktor when you're done with him. I suggest Scrubbing Bubbles.

If all that didn't help, and you still can't afford a plumber, my advice is to burn the bathroom if you can do so without endangering the rest of the house. Since this probably isn't an option, you might consider barricading the door to the indoor privy from the outside. Because if you don't, late at night, THIS might happen.

Special thanks to Roman Dirge for inspiring the title of the article.

Go watch his super-cool video above to learn more about

THINGS FROM THE POOPY CHAIR.

Getting By In the Great Recession, Vol I: The Houseboy, the Gourmand, and the Loa

2011-10-25T21:27:00.000-07:00

In case any of you haven't heard, that whole "I'm gonna open a wine shop and kick the local liquor industry's ass six ways from Sunday" thing didn't work out so well. Sometime when I'm feeling less bouncy and happy, I'll tell you all about it. The miniaturized version is, we ran out of cash, and the fucking sorry-ass banks wouldn't give us a penny, so we had to close (after we'd been arrested, sued, humiliated, and forced to file for bankruptcy). I'd already been fired from my previous job when I started Top Shelf, so I couldn't go back to Chuck's even if I wanted to. Starting in June, I joined the ranks of millions of my fellow Americans and started hunting for a job.

Yeah, about that. It turns out that when your last job description is "owner and CEO", and you're 35, people tend to assume that you're going to be the kind of arrogant shit-stirrer who asks for things like raises and vacation time. You don't get a lot of call-backs.

And when I say "not a lot", I mean "none".

I couldn't even get hired at ~~AFNI~~ this call center that's well-known for hiring literally anyone, even if the applicant is functionally illiterate, pregnant with pygmy marmosets, and missing their entire head. They actually sent me a rejection email. It was a real kick in the dick, for the one second of white-hot rage I experienced before relief set in at realizing that I wouldn't have to work there.

I had submitted over thirty job applications by this time. After a week or so recuperating from a grand mal cat bite and its attendant tetanus shot, I got diagnosed with degenerative disc disease (yet ANOTHER topic for a future post) and decided that maybe I should just back off the old job-search protocol for a while. It was sometime during this period that I realized I already had a job, albeit an unpaid one:

I am a full-time stay-at-home-dad. (I prefer the term "houseboy", but when you say that in response to the question "So what do you do?" from one of your spouse's co-workers, it tends to breed unfortunate rumors.)

If it wasn't for the fact that we're now poor as fucking church mice, this job would be ideal. I not only have time to write, I actually am writing. (Shocking, I know; you probably thought I cribbed all this stuff off the Blogess.) I had a flexible schedule at my last three jobs, so it's been my job for years now to pick up the Strapping Son from school, and run errands, and pick up incidental groceries for dinner. I like keeping the house tidy--well, as tidy as is possible with a seven-year-old kid, three cats, and a dire (or "diarrhea") wolf all making messes at the same time.

The elusive dire wolf in repose. Note stain to his left. He made that using only his ass.

When it comes to food, not much has really changed there either, except that now I pack lunch for Mary before she goes to work, and I do all of the meal-planning. I've always done the vast majority of the cooking, and usually I really enjoy it. With that said--if you don't have kids, you can't possibly appreciate just how much ~~suicide-inducing frustration~~ fun it is to find new and inventive ways to get nutrients other than "starch", "fat", and "processed bushmeat paste in the form of patties and/or nuggets" down their vile little cake-holes. The Strapping Son, despite his age and my best efforts, still eats ONLY the following:

Fruit (bananas, Granny Smith apples, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, and grapes. This is the only reason his guts still work, as you will see from the rest of the list.)

Maruchan Ramen (beef flavor. Only.)

Kraft Mac and Cheese (spiral or original)

Velveeta Shells and Cheese (known as"jack and cheese", to distinguish it from regular ol' mac & cheese)

Meat (literally anything except fish, as long as it hasn't got sauce or other adulterants on it)

Spaghetti Bolognese (he eats the spaghetti--no other shapes need apply--and the meat from the sauce, with lots of Parmesan on top. Vegetables are plucked from the painstakingly homemade sauce and surreptitiously given to the dog.)

