Chess

(pictured above: The Super Bishop)

My co-workers have been borrowing my Chess board to play at lunch a lot lately. I haven’t thought about chess in a while, every since Dimitri left I haven’t played at all (single tear runs down cheek).

It got me thinking of my childhood… In the 4th grade we were forced to learn to play chess, every single student in Mrs Garable’s Kick-Ass 4th Grade Class. (That’s what we named the class that year… well, that’s what I and my friend Steve Zyke named it at least). Each day during study time 8 children were selected to go to the back of the class and fire up a game on 1 of the classes 4 chess boards. Being that I was a kid already obsessed with war and all manors of armed conflict I took to chess with great zeal. In fact like most things I’m really into (drums, outer space, dinosaurs, beef jerky, etc.), I went over board with my affectations; drawing knights and castles all over my notebooks, mapping out strategic moves and ideas, reading books about the historical significance of the game, etc. etc.

My point is that for a short time I became overly involved in the game of chess and I waited restlessly everyday for the afternoon ‘study time’ to approach so I could get picked and play chess instead of work on my grammar and spelling words. Now I know that chess is good for the budding young mind. Chess players are known for being great problem solvers and free thinkers. Complex multi-faceted problems like: ‘2 trains leaving from the train station going different directions at different speeds with varying weight in cargo’, are a breeze for chess players. But I spent an exorbitant amount of my 4th grade life thinking and playing and thinking about playing chess, and not much else.

So I’m just going to say it… The reason I can’t spell is because I was too preoccupied with playing chess to work on my spelling words okay. There it’s out and I feel better now. Dani and Chrispy and Dan Schindler and Mandy and all my high school teachers and my sister and a whole bunch of other people who love to point out my spelling errors but I can’t remember who you are at this moment, can all just deal with that! It’s not my fault I spell like a 3rd grader, that’s as far as I got okay…

Consequently in this current atmosphere of super-hero/vampire movie pop culture, I decided to make a few much needed updates to the age old game of Chess to better reflect the concept that destroying an apposing army or foe does not necessarily require a superior force lead by a charismatic leader anymore. All you really need is some special effects and an audience that is willing to believe it. So jot these updates down and dazzle the fuk out of the next poor sap you wail on at chess this coming holiday season.

The Super Bishop – This is when you stack your bishop on top of your rook to create a Super Killing Machine. The Super Bishop moves in concentric circles, like a shock wave from a blast point, wiping out all juxtaposed pieces, both adversarial and friendly, without conscience. Think of this guy as your own personal Richard M. Nixon… carpet bombing the Viet Cong has never been seen before in the chess world until now.

The Knight Rider – You’ll need some tape or glue for this one, any household-grade adhesive will work. Tape/glue one pawn to the back of your horse like he’s the horses ‘rider’. Once you have that done this new piece moves in a full square. Like the normal L-shape that the knight usually moves but now doubling back to one square over from where he started. (So the rider can sleep at home at night, he’s not into camping and horses are smelly, who wants to sleep outside next to that thing snorting and chewing grass and stuff all night, gross). The beauty of this piece is that when you get killed you now actually have 2 lives. At the first strike, you lose your rider, then on your second strike you die for real. (As in your piece is removed from the board). Think of Yoshi in Super Mario World… when you get hit you pop out the top of Yoshi and he goes all whilly-nilly back and forth with no stirring and you have to try to catch him to get back in the saddle. Same idea, after your rider gets taken off, your horse goes buck-wild (literally, if that is what you call wild horses) and starts to take out pieces all around him until he’s either killed again by your opponent or is mercifully shot in the head by your queen.

The Snake – This requires purchasing a pack of rubber or plastic snakes from the ‘kids isle’ at Walgreens. Don’t tell your opponent about this one before you start playing. When you get a pawn across the board to your opponent’s side, instead of trading up for one of your taken pieces, you replace your pawn with a plastic snake and make a hissing sound. This means that you now get 2 moves in a row and when you bite your opponents piece that piece becomes infected with your venom and becomes one of YOUR pieces. Totally sweet! (Have a permanent marker handy as well so you can quickly color the piece to whatever color your team is). This will strike fear into the heart of your opponent and if they happen to be a mathematician from the former Soviet Union they could possibly accuse you of being KGB and swallow a cyanide pill ending the game and making an awful mess on the rug.

