Cybernetic Eating Habits of a Poor Reporter

(NOTE: Sometimes I write things and forget I wrote them. Usually, with good reason. Here’s an example.)

Typical freelance journalist—at least, one living on the cusp of the communal cup that was the U.S. dole, filled with whatever sketchy dross…whatever watered-down witches brew… you might expect to find at the bottom of such a public assistance barrel at the end of a long reign of conservative Republican plutocracy. He was a diabetic from a long line of poor Irish Methodist diabetics, which was slightly funny (or not) when you paid attention to his one decorative vice: collecting soda pop memorabilia from the turn-of-the-20^th century sugar-syrup and soda water gluttony…when a hundred brands proclaimed their prohibitionist Puritanism with the rise of the soft(er) drink, just as the medicine shows were drying up thanks to the Pure Food and Drug Act curtailing the magic of enough heroin, cocaine, and laudanum to raise the Titanic on good cheer alone.

The bottlers went from Doctor Pinkman’s Powerful Powder to Pepsi Cola, and those heavy old dope bottles lined wooden shelves, with Gibson Girl soda trays and framed adverts from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

He pulled a box of frozen Argentinean line-caught Tilapia filets, bought with a Food Stamp debit card thanks to the kind words of a French-Canadian doctor, whose son’s indiscretions with a local transgendered prostitute and crystal meth cook had been creatively edited from a Page 2 Police Blotter filler. (The Power of the Press)

The frozen machine-prepped squares of fish went into the oven. He waved the box over the oven’s scanner, and it adjusted the temperature and timer, and added another box to his shopping list, downloading a USDA/Food Stamp Coupon for $1.00 and entering his name in a contest which offered as the grand prize a Virtual Reality “Be An Alaskan Snow Crab Fisherman” give-away.

The hologram on the box downplayed the Argentinean Sea Lab where the “fish” had been “caught”…instead: there was a bearded Yankee wearing a yellow slicker, at the wooden wheel of a barely-suggested fishing vessel circa 1875. The fisherman winked at him. If you winked back he would pull up an animated USDA Eat More Protein! display.  Instead, he pulled the tab that deconstructed the box, and began the auto recycling program, folded the box in half and pitched it into the Pig. The Pig oinked! a thank-you.

He took a bottle of expensive Saucier Works sauce. The kind that was like wine: you were supposed to add a thimble-full of Balsamic Vinegar, and it would distill something exotic that got better with each month you let it cook-down in the fridge. Except he had forgot to feed it the vinegar, so it was now mostly just expensive ketchup, which was okay, too.

When he was a kid, his mother would take him to Cap’n Jacks and he would get Fish Sticks and dip them in that sweet ketchup that you squirted out of the Pirate by mashing down on his head.  His mother always said that was disgusting, because the menu said the REAL Cap’n Jacks was a pirate who used to cut people’s heads off with his cutlass.

It had been his favorite restaurant.