Pizza (pepperoni, no exceptions)

Mashed Potatoes (instant ONLY, since according to the Strapping Son, homemade mashed potatoes "have beans in them". This is a reference to the little bits of unmashed potato that occur in even the most carefully whipped homemade batch. Instant potatoes are called "taters no beans". See what I mean about HOW MUCH FUCKING FUN this is?)

Rice with butter (white rice and Brummel and Brown, actually)

American-style chicken and slippery dumplings (only Cracker Barrel's, and the homemade ones Mary constructs for my chicken soup; again, no vegetables are harmed by the Strapping Son in the consumption of this meal, even though our version contains onions, carrots, celery and parsley.)

Grilled cheese sandwiches (he does consume whole-wheat bread, thank Ceres)

Eggo Nutri-grain blueberry waffles (with real maple syrup or NOTHIN'. He may be picky, but he's still my son. We don't fuck around with no "pancake syrup".)

Scrambled eggs (when made in the French style, whipped together with milk or cream and cooked only until they're just done. Like I said, he's my kid.)

Biscuits (homemade, frozen, Cracker Barrel's, KFC's, whatever, bring 'em on.)

Various junk foods and/or sweets that all kids eat (ice cream, Goldfish crackers, and anything from a fast-food restaurant so long as it is PLAIN PLAIN my God PLAIN, but with Imperial ass-tonnes of ketchup.)

You will note that the VAST majority of these foods contain no dietary fiber of any kind, and that they are either white in color, made from white flour, or both. (And they're ALL washed down with milk.) We call the Strapping Son's list of acceptable foods "Papa Damballa's White Foods Buffet"-- according to his devotees, the Vodou loa known as Papa Damballa is much pleased by offerings of white foods such as rice, eggs, sugar, white bread, etc. (How do we know these things? My sister has lived in Haiti for almost thirty years, and we all get presents with vodou Vévés on them at Christmas.) Unfortunately, it seems all too likely that this devotion to the White Foods has caused the presence of Papa Damballa--or worse, some far more malign spirit-- to descend upon my son. I only discovered this when certain untoward and flesh-creeping occurrences began to plague this house...(Oh, come on, how the hell was I supposed to know he'd been possessed? Have you ever seen a seven-year-old on a sugar high?! How could I tell the difference?)

Tune in tomorrow for a tale of turgid tumescence and twisted terlet terror!

2011-10-22T11:31:00.000-07:00

Hey true believers: go check out my buddy Jon Treadway's poetry in this review from The Single Hound, a badass poetry journal from right here in Kentucky. Jon's a Bluegrass State prophet with a glass of Four Roses in his hand, a Bible on the bedside table and a woman of unknown character in his arms.

FUCK YOUR GODDAMN SHITTY-ASS RECIPE!, Vol. I

2011-09-19T09:29:00.000-07:00

Welcome, gentle readers, to the first installment of our Interwebs serial, Fuck Your Goddamn Shitty-Ass Recipe!

Before we begin, I'd like to say a few words about the genesis of this column. Fuck Your Goddamn Shitty-Ass Recipe! came about because of the Internets in general, and the Intersite called "Pinterest". Please take a moment to click this Interlink if you are somehow unaware of the Pinterest.

DUDE, IT'S ONLY LIKE THE COOLEST THING CURRENTLY ON THE INTERNETS NOT INVOLVING CAT PICTURES. Wait, it has piles of cat pictures. But you see, that's the genius of the thing. You can post every single got-damn Maru video you own. You can pin Lolcats until your eyes bleed from the unutterable cuteness. You might consider doing a few non-cat-related boards, just to keep people interested, but you don't have to if you don't want to. I pin whatever the fuck I feel like!

And so does everyone else. It's digital democracy for the visual thinker. You literally throw shit up against the wall and see what sticks, and categorize said shit to make it easier for others to locate. I could go on for hours about what the hell it all means, but you get the idea. It's like Imgur with organization.

The thing is, digital democracy has its price. For every cool thing I see on Pinterest, I see hundreds and hundreds and HUNDREDS of things that are lame, passe, pointless, tasteless, or all of the above. For every picture of Foster the People, there are three dozen Anne Geddes photographs. You know, that bitch:

"OOOOOH! Isn't that cute? How does she come up with this stuff!?"