On a final note, gather up whatever figurines you may have around before you play your next game of chess and create an audience. (Stacks of books make great bleachers for stadium seating and a better view of the battle). Having an audience watching creates more of an urgency to do well and not make mistakes. It puts pressure on your opponent and makes them self conscious. They’ll think their intelligence is being judged by you and your collection of bobble-head Michael Jordans. Any edge is a good edge in the cutthroat world of chess.

Have fun…

Bombs away Millhouse!

Why I hate Sports and consequently High-Fives

This essay could be nearly 30 pages if I wanted it to be, but there are a few simple things that I can address to explain my stance. The fact that all American Males are suppose to be a part of an organized sports team sometime in their youth is in-in-of-itself enough of a pain in the ass for a person of my size and stature. But it’s also assumed that I should know about and follow religiously any and all competitions that may be taking place in any given season we happen to be in. The guys at my work talk about it to no end all day and I can’t stand it. I do not care about any of it, and I’d rather stick my head in an oven then listen to what that kid I can’t stand in Tech Ops thinks about some over paid gangster rapper’s potential to chew up the defense or out rebound anyone who has ever walked the Earth.

I think whole heartedly and with my deepest conviction that NASCAR is just a waste of gas. We are running out of Mesozoic Era microplankton and you diks are going in circles for 7 hours!? There is a reason you have to change your tires so many damn times; It’s because some redneck made a simple math mistake and turned yards into miles and now it takes all day to accomplish what could be done in 14 minutes: that is to tell us which guy named Dale is faster… And on one single set of tires no less! (This is exactly like the architects who screw up inches and yards and end up making tiny Stonehenge models that are in danger of being smashed by the dancing midget druids). Just leave me alone already.

Now onto Sports most coveted signature; The High-Five! The high-five is to sports what Ronnie James Dio’s Devil Horns is to metal fans. It is the identity by which to show others that you are not to be fuked with unless you are dressed in the same exact color as the person with his open hand in the air. The high-five is best used in situations where you’ve just scored and you are in fact in your house and everyone around you should know whos house they happen to be in. The same concept applies to being hammered at a bar and watching the sports team from the state you happened to be born in while they are doing the same thing. (e.g. scoring ungodly amounts of points on the other teams asses, and there by “owning” their collective asses. Not in a gay way though).

The reason I hate high-fives so much is twofold. One is that it is just simply retarded looking. The other is that it reflects on who you are as a person, which usual amounts to an upper middle class white kid who has a hair trigger temper (due to being told he was the smartest and best at everything he did his entire life from his parents, and was applied to literally everything he did from finger painting with his own boogers to crashing his dads car into the back of the garage in the 9th grade), and who’s entire outlook on life is molded around what other people should be doing for them. So pretty much acting like the kids on any MTV reality show. Most post-collage doughy sports dudes will talk of their glory days on “The Team” and about “Coach” who use to call him T-Bone or Smitty and demanded said doughy sports dude’s absolute best everyday in practice for the “Ultimate Game”… LIFE. So throwing high-fives some 3, 5, or 13 years later drunk in a bar is a way to show other doughy sports dudes that you did in fact use to “Rule” and that you are one of them. (And still currently 'Rule' at stuff now). Now this all seems harmless until a certain intoxication level makes them long for the glory days of “ruling” and can most easily be recaptured in being a total dik to anyone without an Official Champion Jersey on. That is 99% of the time me or my friends. I’ve never actually been beat up before (see my close in encounter with this under the story about Sissys). But I’ve come really close a few times and every single of them evolved high-fives in some way.

Untitled Number 2

I’ve turned myself into a monster for countless reasons… most of which seemed like a necessity at the time.

Jay’s Guide to Pumpkin Carving

(updated)

I've never actually been to a real pumpkin patch, only the whole sale distribution centers that sling them to the public from someone's front yard or at a semi-busy intersection. Sometimes they’re set up in a wayward parking lot where a Fashion Bug or Fashion Bug Plus once flourished. That same spot will be used the day after Halloween is over for the 'Christmas Tree Blow-Out Extravaganza'. I asked Comagirl Sam about pumpkin patches and she informed me of the correct behavior one would display at a pumpkin patch. It in tales dressing warmly and frolicking amongst the many various shaped specimens in a search of the perfect match to your personality. That idea got me thinking of pumpkins and pumpkin carving. Once I thought about it for a short while I realized there was a rhyme to my reason when it came to pumpkin related events in my life. I realized I always look for the weirdest looking pumpkin I can find. I like the long skinny ones or the oblong squished ones. In fact the weirder the better. I'm just not a fan of the round ones so much. I'm too much of a germaphobe to like the ones with the weird tumorous growths on them. You know what I'm talking about right; they’re usually like greenish in color and bubbly or pock marked... You'd think you could use that in making a more grotesque and monstrous display, like your pumpkin is crying out in anguish at his unfortunate skin circumstances, but I'll stick to the oddities of geometry for the purposes of this blog.