Media Bias and Hurricane Katrina

I’ve just finished watching Spike Lee’s documentary. I find myself eagerly sucking in the storm video from Act I. Sometimes my obsession makes me feel a bit deviant–considering all the heartbreaking loss Katrina represented. Though my family lost two cars in hurricanes between 2004 and 2005, we were fortunate to escape actual physical damage to our persons. This is really miraculous considering my brother and I decided to visit Daytona Beach AFTER a mandatory evacuation (hiding from police just to get our storm-on) during one hurricane…and went for a drive during the worst of the weather during another. In other words, we’re idiots. Every time I watch Lee’s docu, it makes me think of the following story…  Hurricane Katrina and the “Two-Photo Controversy” Katrina struck New Orleans, two photographs published by Yahoo! News depicting residents making their way through chest-deep water caused an uproar relating to bias in media coverage. The first image, shot by photographer Dave Martin for the Associated Press, showed a young black man, who, according to the accompanying caption, “walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store.” In a similar shot, taken by photographer Chris Graythen for AFP/Getty Images, a white couple was shown wading “through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store.” It is Yahoo!’s policy to use photo captions that are provided by the photographers and not edit them before posting the images online.1 These captions caused many to question whether black people were being treated fairly in media coverage of post-hurricane events. In response to the ensuing controversy, the journalists associated with the photos claimed that it was not an issue of race, but rather a question of semantics over the terms ‘looting’ as opposed to ‘finding’. According to Jack Stokes, the director of media relations for AP, Dave Martin, the photographer of the first picture, personally witnessed the subject of his photograph entering a grocery store and leaving with items, thus witnessing the man looting.2 Whereas the photographer of the second photo, Chris Graythen, didn’t witness the subjects of his photograph taking the goods. “I wrote the caption about the two people who ‘found’ the items. I believed in my opinion, that they did simply find them, and not ‘looted’ them in the definition of the word. The people were swimming in chest deep water, and there were other people in the water, both white and black. I looked for the best picture. There were a million items floating in the water — we were right near a grocery store that had 5+ feet of water in it. It had no doors. The water was moving, and the stuff was floating away. These people were not ducking into a store and busting down windows to get electronics. They picked up bread and cokes that were floating in the water. They would have floated away anyhow.”3

Heavy Weather

Tonight the Weather Channel is tracking Carlos, the second storm of the 2009 Hurricane Season.

Also tonight, lots of unattached guys my age are getting ready for another spin through the single’s scene. In cosmopolitan Fort Payne, Alabama, there aren’t too many places where the ancient mating rituals of the Homo sapiens take place. After showering and splashing on handfuls of Obsession, it’s off to try one’s luck with the ladies…an obsession in its own right.

Sometimes it’s hard for my friends to understand why I’m totally uninterested in dating. Many of my oldest friends remember a time when I would have been the first one in the car, reeking of Drakkar and overdosing on testosterone. (NOTE: Drakkar is a kind of pre-Axe Body spray scent guys used to practically bathe in; think of it as the cologne the ‘A Night at the Roxbury’ characters—or ‘The Soprano’s’ Christopher Moltisante character—would have worn). I suspect some of my friends think I may be gay. Others are of the opinion that I’m simply too picky.

            But the truth is, I’m too busy with my own obsessions to give a relationship the attention it deserves. If I put the kind of Herculean efforts into dating and an eventual relationship, I wouldn’t have the time (if possibly the inclination) to spend the same efforts on writing and my other artistic endeavors. But even above and beyond this reality is another: dating means my obsessions will suffer from my neglect.

            Tonight, instead of slathering on cheap cologne, tucking away the “bad luck condom” in my wallet and driving an hour to buy ridiculously-overpriced bottom-shelf liquor for women I’ve never met while listening to horrid Eurodance neodisco, I’m watching Spike Lee’s ‘When The Levees Broke’ for the fourth time. (NOTE: the ‘bad luck condom’ is a quasi-mystical occurrence ensuring that, if you purposely take a condom along, it won’t leave your wallet).

            Science fiction writer Bruce Sterling calls it ‘heavy weather’: ultraviolent storms that drive people like me to seek them out like a junky looking for his next fix. Thunderstorms, flash floods, tornados and hurricanes: these are dangerous drugs. Heavy weather is unique in that we can study weather patterns with scientific methods using the latest meteorological tools, but the storms themselves still have a primal sort of magic to them. Getting caught in a violent thunderstorm or taking refuge from a tornado under an Interstate overpass, it’s easy to see how our ancestors saw a supernatural power at work behind these events. Zeus flinging lightning bolts at hapless mortals or Poseidon drowning sailors in man-eating whirlpools are a colorful way to picture heavy weather—but the truth is much stranger (and stronger) than fiction.