Oh, shut the fuck up. I almost used Thomas Kinkade as my example, and if I had done that you'd be looking at one of his so-called "masterpieces" right now. Plus there would be vomit on your keyboard.

Most people don't have any particular artistic taste to speak of, or if they do, it's bad. This is not aesthetic theory, or elitism, or even a lament. It's just the truth. And while I despise the Geddes, the Kinkade, that other hack Kim Anderson, etc, the good thing about pins of their, er, "work" is that I can instantly avoid them. I see Kim-fucking-Anderson, I ain't clickin' that shit. I see some stupid office-humor truism that was tired out before the first Bush administration superimposed on a stock photo of a farm, I'm not wasting my time looking at it. I will, of course, mock it in my own time, but it doesn't drive me crazy.

I could let it all pass by me if it wasn't for the fucking food pins.

Everyone eats. And in America, at this stage of our development, we have more cooking and dining options than all of the other cultures of the world, throughout history, combined. In general I'm extremely pleased with the culinary Renaissance this country has undergone in just the last few decades. We drink more wine than beer; we know that "Chinese food" is a meaningless grab-bag term; we can buy good brands of pink peppercorns, French grey sea salt, and handmade Italian pastas at fucking TJ Maxx. Nobody gave a wet shit about Argentinian steakhouses twenty years ago. Now we've got 'em in Nashville. Right here in Bowling Green you can buy all of the ingredients for an authentic Thai green curry for less than $15 at the Asian market. Hell, you can buy all of the ingredients at Kroger, too, for something more like $20.

That is, if you're the sort of person who actually likes to eat good food. Everybody else is still doing this shit.

The worst offenders are the people who somehow have both appalling taste in food, yet enough aesthetic sense to make the pictures they take of their Ritz-Cracker Rat Bake look appetizing. Hiding under the nom de guerre of "Autumn Casserole", resplendent in a white ceramic dish with fluted sides, it entices me, and I click on the pin, follow it to its original home (normally someone's FUCKING AWFUL blog), and there I find that I have been deceived.

Then there are the people who have appalling taste in food, and don't care. (Their blogs are awful, too, but slightly more honest.) I can understand that we aren't all alike, and that not everyone has the benefit of growing up in a family full of cooks as I did. Some will never develop good cooking skills, or don't care to devote the time. I get all that. It doesn't make up for the fact that these people eat GARBAGE, and are determined to help other people eat garbage.

I repeat, however: this is digital democracy. You have the right to like shitty food. You have the right to advertise to the world via Pinterest that you like shitty food. You even have the right to explain to me in the description of your pin that I will also like this shitty food, usually because making it is "easy".

I, however, have the right to remark that another thing that's "easy" is your mom.

And she'd probably taste better than most of that glued-together MESS that you're ladling out of your Crock-Pot.

The Crock-Pot is going to feature very heavily in Fuck Your Goddamn Shitty-Ass Recipe!. It has the distinction of being one of the most misused kitchen appliances in history. Yes, I own one. Yes, I have used it, many times. It's excellent for making soups, stews, bean dishes, and other things that require long, slow, even-temperatured cooking-- because it's a fucking slow cooker.

It is NOT a magical goddamn ROBOT-WIZARD HYBRID OF THE CULINARY ARTS that can do any kitchen task you assign to it. Sure, with enormous amounts of tweaking, you can get it to produce weird facsimile versions of all kinds of dishes. Such as the following entry, today's Star Prize winner:

Muffins!

No, you didn't hallucinate that.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but as long as you have muffin mix, oil, eggs, a muffin tin and some of those DARLING little fluted paper cups, you may in fact craft delicious muffins in your very own electrical or gas oven. All told you'll spend no more than five minutes on prep and about twenty on baking. Brain-dead people with hooks for hands can do this.

But why do it the old-fashioned way when you can enjoy the benefits of TECHNOLOGY? Thanks to the tireless research conducted by the Society of Crock-Pot Fetishists, you can use the wonders of modern science to create delicious muffins--in JARS! (You'll have to use jars, actually, because even the tinfoil muffin tins won't fit in the Crock-Pot unless you cut them into bits.) But wait--the Crock-Pot is so revolutionary, so INNOVATIVE, that the Muffin of Tomorrow is actually EIGHT TIMES LESS EFFICIENT than its oven-baked predecessor! Now those pesky muffins will stay put--in the CROCK-POT--while you use your newfound free time to SPREAD THE GOSPEL OF THE CROCK-POT across all the Internets!