My favorite design is this: One HUGE round eye, one small round eye (sometimes with strait edge on top to imply anger or fear) and stitches for mouth. This guy has had his mouth stitched up and can now only express himself with wild and exaggerated eye movements. I also enjoy the wide open mouth from time to time. This is great if you have a really big (and hopefully terribly misshapen) pumpkin. Then you can even set a smaller pumpkin with a totally distraught and terrified look, half way into the mouth opening of the larger. This set up is sure to please the kids. "Look mom that huge one is eating the small one!" (What a great metaphor for society). With a simple scene set up like that, you're single handedly entertaining the youth (who will then think your great and not TP your house when they are teenagers), and being snarky enough that the adults will appreciate your wit.

Pumpkins with one side dangerously out of shape, or even flattened completely are great for scenes too. Use their oddity to your advantage. Make one cheek of the pumpkin the flat side like he is getting punched in the face or hit by a bus. You can use a Barbie Corevette and set up a horrific drunk driving crash scene. Any normal blonde Barbie will work great as a Paris Hilton or some tramp from The Hills, they’re all the same. I mean its Halloween its okay to be twisted. Try carving an open mouth and let the pumpkin insides come out of it like he's puking. I call that the Frat-guy pumpkin. Add a small Golden Tee game behind him and 4 more pumpkins with baseball hats on and you've got your self a fantastic ‘Any Lincoln Park Bar’ scene

In fact, let’s look at some more scenes we can set up in what I like to call:

Jay's Multiple Pumpkin set up ideas:

1. Get one very angry looking pumpkin and put him up on a box of some kind, maybe set up a microphone made out of a Cattail or some corn husks. Then, surround him with a half dozen or more smaller pumpkins like they are listening to his fiery and charismatic speech. (add tape recorded crowd cheers every 48 seconds for effect).

2. I've always enjoyed the idea of 2 mad scientist pumpkins operating on another pumpkin. You can open the ‘patient’ pumpkin up too; don't be afraid to get wild and gross with it. Leave some of the gross pumpkin innards coming out of the surgical opening like they are butchering the poor patient. And don't forget to put surgical masks on the 2 mad doctor pumpkins. And one surgeon needs that round thing doctors wear on their forehead, you can use a soup can lid for that.

3. Pumpkin Reenactments... Set up your pumpkins in famous historical or pop culture situations. Try:

- Storming the beaches of Normandy on D-Day - (Note: this requires anywhere from 20 to 137 pumpkins so plan this one with friends and neighbors unless you own your own pumpkin patch and/or have access to untold numbers of them)
- Salem Witch Trials - few girl pumpkins swing from ropes while townspeople pumpkins look on in shame and fear. (You can make those funny hats they wore with cloth table napkins).
- The moon landing. One small step for pumpkins, one giant leap for vegetables... (Make a flag with a carrot on it or something cute like that). Tin foil covered boxes make great Moon-lander ships

Great Movie Reenactments...
- The court seen in A Few Good Men when Jack Nicholson is berating Tom Cruize "... But deep down inside of places you don't talk about at cocktail parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall!" (Don't forget a 'cute as a button' Demi Moore pumpkin behind a table watching intently).
- 2 pumpkins with scarves on in a Barbie Corvette going over the edge of your porch like the last scene of Thelma and Louise.
- 2 pumpkins with bras on their heads making a hotass girl pumpkin like in Weird Science. Hook up electrodes to the hotass pumpkin and give her huge puffy Kelly Labrock lips (don't hate her cus she's beautiful).

Or some music related set ups:
- Janet Jackson pumpkin exposing herself to a Justin Timberlake pumpkin on national T.V. (try and add angry soccer mom pumpkins calling their state representatives and complaining about the state of pumpkin society)
- Try and find some really bland put perfectly shaped pumpkins and give them all head set microphones. POW. Pussycat Doll Pumpkins You’ll need to have some really talentless pumpkins; you may have to ask the sale guys for help, usually the talentless pumpkins grow right in the front of the pumpkin patch).
- Bono Pumpkin. I'm not 100% sure how to do this but it’s worth a shot. I'd go for the sweet 80's Mullet Bono pumpkin look, possibly saving Africa by meeting with heads of state pumpkins around a oval (not square) table.
- Bigge Smalls and 2-Pak pumpkins. Maybe a pumpkin with MC Hammer pants on hanging around too.