            Watching weather reports and disaster footage is akin to porn for a storm chaser. Watching documentaries like the Spike Lee film are a way to temper the heavy weather obsession. After all, it’s not the pain and suffering that is attractive. It’s the raw, undiluted power of nature that fuels our obsessions.

Usually, storm chasers obsess over one specific kind of heavy weather event. For me, it’s hurricanes and powerful storms (tropical depressions and tropical storms). Living in Florida for 25 years, I made it through countless storms and several powerful hurricanes.

The last storm I rode out was in 2005. My parents and my son evacuated to Georgia, while my brother and I battened down the family fortress and hoped for the best. When the storm hit, the sky turned a weird greenish color, which gradually darkened until it was fully dark in mid-afternoon. I went out in the yard, noticing a poisonous juvenile Coral snake making for the safety of some underground nest. Inside, our dogs (a basset hound and a lab mix) were whimpering, wandering about the house looking for a safe place to hole up, just like the snake. Animals can sense heavy storms—whether it’s the barometric pressure or some hindbrain reptilian sense at work, who can say? Perhaps the dogs and snakes were the smart ones—maybe my obsession stemmed from the lack of ancient instincts that tell saner people to duck-and-cover.

Outside, while the sky was darkening, everything became calm. The leaves stopped their rustlings, the afternoon opera of tree frogs and crickets fell silent; with most of the neighborhood evacuated, there were no lawn mowers, no children playing down the street…no nothing. Creepy.

But you could feel something: some indefinable sensation that walked up and down your spine until each nerve in your body seemed to sing. You could feel the growing sense of power, a collection of static electricity and pressurized atmosphere, a slightly-metallic smell, like shaved copper or blood. The lighter smell of rain, underneath everything else.

When the storm hit, palm trees snapped. Power lines went down, the air conditioning and cordless phones were useless. In a few short minutes we were back to medieval-era technology. Even our cell phones were useless, owing to the electrical characteristics of huge storm systems. Part of a large oak tree fell on our front yard, crushing my car and burying another underneath the foliage.

These storms are something I really miss about Florida. Though they are often incredibly destructive, the power they represent makes you feel…well, alive. Whenever I start feeling the urge to chase down another hurricane, I pop in Spike Lee’s documentary. As I said, it’s a way to keep my obsession in check. Of course, as Lee points out so succinctly, it wasn’t the hurricane that caused the majority of the suffering in New Orleans. The flooding from poorly planned and constructed levees did far more damage to people and property. Even though the clips from videotaped scenes as the hurricane caught New Orleans in its grip are scary, they do an admirable job of catching that feeling of unleashed natural fury quite well.

MOSQUITOLAND

Here are a few pieces from STRIPMINE…this is a collection of short essays and poetry written from about 1987 to 2005. The first printing was in 1994, with another limited run in 1999. I’ve edited the whole collection three times, with the most recent major edit in 2005.

The following selections are mostly pieces I wrote when the bugs were particularly bad…which, in Mosquitoland, means most every day. Of course, not all bugs are insects…

(blood meal)

 

they say  the big ones take a pint or two at each feeding

from whatever warm blood happens to be nearby

you can hear them out there, rustling in the trees

they like it down in the dark

with the night flies

and used motor-oil floating in old tires

flooded with swamp water

they come here to breed:

laying clusters of eggs in the tires and

 pools of rainwater

inside refrigerator boxes

some kid used for a space ship or Indian fort

everything is left to rust in the ditches

 by the side of the old Titusville road

 

(daytona beach: off season)

 

alone in the kingdom of Elvis:

surrounded by the blue-suede walls

 of a cheap motel room

an aging porn queen lies tranquilized

retired on the stained mattress

high on crystallized methamphetamine

and the dim thoughts of some eight-track suicide pact

comatose in a pool of drugstore perfume and melted mascara crayons

we have come here fueled by cut-rate gin and a gallon and a half of diesel fuel

leaving a ‘66 Buick dying in the parking lot of a 7-11

we walked the rest of the way, past a radio station and a massage parlor

following an endless parade of Black Velvet ads to this place at the end of all roads