Seriously, something is really, really wrong with the logic involved in devising a way to make instant food in a slow cooker, rather than just doing it as indicated on the package. For that matter, you could make muffins from scratch in way less than two and a half hours. Which is why, today, we say to you, Crock Pot Muffins:

Fuck your goddamn shitty-ass recipe!

Top Ten Children's Books NOT Recommended by the ALA

2011-09-09T14:59:00.000-07:00

Sorry this blog fizzled out after a couple of entries. It's been a crazy year.

With that said, I've been going through some Sterilite containers that I've never touched since we moved almost two years ago. I found a bunch of my old journals (oh, the humanity...) and I'm pleased to say that, sorted out of the self-pitying crap and discarded story ideas, I did find something that made me laugh: an old list of made-up children's book titles that once graced the whiteboard in the bathroom at my very first job.

Years ago, I worked in our local mall bookstore, B. Dalton. This was, at the time, a division of the Barnes and Noble Corporation. Let me rephrase that; we were the RED-HEADED STEPCHILD of B&N. The red-headed stepchild that lived under the porch and was told not to come out during the day, lest it be seen by the neighbors.

It was my first retail job, and it was a VERY good introduction to the Horrible World of Retail. I have literally hundreds of stories from those four amusing and terrifying years, which I will relate from time to time in the future. But for now, you should know that the employees were a pretty interesting crew, and I still have close contact with at least three of my former co-workers (Mary Jo, Lucile, and Nathan...excuse me, Dr. Stice.) Like most intelligent people working in a job that offered limited pay and benefits, and which required enormous amounts of both mental and physical labor plus the ability to deal with a customer base that almost defies description, we developed into some of the most cynical smart-asses you've ever seen in your life.

Working in the book trade quickly disabuses you of the notion that the reading public are a bunch of nerdy bookworms. In fact, the opposite is usually true. While millions of Americans don't read, the ones that do tend to read utter, steaming, vile, ill-written CRAP. I would estimate that over 50% of all people who read for pleasure NEVER read anything more intellectually challenging than a Harlequin romance. It's goddamn frustrating when you're a book lover, to stand in a space filled with fantastic books from all over the world, books like 1984 and Dune and Sense and Sensibility and The Great Gatsby, and to realize that those books are the ones that sit on the shelves, gathering dust until the day they're sent back to the publisher for credit or, worse, their covers are stripped off and the remaining disfigured book is THROWN IN THE TRASH. Meanwhile, the True Crime, "Self-Help", and Bodice-Ripper sections empty out every month, carried off by slavering twats who pat themselves on the back for being "readers" and think themselves mighty fine.

Even among those who read good things, there's an enormous reliance on the opinons of others when choosing what to read, or what to buy as a gift. We happened to be working in books at the very, very beginning of that cultural phenomenon of the '90s that must be written in capital letters to give a sense of its importance: OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB. By and large, we approved of it. It got people reading, there were some very good books on the list, and it definitely sent sales way, way up. But so many of the people who participated in it didn't want to read anything that Her Winfreyness hadn't recommended. We'd suggest things similar to the items the customers had purchased in the past (for example, if someone had read and enjoyed Song of Solomon, I'd invariably pitch The Color Purple. And was rewarded, every time, with blank stares and occasional outright hostility. After all, what did I know. Was I OPRAH? Obviously NOT.)

Another source of information that people relied heavily on was the American Library Association's list of Notable Children's Books. Now, don't get me wrong, this is an invaluable resource and the titles are usually fantastic. But again, people who based the purchases on the list tended to be AMAZINGLY resistant to suggestions of other, equally good children's books. Whether it was our frustration at this behavior, our general stress, or just pure cussedness, one late Saturday night, when we were packing returns long after the mall had closed, we came up with our OWN list of children's books...a list that would never make the Notable category, no matter how well they sold. This was directly inspired by a David Letterman Top Ten list from the early '90s (I'll dig it up and post it as a comment later) but on the whole, I think ours were better.

Here you go. Enjoy...I think. And yes, you will note that there are 13 titles, not ten. So sue me. We were tired and getting giggly, and couldn't be stopped.