Well I hope this helps, Halloween is right about the corner so get to work. Let me know if any of these work for you, send pictures if you get a really sweet set up done.

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I could write a thousand and one songs... and they’d all have the word you in them.

Sticking around...

...maybe it's your morbid voyeuristic side that's a direct result of a swirling concoction of jaded Gen X-er, throw away pop culture, and too much reality TV. Maybe you just want to hang in there to see how I turn out... It can't be normal you know, it can't be just some semi-manicured greenish-yellow lawn with dog and SUV and a 401K... It has to be a 'Crash and burn' or 'Fizzle and burn' or a 'Fuk are we ever gunna fuking light this thing and burn here or what?' kind of outcome, there can be no sunset fade-out ending for Jay...

You stick around because you have VIP seating to an ultra low budget Greek tragedy and you've already read most of the script... you just have to hang in there for the 3rd act so you can answer all the exclusive 'insider questions' outside the theatre after the play...

J in L.A.

My trip to L.A. was amazing! I landed on Wednesday night and jumped a Super Shuttle van for what felt like 37 hours of going around in circles thru LAX fishing for more income for the driver. Made it to hotel around midnight and made instant friends with a young lady from NYC. I called her Parker Pose because she smiled a lot and had strait dark hair. The Standard Hotel is a 21+ only hotel (thank god), but doesn’t allow outside alcohol inside. This is a strange paradox to the hotels in the Midwest that all but encourage their patrons to fill the tub with ice and chill a case of Busch cans for the weekend. I went down to the over price diner and had a drink and then to the adjoining night club that was blaring hip-pop jams and got a drink 12 seconds before last call was announced.

Now, in Chicago “Last Call” means: “Hey everyone, we’re gunna close up soon so try and finish your drink while I tighty up my bar and dip these lipstick stained martini glasses into 3 sequentially less soapy sinks of water”… But in L.A. “Last Call” means large bouncers violate your personal space holding busboy tubs giving you thug looks while saying: “Let’s go, Let’s go, Let’s go now, NOW little man”, until you drop your .75% full drink that you just paid 8 dollars for into the bus-tub and walk away hoping you can make it to the door before getting pistol whipped.

After getting forced out of the club (right in the middle of T-Payne too), I retired for the evening.

The next morning I went shopping on Melrose… Now anyone that knows me knows that I do not swim… in fact outside of the spur of the moment cannon balls I did in St. Louis last summer with Tommy and 2Fresh in our underwear, I haven’t swam with premeditation since 2001 when I was in New Orleans. But when in Rome…

I stopped in a surf shop in what I then figured out was L.A.’s Boystown and found some sweet little Euro-Trunks. (I also found my 2010 Pride outfit but that’s for another blog).

The L.A. G-star is nice, albeit light in the cool jackets department, but the girls in the store were sweet and good re-folders of things I tried on and promptly discarded. One of them liked my pants so she was my favorite. I stopped in a few other stores and nosed around at a lot of bejeweled and distressed garments for the fall, nothing of which sparked much interest. I walked nearly 400 miles that afternoon in 176 degree heat so I needed a nap before rolling out to the show.

Apoptygma Berzerk was playing Knitting Factory and Brandon put me on the list so things were working out smooth. The show was full… full of L.A. Goths! I mean wildly dressed individuals in all manors of menacingly black layers of black on black in black with black accents. Some of them were so clad in black that they left a black trail of ashen liquid behind them – not unlike a squid or octopus would do – as their huge boots and tattered layers washed by me.

Aerodrone was on stage when I entered and I saw Carlton from The Dreaming looking a lot like Johnny Radtke. Tza was flipping her inhumanly pin strait hair around and looking cute as ever.

I talked with the dudes from The Surrender (who are fantastic by the way) and found about the after party plans. I watched Apop from the side of the stage. Logan played a song with them as did a heavily tattooed short guy in a little hat.