 

–

 

you pierced my flesh

 you pierced my soul

your teeth left traces on my skin

the blood: like a flower

dried and faded with time

but the scars, they remain

 

 

(nest)

 

beyond the broken facade of mountain, built on blackened rock

there lies a dormant nest of poisonous insects

who crawl into the shadows of November

and forever multiply by the million-fold

where the sight of man cannot go

 

 

The Fly

 

the fly is speckle-winged, livid in sugar-fury

flit and fly from slice to slice of rotting fruit

with that grotesque meat

swelling between its abdomen

like some infection, red and swollen

its speech is pitted with consonants

slap him down nice and solid

he’s just a smear of ugly jelly

crawling with microscopic things

TRACE EVIDENCE

Trace Evidence

By Gregory Purvis © 2008

 

The first week of May and it still feels like winter.

Ganza shook his head irritably, wincing at the stiffness in his neck. The house—a crime scene, now that Forensics was officially sucking-up all the overtime hours—was bathing in long shadows, with sunrise still two hours shy of turning this bad black-and-white movie into a Technicolor gore-fest. As long as the shadows hid the worst of the human carnage inside, the cold pop-tarts that stood-in for a decent breakfast were safe in his stomach, where they belonged.

None of the uniforms bothered to check his ID, even though this wasn’t his shift (or his district, for that matter), and Ganza didn’t recognize any of their faces. They were clustered around the door leading from the garage into the house, drinking coffee and swapping the latest gossip: whose wife was sleeping with whom, which lieutenant had fallen off the wagon, what assistant D.A. was going through a bitter custody battle.

“…heard he had been in counseling, the mandatory kind the assholes in IA make you go to…”

“.. the department ‘ll pay for that shit, just to keep it nice and quiet with nothing in your jacket and off the front page of the Times..”

“..wouldn’t do that, even if I wanted to—and with Connie, believe me, I’ve wanted to every day since I said ‘I do’—but you gotta keep a lid on that kinda thing. It eats at ya…”

 

 It was cop-talk: familiar, low-key—even soothing, in its own way. Usually. But somehow it wasn’t—not this early, not in this dark, cold place that was choking with the smell of blood and death.

 Maybe it’s just that these guys are all strangers, ‘brothers in blue’ or not, Ganza thought.

He ducked under the crime scene tape; the door to the house was only half-shut, leading into a small, cramped laundry room that smelled of fabric softener and gym socks. None of the uniforms even looked up, pretending whatever mess was on the other side of that door was in some fourth dimension—far-removed from anything important or relevant in their own world.

The house was as quiet as the proverbial tomb. But no matter what mess was buried within these walls, the silence was just a temporary arrangement. Forensics was on the clock, or would be any minute, and the brass would start winnowing away non-essential personnel. Happened at the end of every fiscal year, when the department’s overtime budget was stretched past the point of no return.

The juice seemed to be off. Ganza tried a second switch, got nothing. The air conditioner must still be working, though, because the wintry chill followed him from room to room. The walls were featureless black rectangles, broken by the occasional darker stain of a doorway or window. Massaging his neck, Ganza moved past the feeble light coming in from the garage, towards the deeper darkness of a large open space, maybe a dining room? He reached automatically for his flashlight, a powerful little LED penlight that was deceptively bright.

Shit. He must’ve left it. Home, maybe. His notebook, too.

He hadn’t been on the weekend roster. And he’d been asleep—that kind of deep, down-in-it sleep where the real world can only seep in as part of some dream that you can never really remember once you come up out of it. You can hear something, like the alarm clock, maybe, but it sounds far, far away. Muted, like listening to a radio next to a swimming pool while you’re underwater.

Ganza’s foster parents had gotten religion when he was eight or nine years old. They went to these revivals where people prayed out loud, repeating a word or phrase over and over again, eyes wide-open and staring at something on the ceiling, tears streaming down their faces.