TOP TEN CHILDREN'S BOOKS NOT RECOMMENDED BY THE ALA:

13. Tell Us About Sex, Amelia Bedelia!
12. Frog and Toad Are Domestic Partners
11. The Little Engine That Couldn't
10. Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame Scratch and Sniff
9. Clifford Gets Fixed
8. Goosebumps #3528: "It Came From the Colostomy Bag"
7. Everyone Poops (the Pop-Up Edition)
6. Quacker Meets Mr Decoy and Mr Hunter
5. The Klutz Kid's Book of Knives
4. Baby's First Satanic Bible
3. The Magic School Bus in a Full-Scale Nuclear Exchange
2. The Berenstain Bears Learn About Incest
1. Curious George and the Big Bag of Crack

NOSTALGIA: The Purgative of the Masses

2011-08-01T11:14:00.000-07:00

I CANNOT FUCKING STAND IT when utterly clueless people stand around and pontificate about how things were better back in (pick an era, any era, that isn't now). Although Republicans and fundamentalist Christians are almost all guilty of this, they aren't the only ones. Even the young and idealistic are guilty of it. Take, for example, my own generation (the "13th Generation", "GenX", etc.). Raised on a steady diet of TV movies, Nick at Night, and high school history classes taught by coaches, a great many of my compatriots are guilty of wallowing in that most useless of emotions--NOSTALGIA.

Nostalgia is STUPID. Nostalgia for any era inevitably includes a TOTAL WHITEWASH of that era, if you lived in it, and COMPLETE IGNORANCE of the era if you did not actually experience it. For instance: when I was a senior in high school, our beloved English teacher, Linda Elmore, broke her arm in about six hundred places and had to be on sick leave for several weeks. Her replacement...well, she was a nice lady, and she really liked me, but her assignments were somewhat, let's say, less inspired. The only one you need concern yourself with was entitled "The Good Old Days", and we had to pick a favorite period in history and write a three-page paper on why we liked that period and what it had to recommend it.

I'm a complete, unashamed, slavering history buff. At the time, I had been reading extensively about the Edwardians, so I dashed off some fluff about the endless round of parties, and modern art, and all the cool new technology they had (movie theaters, telephones, the beginning of radio, improvements in medicine, etc.) I made the entirely unoriginal point that people in 1900 had more in common with the modern era than they did with people in 1800. I also made it very clear that I would only want to live in the Edwardian era if I was violently rich, because this was in the days before Progressivism, FDR, and LBJ, and BEING POOR WAS BASICALLY A DEATH SENTENCE.

I was also the teacher's assistant in this class, so it fell to me to proofread all the papers except my own. I wasn't exactly expecting a lot, but OH MY GOD you would not believe some of the UTTER GARBAGE that I had to endure. This was not my first experience with the utter pig-ignorance of Nostalgia--but it was the worst experience-- like being DROWNED IN A SEWER FULL OF THE STUFF.

Item: there were eight different papers about the 1950s. EIGHT. Four by guys, four by girls. AND EVERY SINGLE GODDAMN ONE OF THEM USED A SINGLE "PRIMARY SOURCE": you guessed it, Happy Days. Yes. THAT SHOW.

Red Scare? What's that?

Uber-conformism and the "Good Consumer" society? Huh?

Jim Crow? Wasn't he in Dumbo?

Duck and Cover drills? Oh, was that like Black & Decker?

Euuuuugh. God. No, no mention of "any of that boring stuff"...but Oh my GAWD, the SOCK HOPS! Poodle squirts! (Sorry, 'skirts'.) MALTEDS! CARS! THA MOTHERFUCKING FONZ! Everything, everything, EVERYTHING was so fucking peachy back then! And it was an INNOCENT TIME TOO, did you know that part? Nobody took drugs (evidently the Beatniks and William S. Burroughs and EVERYBODY'S MOM WHO WAS ON VALIUM were figments of our imaginations). Nobody got knocked up because nobody even knew what sex was (teen pregnancies in the US peaked in 1957, go look it up). And there wasn't all this VIOLENCE (as long as you were white and suburban anyway...oh, wait, I forgot about The Outsiders). I went home that day and reported all of this to my, at the time, 70-year-old mother, who laughed mirthlessly, looked me straight in the eye, and said "Honey, the Fifties SUCKED."