The after party was across the street at a club called Perversion. It looked like a lobby of a convention center with pounding goth jams in the main and side rooms. It felt like I was at Vampire High’s Home Coming 2009. No cool lights and no fog, just dark. I was at the bar waiting for a drink when a short guy covered in tattoos bellied up next to me and said hello. The music was pounding loud but we spoke back and for a while and he asked me where I was from. When I told him Chicago he asked if I knew Kill Hannah and I said that I was friends with Matt and he told me to tell Matt hello. I said I would and asked him his name, to which he replied “Vindy”. I remember thinking “Vindy is a strange name” but you know people have made up names all the time and he looked like a rock dude so Vindy it was, fine by me. So I texted Matt:

JR: Vindy says hello… P.S. I’m in L.A.

MD: Who’s Vindy? What, you’re in L.A.? Cool.

JR: Shorter guy like myself w/ little hat, covered in tattoos… how’s SWR tour?

MD: Vindy… No idea who that is, does he have a cane?

JR: No visible cane… little hat though

Hung with Apop and The Surrender at the Surrenders compound in West Hollywood till 4am talking about amps and drums and whatnot… Thanks for the ride Tyler… :D

----- next morning -----

MD: Yeah, no idea who Vindy is… have fun in L.A.

The next night I headed down town to an Art show that Kendra’s Chicago friend was having and ran into my friend Margot, promptly texted Peter in Boston to let him know I was having more fun then him now. I met up with my boy Hans who then brought us to the coolest night club I’ve ever been in. (Besides maybe Ghost Bar in Vegas). It was called the Edison and was in the basement of the historic Edison building down town. It was like a brick and Iron boiler room with LEDs and candle light accents. I guess this is 'Swank L.A.' Hans works for the club air brushing the models so he gets the hook up. After that we head to Das Bunker to catch the ‘secret’ Apop show. I begin to think that I’ve come to L.A. to study West Coast Goths versus Neo Goths for a compare and contrast term paper.

After the show (which sounded amazing), I’m back stage hanging with Brandon and in walks Vindy… I felt compelled to tell him but at the same time a bit nervous… finally I just say: “Matt said he didn’t know any Vindys”. He said “I’m Benji. Benji Madden” (from Good Charlotte). I then feel like a huge dick… Both of us pull out our phones and to text Matt. I can see what he’s typing

BM: You don’t know meeee mutha fuker? I’m with Jay Ramirez right now!

JR: I suck, it was Benji Madden from GC

MD: Tell him he owes me a steak!

We talked about the new GC record, which I guess is going to be huge and he was honestly the nicest guy ever, so down to Earth and cool.

Thanks for the Apop hoodie Stephen… (not pictured)

The next day my friend Margot took us up into the hills and I saw L.A. in the daylight. It was hot as all hell but very pretty. I saw a horse and a few thirsty dogs along the way as well.

That night I was ready for some L.A. glam rock so I went to Viper Room on Sunset Blvd. There was a dirty punk band playing upstairs and right before I was going to leave Vinny Appice got up and played Rock you like a Hurricane with them. Totally sweet! Then to Rainbow, which is like a rock-n-roll Denny’s with dirtier floors and smellier bathrooms. I met some Australians, talked about crocodiles, music and Squid Billies. Talked to Johnny Haro for bit and that was it. (Everything closes at 2am remember).

Sunday was my last full day so I planned on taking it easy. I was at Skin Graft trying on stuff when Sara T called me. When I told her I was in L.A. she screamed “WHAAA… So is Dan”. Turns out Madina Lake was in town shooting a video for Welcome to Oblivion. I met them up at Rainbow that night and we caught up. I guess Dave Navarro was there and I remember for a second being mildly amused by the idea of inspecting his perfectly manicured facial hair but soon lost interest in all that noise…

Cut to around 3:30am

Me to Mathew: “Are you sure you know where the Chamberlin is?”

Mathew: “Yup, dude yup, I know right where it is”

Dan texted me yesterday, him and the twins wondered around lost just after that… HA.

Nathan trying on Kendra's jacket, (the same one I had to wear to get into The Edison, 'L.A. Swank remember... they don't take kindly to t-shirts with Motley Crue on them I guess)...

Last Night...