They had baptized him at one of those revivals—in a big plastic pool with the water up past his waist. The preacher had held him under, and he’d been so scared he’d peed, terrified of drowning and the preacher noticing the yellow stain before the water diluted it. He remembered that, the muted sounds of the congregation praying, from underwater…

 praisejesuspraisejesuspraisejesus

Amen! Amen! Amen! Amen! Amen!

The phone was ringing, had been ringing, for a while, Ganza figured.

The noise was dull, slowly dopplering in from some vast, mapless distance where every moment seemed centuries in the making. Then, breaking free of that warm, dark, deep water, the sound was suddenly sharper, piercing. Fumbling for the receiver:

Whazzit..?

He didn’t remember the voice on the other end of the line; dispatch, probably. Somebody called in sick. A lot of somebody’s, for them to call in someone off-roster, and from another district.

There was light coming from a hallway, spilling into the dining room. He could see that’s what the room was, after all: white staccato flashes revealing the shape of a long formal wooden table, three chairs down each side, with one at the head and another at the foot. The source of the light wasn’t a flashlight; it was too intermittent, too bright: a Forensics tech or another dick, moving around in a room at the end of the hall with a digital camera. They must’ve come in the front.

The shadows still clung to the walls like some dark tide washing up on a beach, rinsing away any details or evidence of human habitation, shrouding family photos, framed pictures, wallpaper.

Ganza could hear voices: low, murmuring, male.

The hallway was colder than the laundry room or the dining room and— despite the occasional bursts of light—it seemed darker, too. Ganza could see the bright flashes, but the hall itself could just as well been a cave—or a grave: buried deep under the dark, stale-smelling earth. The ceiling and floor felt like they were stretching towards each other, reaching up and down both at once, pushing closer until he was bent over at the waist, trying to resist the urge to crawl.

Just as he reached the end of the hall, two men stepped out from the room, one carrying a digital camera, the other one nodding his head to something the cameraman was saying, scribbling in a notebook. Ganza recognized him: Detective Sergeant Rolly Sherrod. The pen looked like a child’s crayon in his huge, meaty hand. Sherrod was a giant, maybe six-eight or so, had to be close to 300 pounds, most of it muscle—and what wasn’t muscle looked just as hard. He was bald except for a thin strip on top of his massive square head—the feature that had given him the nickname “the Anvil” when he played college ball for Nebraska. He was attached to robbery-homicide in the West District—a job Ganza had himself coveted, because the district was only a mile from his home. The other guy was a tech, a Philippino kid Ganza had seen a couple times, but couldn’t remember his name. Ortiz or Cortez or something.

They brushed by him in the narrow hall, the kid’s mouth going a mile-a-minute, Rolly Sherrod nodding, still writing. Neither one of them looked at Ganza, or said anything. Past him, they kept walking towards the laundry room, and it took Ganza a minute to realize the lights were back on. Two recessed halogens lit the hallway.

Those’re a pain in the ass to change, Ganza thought, looking up at the lights. The ceiling was actually high, he saw. The illusion had been his own claustrophobia.  Made the worse for wear by the darkened crime scene and exhaustion. He had pulled a double, filling in for a buddy, and had only been asleep a little over an hour when the phone…

…he could hear a phone ringing, now, and turned back to the doorway. A small nightlight and a reading lamp were the only lights in the room—the master bedroom. The reading lamp had been knocked off a small table on one side of a large Queen-sized bed. The shade was keeping it off the floor, and the low-watt bulb didn’t do much to brighten up the room, down that close to the dark carpet. Half the room was still bathed in shadow, relieved only by the nightlight plugged into a wall socket in one corner, revealing a closed door to the bathroom.

The phone was one of those gaudy princess models his wife liked, oversized handset —white, embellished with gold leaf—sitting on the table where the lamp had been before whatever had happened in here had happened.