So, that was bad enough, but wait! It gets even better! Another seven people wrote about, yep, you guessed it: THE CIVIL WAR. (This time it was six girls and only one guy.) It's every American's favorite period of history for no discernible reason! This was about four years after Ken Burns' film, ALL NINE HUNDRED AND FIFTY HOURS OF IT, had aired on PBS, so the topic was still pretty fresh in everyone's minds. Not, mind you, that any of my classmates had watched the damn thing. They HAD, however, seen Gone With the Wind. Theoretically, at least.

One of the papers mentioned the fashions of the period as a reason for loving it: "Women wore hoop skirts(sic) and pretty bonnets and lace gloves." OK, sure, they did. They couldn't put on any of it without at least six slaves to help, and they wore nine pounds of underwear all year round even in the South, but 8 out of 10 for effort on that one. Male fashion, however, had been less rigorously observed: "Men wore stockings, and such." Uh. No. Firstly, that ain't much of a sentence, and secondly, knee-breeches and silk stockings were already forty or fifty years out of date by the 1860s. Did you see Rhett Butler in knee-breeches? OF COURSE YOU DIDN'T. He, and every other male in the period, was clad in ill-cut wool, with those god-awful checked trousers and beards you could lose a badger in.

"It was a more genteel time." I don't even pretend to know what that means. I think she was saying that people had enough time to eat gigantic multi-course meals and loll around on chaise longues drinking mint juleps (because of the MILLIONS OF HUMAN PACK ANIMALS they fucking OWNED, who did all the cooking and cleaning and ass-wiping). Or maybe she means that people had "better morals and manners"...you hear that one a lot when the sadly misinformed get up on their hind legs and talk about history. Personally, I have NO desire to live in an era when everyone continually pretends that they NEVER, EVER shit, piss, fart, or vomit, to say nothing of their attitudes about sex: no one ever has sex, women are impregnated mysteriously (and chastely!), and NO ONE EVER EVER EVER RAPES THE SLAVES, despite the fact that in the real world, 90% of the slave children at Tara would have been obviously half-white and LOOKED EXACTLY LIKE MR O'HARA.

Sadly, this problem seems only to have grown with time. Go into any Wal-Mart or "Christian" bookstore in the country, and there is--I shit you not--a WHOLE SECTION of fiction books devoted to...are you sitting down?--AMISH ROMANCE. My wife calls 'em "Bonnet-Rippers". Apparently, MILLIONS of people think there's something romantic about living in a community of hairy German-speaking yokels who abuse their women, do tooth surgery with hammers, and HAVE SEX THROUGH A SHEET WITH A HOLE IN IT (you can't make this stuff up!) 'Cause it must be ROMANTIC with all the sweaty horses and suspenders and bonnets, right? That's "Old-Timey", and "Old-Timey" things are clean and pure, but somehow also sexy. Or something.

Folks, the fact is, whatever its problems, I'll take the big, sprawling, noisy 21st century and its 21st century problems ANY DAY OF THE WEEK. We've got the Internet, and penicillin, and air conditioning, and all kinds of stuff that makes any other era pale by comparison. As Andrei Codrescu famously said, "I'd happily go on vacation to 14th century Romania. But trust me, you wouldn't want to live there." Damn skippy, say I.

One of These Days...

2011-07-28T10:52:00.000-07:00

Things I'm going to buy stock in when I have some damn money again (which will be NEVER):

1. Resolve Carpet Cleaner
2. The Bissell Company (vacuums and carpet steamers)
3. Whoever sells Kroger their milk (we go through, no shit, four gallons a week)
4. Maruchan Ramen (my seven-year-old son Dorian eats a six-pack every thirteen seconds)
5. Bulleit Bourbon
6. Philip Morris (creators of the world's best non-premium cigarette, the Parliament Full-Flavor. To quote Denis Leary: "I love to smoke. I smoke SEVEN THOUSAND PACKS A DAY, OK? And I am NEVER FUCKING QUITTING.")

In case you care, here's why.