The blast went off some hundreds of miles in the distance, but I saw the rushing wave coming for me with amazing speed, I fell into the ditch outside of my high school and buried my nose into my hands and my hands into the soft earth as the purple rush of radioactive debris flooded over me, I couldn’t breath and I might have screamed but the sound of a million gallons of water dumping into my ears was all I could hear. It was over just as fast and when I got up the landscape around me was deadly silent. Everything was light grayish-white and huge flakes of soft purple carcinogen snow floated lazily around me.
For the most part, the structures around me were still standing so I must have been farther from the blast then I thought. I contemplated how I could have witnessed the angry mushroom blast into the stratosphere and yet the flash didn’t instantly burn the eyes out of my head, or how the wave of irritated debris didn’t rip the flesh from my bones as it rushed over me at 250 miles an hour…

No matter for that now… I need to get home and load some guns, what if this is a movie and hordes of post apocalyptic zombie mutants will be coming for me… hungry for my brain or something.

I ran to the farthest northeast entrance of my high school and kicked the door in (something I always wanted to do), and looked around. It was pretty empty; it must be a weekend, or maybe summer break. I ran up and down the halls slipping on the freshly fallen purple snow. Aside from a few burned out corpses and charred books I didn’t find anything useful for any sort of zombie army defense. A boy I don’t know came around the corner and looked at me in horror. He didn’t look mutated or melted or anything but maybe I did… I simply grabbed his shirt and told him we better cover our noses because nothing purple should ever really be ingested. We both made makeshift surgical masks and I told him that he could tag along with me if he wanted but that I was headed for my parents house to make sure they were okay and to load some weapons.

We ran down the road to U.S. 31 and saw a small shack with 4 or 5 U-Haul vans outside in the dirt parking lot. There was a decaying dog still tied to it’s leash outside the door… I kicked the door in and found a few people inside huddled around the desk looking at papers. I told them I needed a van as I grabbed for the keys hanging on the wall. The eldest lady, who must have run the business didn’t seem willing to let me have the keys and began to raise a fuss about how she didn’t have the gas in them to just lend them out to whomever. I gave her a hard push and she toppled head-over-feet backwards. The purple snow had begun to subside over here, and as I looked out the tiny window next to the keylock box I saw some fires burning in the distance, toward Holland… toward my parent’s house… toward where I was headed. I looked back at the now decaying people sitting in there chairs, still studying the withered papers but now with empty eye sockets and leathery faces and I said: “I’ll return the van when I can… and you should have covered your mouths when the purple wind came”… I walked out without closing the door and found myself alone again. The kid must have run off, I didn’t need him anyway.

The van didn’t start right away and when it did it didn’t run very well, the air intake was choked by the nuclear fall out and it kept stalling on me. There were no other working cars on the road, just a few flipped over in the deep ditches along the sides of the highway. The sky was getting darker now, a deeper purple then the snow, but the ground was glowing softly like a low watt incandescent light… I thought about Chicago at 3am on a Wednesday night in January, when the ground was brighter then the sky like someone painted the landscape thinly on top of the surface of a huge light blub and you could look in every direction and see no living things. Just steal and concrete humming with a faint glow in soft fresh snow.

I crashed the van into the neighbor’s car next to our house, and then jumped out without turning it off. I ran up to the northern side of my parent’s house, my heart was pounding out of my chest, but something caught my eye in the backyard. Down near the creek where my birthday-tree was planted there was something shimmering golden-white. I had to run over to it to see what it was. On the edge of the creek embankment a fresh well had sprung and was pouring an opaque green liquid into the creek. It looked like Absinthe, frosty white-green and swirling with movement under its smooth surface. Under the shallow wake I saw coins of all different shapes and sizes, gold and silver and bronze coins, from ages ago and from millions of years in the future. I was afraid to reach into the water for fear my hand would melt off or freeze. I tore a branch from my birthday-tree and poked around in the shallow riverbed until I had pushed one of the coins onto the soft muddy bank. I picked it up and rubbed off the years of dirt that had crusted over the deeply cut design. The coin wasn’t in English but I could read the numbers: 08052057.