It rang again. God, he hated that noise. It drove him nuts, and Amanda never seemed to be in any hurry to pick it up and shut off that noise.

A few steps and Ganza was standing over the small table. Most of the bed was covered in shadow, but he thought he could see a darker stain spreading out from the crisp, white linen sheets—like one of those ink blots that shrinks show people. The stain was dark…dark red…

The phone rang again.

Ganza reached down, picked it up.

“Hello?”

Whazzit?

(static)

“Who is this?”

(helpmepleasemakehimstophelpmegod)

“What? Who’s calling? Answer me!”

This is Detective Sergeant William Ganza, North-Central District Major Crimes Unit. I’d like to report a…a..it’s happened. I’d like to report. To make the report.

“Uh…Detective Ganza, can you repeat that? What are you reporting, sir?”

It’s me, I’m going to, I mean I did…

“Sir, can you please just tell…”

I killed the bitch. She was one of them. She laughed at me! She knew I knew!

(muffled conversation)

“Sir, where are you calling…?”

She slept next to me, in my bed! Dear Christ, they were inside her! For months! Years, maybe…and I slept next to her! Next to THEM!

“Detective…”

They came out of her, when I shot her. I’ve got the evidence. Bring the lab boys; I got hair and fiber, tissue samples. Her head came open, and that’s all there was, just…hair. Hair! It wasn’t human hair! And no brains, just…there was just hair…ohmygod you gotta…

The line went dead, and the imitation ivory handle of the gaudy phone slipped from Ganza’s fingers. He turned slowly, back toward the bed. Toward that dark stain, spreading on the white sheets. A woman’s body lay on the bed, her head a ruin. And something else…a dark form, dangling over…he looked up, a sharp pain in his neck making him wince. A noose made from a long brown extension cord was tied to the ceiling fan. The shadows seemed to dissolve then, to pull back, and Ganza could see the man hanging from the ceiling fan, his face black, eyes staring sightlessly.

His own eyes.

Staring down at him, accusing.

Lust: It’s whats for dinner

The Internet is the World’s Greatest Lust Engine. Whether it’s porn (in the flavor of your choice), food or drugs (ditto the flavor choices), the object(s) of your affection or obsession–be it person, place or thing–can be found, bought, discussed, and analyzed…further adding to the collective obsession concerning the Object of desire.

When I was a student at Daytona Beach College I wrote an essay on online ethics in which I suggested porn should be relegated to a sexually-permissive section of the eversticky World Wide Web, to be thereafter known by the suffix .sex. Or, alternatively, .xxx. But of course, that would decently cover only sex…leaving uncovered all the other myriad subjects of human obsession. (Though it would allow a certain measure of control over mature subject matter without imposing any rigid censorship methodology…which was my intent…)

Following hedonism to its logical, lusty conclusion (release), I spend some of my limited time online researching objects of affection, many of which are well-remembered pieces of my childhood: food and toys. The Internet is a great place to relive pieces of one’s past that have been dissolved in the acid-bath of memory…there are ALWAYS people who remember pieces of the past you may have forgotten…and OCD is alive and well in the minutae of desire.

For me, childhood food memories are far and away a different beast than my tastes as an adult. And many of the fondnesses I recall have been rather difficult to hunt down. Some of them, however, are still out there. Take for example two of my favorite fast food restaurants as a kid: Roy Rogers and Arthur Treacher’s Fish’nChips.

Both were founded in 1969…the same year I was born. My mother would take my brother and I to feast on roast beef sandwiches and french fries at Roy Rogers fairly regularly. Arthur Treacher’s was a rarer treat…probably because Mom wasn’t overly fond of fried fish drenched in malt vinegar. Both restaurants disappeared from the Central Florida fast food scene in the 1970’s. I’m still a member of the Roy Rogers Buckaroo Club, by the way.