1: RESOLVE CARPET CLEANER. My wife, son, and myself live in a bad-ass original ranch house which we are, with heat-death-of-the-universe slowness, trying to restore to its Atomic Ranch grandeur. This house is gifted (cursed?) with deep-pile beige shag carpet everywhere but the kitchen and the indoor privies. We like to drink wine, lots of it, mostly red, plus port, and coffee, and tea. Also we have three cats and one giant dog. More on that momentarily. You can see where this is going? We can either rip up all the carpet and live on baseboard until we can afford the grey stone tile I lust after (which will be sometime in the next millenium) or we can clean the goddamn carpet.

2. THE BISSELL COMPANY: We have one o'them fancy vacuuming machines, Mr. Bissell Liftoff, that is specially designed for households mysteriously infested by hairy parasitic creatures who demand allegiance, food, and the right to shit into (and outside of) a box full of gravel. They like to remove their hair IN FISTFULS and wipe it on the furniture and the carpet and the ceiling and our faces. The aforementioned vacuuming machine LIKES TO EAT HAIR. It likes to eat hair very much. This is disgusting, but useful.
It also has a cousin machine, Mr.Bissell Proheat, which likes to piss steaming soapy fluid into the carpet and then suck it back up, taking the remnants of wine, port, coffee, tea, and epic dogarrhea* with it. Hey, I don't judge. I'm just glad they live here. You should get one or both if you're stupid enough to have carpet, like me.

*Epic dogarrhea (n.)--when your Aussie Shepherd/St. Bernard mix eats something he isn't supposed to (dried squirrel assholes, bacteria-laden styrofoam meat trays from the trash, etc.) and then deposits the PUTRID, REEKING, BESLIMED RESULTS inside your living space rather than in the damn back yard.

3. WHOEVER KROGER GETS THEIR MILK FROM: I used the Google on this one. It turns out that Kroger gets their milk FROM KROGER. I thought you had to make the stuff, or grow it or whatever, but apparently it just spontaneously generates at the back of the dairy case. Occasionally it migrates onto the shelves of the dairy case, but mostly it's just left there unattended while you climb onto the dairy shelves and futilely wave your arms in the hopes that this will cause the milk to come flying toward you. (Please note: the stock crew was watching. And they have never, ever stopped laughing about it.)

4. MARUCHAN RAMEN: Did you know that there is a country called JAPAN? And in Japan, they have entire chains of "restaurants" which sell hand-made, delicious, noodle soups WITH MEAT AND EVERYTHING that are called " ramen". Unfortunately, due to an incident involving radiological materials, a giant lizard, a former-hat-salesman-turned-President and the fact that most Americans would rather eat fried horse turds than real food, this "ramen" is not available in the USA. What we do get, also confusingly called "ramen", is dried paste in the shape of brain convolutions, which you must BOIL FURIOUSLY to remove the radioactivity. "Seasoning" is also provided in a small foil packet. It consists of salt and giant lizard bouillon powder. Stir the "seasoning" into the now de-radiated boiled paste, and stir like a mofo. Now you can either

a: eat it, or

b: throw it into a lead-lined pit marked with the correct biohazard symbols, cover it with a two-foot-thick concrete lid, and inform the government of your actions.

My son prefers option "a". He, though only seven, is a stout trencherman. He ate FOUR CHICKEN LEGS for dinner last night. And two bowls of rice. And a bowl of strawberry ice cream. He is not much fazed by radioactive paste with lizard salt in it. In fact, he eats it as often as he can. He seems to be fine, except for the fact that he is currently running around the house wearing a plastic Thor helmet, waving a battered Nerf sword and screaming "COME IN, TOKYO!!!" at the top of his lungs. I should probably be more concerned about this.

5. BULLEIT BOURBON: See below.

6. PHILIP MORRIS: Look, I'll just put it to you this way: Brown party liquor and delicious, non-habit-forming Parliament cigarettes make Daddy a much, much nicer Daddy. Daddies who do not like brown party liquor and Parliaments probably do not really love their children. They are, in fact, secretly plotting to sell their young for medical experiments and/or to run off with that floozy from Accounting (who has spots on her junk, which the non-drinking non-smoking Daddy will not find out until it is entirely too late). Your choice in these matters is clear, folks.

Next time on Heartfelt Apologies and Other Bullshit: How Old Men Still Get Laid Despite Smelling Like Brylcreem Stirred Into Week-Old Vegetable Soup