I know those numbers, August 5, 2057. It’s from my favorite short story from Ray Bradbury. It’s part of the reason I came up with the name of my band…

Without worrying about my hand melting off from the Absinthe colored spring, I shoved my hand deep into the opening and it was freezing cold inside. I shovel-cupped my hand and dredged out a huge bounty of coins and soft mud. I looked up into the sky and smiled at god for a moment. I kept digging for the next few minutes each time digging deeper and deeper into the increasingly larger hole and each time removing all manors of coins from throughout humanities existence. A great record keeper had made his stash right next to my birthday-tree and it took a nuclear accident for me to find it. I was sure that my life’s worries were over now. I wouldn’t have to pay any bills ever again… But was it because I found this strange treasure or because the Earth was destroyed and no one would come looking for me now? The deeper I dug the more I pulled out: Clumps of my curly hair as a child, my favorite childhood teddy bear that my niece accidentally burned when she stood him up against the electric space heater in my sister’s room when she was 6 years old. The dark blue plastic army guys I buried in the front yard when I was a kid… The car keys to my first car, my brown and green button down shirt that the paramedics cut off of my collage roommate Brent in the ambulance on the way to the hospital when he fell off the balcony at Michigan State and landed on his face. The tiny star necklace I bought for Mandy that she lost at work, my neon green drum sticks, my favorite drawing book with the dragon on the cover, the picture of Becky when she was a sophomore in art class, the shoebox with my marching band gloves and the broken snare drum parts I had under my bed… my stainless steal silver box my dad made that I had my 13 lucky buffalo nickels in. The coins were running out by my past wasn’t. It was pouring out faster then I could dig now, like if someone on the other side was pushing it out. Expelling it from the cold Earth onto the scorched and sickly post-nuclear landscape that I may have asked for just before I saw that blast tear open the sky back by my high school. But that’s where the dream began, there was nothing before, and I wouldn’t ask for that, I would never ask for a place for everything I had once been to be reborn, and even if I had, it wouldn’t have been a burnt and dead version of what my world was before that moment... That’s not worth reliving.

The City at Night

Where our broken bodies lie, the darkest clouds form…
Like Pagan sounds from the oncoming storm…
Hooks from the sky selling me sin
To the corner of the room I’ve backed myself in…

When you learn to lose, winning is okay too…

My collage roommate Brent was the greatest loser I’ve ever met. Sure he was as competitive as all American boys are taught to be, and he was good at a lot of things but losing was his specialty. He was great at Dr. Mario, walking on stilts, and making chicken wings in his Fry-Daddy, but what I remember the most was his ability to continuously lose at the sports video game John Madden Football. He and my other seemingly well adjusted roommate Chris use to play John Madden Football every single night for at least 3 years. Brent never won. Now when I say ‘never’ I don’t mean it flippantly or for dramatic effect either. I mean Chris kicked the pants off of Brent every single time they played the game for the duration of our roommatehood. But Brent would take these beatings with an eloquent and almost inhuman grace. See Brent came from a very small town and went to a very small rural high school in northern Michigan. I think he told me that he graduated with 36 other students. Like all good American boys he played a number of organized high school sports, and partly because of his athletic ability, but mostly due to the sobering fact that the athletically capable student population was so minuscule; Brent played offense, defense, and special-teams on his school’s varsity football team.

One night when we were profoundly drunk, and without a single female in a 10 mile radius of our apartment, he told us all matter-of-factly something equally as profound as our collective intoxication level. He explained that on Homecoming night of his senior year, which was October 17th and the day he turned 17, (His Golden Birthday), he caught a diving 4th quarter game winning touchdown pass in the end zone with time running out on the clock. Later that night he smoked a huge joint in the back of his good friend’s car listening to Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing while getting drunk on warm cans of Coors Light beer. And even later that night he had sex with a girl after the Homecoming Dance (where he may have been crowned Homecoming King, I can’t remember if that is just my subconscious trying to inflate the story for dramatic effect or not, but just doing the math on that would give him an 18.5% chance of being the actual Homecoming King. And that is if every single senior attended the dance which is highly unlikely. I’m sure the Stoners and Gearheads where out smoking pot behind a dumpster and missed the whole event because they were to busy talking about how they’d still have sex with Tori Spelling even though she looks like a horse). Brent said after that night, losing didn't matter to him anymore. That was it… this guy didn’t mind losing! Well that’s just flipping everything Western Culture holds sacred on its head isn't it...

Being a known Dove like that has its drawbacks though. Once other dudes learned this character trait of Brent’s and realized they could rack up countless W’s onto their personal self-esteem scoreboard in any sort of contest they wished, lines formed around the block with Michigan’s male youth waiting to beat the pants off of Brent in sport or other games of chance and wit. I imagine that this is what a hooker must feel like with countless suburban, often married men, ejaculating into and onto them night after night without ever so much as a tickle of enjoyment gained. (Sorry that was gross).