I can well-remember the rare, red and salty slices of warm roast beef, folded in tight pink perfection across a yeasty Kaiser roll…I remember actually drooling before I even got to the front door. You didn’t even need barbecue sauce…and this was a FAST FOOD RESTAURANT!!  The dining room was nice and cool, the air stirred by wooden-paddle ceiling fans. There were seats for kids made from old wooden barrels, and long wooden tables. ROY ROGERS was spelled out in hanks of rope, along with examples of various knots…competing for space along walls festooned with pictures of cowboys like…well, like Roy Rogers.

The Internet has brought both restaurants back from distant memory. And now I can see full-color digital pictures of the foods I have for so long lusted after in my dreams…still out of reach, as there are no restaurants within a day’s drive or more from the van down by the river where I live.

Thus the Internet is, as smarter folks have long known, more a source for frustration than fufilment.

And what do many of us do when we find starlets and supermodels unavailable for marriage?

We go to an Arby’s and shut up.

I’m Going To Scream At My Dog Now, Thanks

Having a dog has one benefit no one ever talks about. Of course, that’s probably to avoid winding up on “Animal Cops” or being involuntarily committed. But since I’ve always been unable to make smart decisions, I will break the silence and tell you THE SECRET benefit of dog ownership:

your dog is your slave.

I feel…liberated. (How ironic.)

I also feel like maybe I should erase this post. Nah. People will wait for the explanation…people aren’t judgemental. This is 2009!

I DO feel strangely liberated after admitting this…

That’s right. SLAVERY baby. Woo-hoo! I SAID it! Yeah! I am the kind of pathetic guy who would pass out in a cold fright if the “n-word” ever came out of my mouth and who secretly feels guilty about my southern white heritage…but who also secretly needs to totally dominate and OWN another creature! And now I’ve admitted it! Whew! YEAH! I likes me some ANIMAL SLAVES! S-L-A-V-E-S!!! I OWN another living thing! I OWN Bustah! I can whip his black ass if he…oh my god did I just say that? Yeah, now I’m definately gonna delete…oops

<PUBLISHED>

Elvis is Back from the Black

Don’t you wish Elvis would come back, delivered from on-high in a Las Vegas lightshow-like UFO, draped in a hundred yards of rhinestone-studded black velvet and eating a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich..?

Just for a few minutes, even. Just enough for a commercial break from this endless speculation about what particular drugs killed Michael Jackson….hell, Elvis could tell ‘em faster than any autopsy reports.

I’m switching back to video games. I haven’t played Oblivion in a couple days. Maybe this crap will be over soon…yeah, right.

‘Stay Thirsty, My Friends’

At times in my life, commercials really aggravated me. Back when I was a communist, for example. But the older I get, the more mellow I become…kind of like a good, single-malt whiskey, now that I think about it. Of course, I realize that it’s not really any sort of accident of brain chemistry or gentling of character brought on by aging that makes commercials easier to bear. No…the sad truth is, it’s likely caused by gradual improvements in mind-control software set to runautomatically whenever the wetwire drive the aliens implanted comes within preset limits established by my 32″ Sony Trinitron television. Or something like that.

For good or ill, I’ve found myself actually enjoying commercials for the first time since I was a child. Enough so that I’ve even created the Evil Robots Kool Commercial Award. Which, as it turns out, has been recently awarded to Dos Equis. Not because (mind you) I plan to actually BUY Dos Equis product…which I think is beer. But the ‘Stay Thirsty, My Friends’ commercials are really pretty kool.

They remind me of 1970’s James Bond movies…specifically those flicks in which uber-playboy 007 is played by Sean Connery. The commercials also remind me of a great first-person shooter video game that came out a few years back called ‘No One Lives Forever’. I’m not exactly sure why, since the hero in that game was a female and the ‘hero’ of these commercials is an old hairy Latino man. Which now that I’ve spelled it out really sounds pretty gay, all things considered.

Be that as it is not, Dos Equis wins by a landslide, and I’ll take my martini extra-dry, thank you.

“People hang on his every word, even the prepositions,” the Dos Equis voice-over tells us, as the aforementioned hairy old man drags a treasure chest from the crystal-blue Caribbean onto a beach mostly populated with scantily-clad Caribbean womenfolk. ”He can speak French…in Russian,” the voice-over continues, as the International Man of Koolness is revealed in a snazzy tuxedo walking through what is most probably his ancestral home, a castle on the coast of Spain, perhaps. Don’t you love the word ’snazzy’?  At this point in the commercial, our hero is like a bearded Mr. Roarke from ‘Fantasy Island’…so much so that I find myself (on repeated viewings) looking around for snazzily-dressed midgets.

And…finally…Mr. Roarke/007 looks straight at US…sparing a moment from the absolutely charming Euro-trash babe on his arm to let us know, matter-of-fact: “I don’t always drink beer. But when I do, I prefer Dos Equis.”

Stay thirsty, my friends. What’s not to like?

Of course, MY version would have to be very different. The beer would need to be Natural Light (’Natch) or perhaps Milwaukee’s Best (’The Beast’). I would look up at the camera, snazzily-dressed in my ‘Jesus Built My Hotrod’ t-shirt, with a “paid companion” on my arm: “I don’t always drink beer,” I’d tell you. “Sometimes I’m in the mood for heroin. But when I do drink beer, I prefer… whatever is cheapest.”

Now THAT’S honesty in advertising.

Let the Dead Paedophile Jokes Begin

Oh, yeah. By the way, Farrah Fawcett died. Now back to our macabre Michael Jackson obsession …

I feel sorry for Farrah. I was 8-years old in 1978–and there was NOTHING hotter than Farrah. Not even Michael Jackson. The infamous poster of FF–with her perkiness poking from that red-orange disco top–was  thumb-tacked to every teenaged boy’s bedroom wall at the height of Charlie’s Angelspopularity in the mid-1970’s. Of course, since I wasn’t a teenager, my mother was having none of that. Instead, she bought my brother and I a much tamer (but still hott) Angels poster that showcased Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith, AND FF in slightly less-revealing (but still hott) polyester 70’s actionwear. I still have a picture of my little brother standing on my bed and kissing Farrah’s airbrushed, one-dimensional lips. FF retained her luscious good-looks into middle-age–even through hair-loss caused by the chemotherapy prescribed to fight cancer. That evil bugaboo that finally took her life Thursday.

The bloated mosquitoes that feed on the blood of pop-culture icons grew unnaturally fat late last week. Not only did FF succumb to her illness, but she had the singular bad luck (at least, according to the endless pap-sweet whine of the mosquitoes) to die on the same day as Michael Jackson, the so-called “King of Pop”.  

At 2:26 p.m. PST, on Thursday, June 25, 2009 Jackson passed into the golden Fields of Elysium…just weeks before a well-planned and expensive comeback tour was scheduled to begin in London.

And as you might expect, all other news was quickly eclipsed by Jackson’s falling star.

Since then, the tasteless jokes have been slung from one side of the Internet to the other. This process has been somewhat-tempered by political figures like Rev. Jessie Jackson, who’ve began the canonization process that will establish St. Michael as something more than pop culture royalty. But far worse than cracks about hyperbaric caskets has been the “news reporting” perpetrated by “journalists”…particularly CNN and MSNBC. Baring their vampire fangs, journalism has degraded to bloodthirsty oneupmanship. While other pop culture products (such as FF) died Thursday, they rated no more than a mere mention as the endless speculation began turning Jackson’s corpse over and over, seeking out the slightest blemish that might relate to new conspiracies or old condemnations.

It’s a sick, sad world we live in, folks. And now I can’t even flip on the radio or TV without being subjected to “Billie Jean” or “Man in the Mirror” or “Bad”. Yep. Sick, sad world.