One of my very last memories of Brent and Chris playing Madden Football came after I had already graduated from collage but was still living in the house in a vain attempted to hold onto my irresponsibility as long as I could. It was a typical Wednesday night (or Saturday night I don’t remember). Every TV in the house was on, fighting for volume supremacy with the horrid jam-band music billowing out of my trust-fund-kid-pothead roommate’s shithole of a room. 4 smoldering cigarettes for every 1 conscious occupant of the house, and a menagerie of clear, brown, green, tall, and chubby beer bottles in various states of emptiness and temperature placed atop all manors of flat surfaces or the floor. Brent and Chris were locked in another epic battle of electronic versions of real athletes running and tackling and blitzing each other all over the place. The TV was humming with the vibrations of charged electrons and sweet-ass 64-bit graphics. I think it was storming outside or it was leap year, something was amiss from what I can remember. But this was the night, this was THE night… Brent was up by some number of touchdowns on Chris and time was running out. Everyone gathered to witness this bit of folklore in the making and it was eating Chris alive. Honestly I rarely spent any time around them when they played that game because watching two people play a videogame is on par with watching a grasshopper scratch his head with his huge back leg… although faintly amusing in some sense, it’s mostly just boring as all hell. But when history is being made the bandwagon seems to run out of window seating rather quickly. As time ticked away, Chris was trying some desperate tactics. From what I can surmise this meant throwing the long bomb on every offensive down and blitzing Brent’s quarterback on every defensive play in hopes of causing a turn over. But Brent was picking up the defensive trickery and covering all of the deep wide-outs with no problems, while also covering the flats for any would be quick slants. (Why the fuk do I know this stuff? What is wrong with me). Toward the end of the 4th quarter Chris attempted what was in the sports world referred to as the ‘nail in the coffin’ play. A quick-slant pass to a wide receiver that Brent’s safety anticipated, picked-off, and ran back for a touchdown. (Complete with high stepping and end zone spike graphics to roaring digital crowd cheers). Chris grit his teeth together with so much force - accompanied by a guttural moan - that a sizeable triangular shaped piece of his front tooth chipped off and flew about 4 feet strait ahead, hitting the TV screen and landing on the beer stained but still quite sky-blue shag carpet in front of us all. Brent didn’t throw any high-fives, he didn’t brag or do any retarded end zone dances. He calmly set the games joystick down, lit a cigarette and walked out of the room to retrieve a colder beer. It seems like everyone else spoke of this moment for weeks but Brent never said a word about it. I guess when you’ve got the whole losing thing down… winning doesn’t really matter all that much either.

Jay's Soup Cube. Episode 1 (The Pilot)

Hi and welcome to Jay's Soup Cube, I'm your host Jay.

Today we're going to try the Healthy Choice Old Fashioned Chicken Noodle (with white meat only) from ConAgra Foods Inc.

After placing into a ceramic bowl, this canned delight cooked up in a jiff on high in the microwave. A dash of pepper and a healthy splash of Tobasco Sauce later and you're ready to go. Today's accompaniment is a Turkey and Swiss sandwich on whole wheat bread with Jay's brand hot chips and a pickle on the side. (slurp)

---eat eat eat, sip sip sip --- (Time is elapsing)

Over all I'd give this soup a 4 stars out of five. With it being touted as "Healthy" and all (note the little running man next to the 'C' in 'Choice' denoting that either: A) This soups so good you need to run to the store to buy some, B) People who run for fun tend to enjoy this soup rather then say... the Meatnormus Rib-n-Giblets Triple Cheese Burger at Burgers King or C) If you eat this soup to fast you may need to run to the bathroom), the most obvious thing you taste is the lack of sodium. We Americans love our salt and when embargoes are placed on it by Socialist companies like ConAgra Foods Inc. (the 'Con' stands of Con-munists Universal Health Care Plan Supporters I'd imagine my Super-Republican co-worker would accuse), our taste buds can pick up on it right away. Aside from the salt deficiency (there-by increasing my chances of getting a neck goiter I'm sure), what I did find refreshing was the "Only White Meat" aspect of this soup. See, every can of chicken based foodstuffs almost always claims to be made with 'only' white meat. But anyone who has ever had a can of soup knows that sometimes when that chicken-colored object that is floating at the rim of the bowl as buoyantly as a chubby kid at the community pool, it is anything but "white meat". You're never quite sure what it is exactly but you're sure as shit it isn't white meat. (It's gizzards or chicken ankle fat I always assume). The Tyson Mechanically Separated Chicken Pieces Machine never bats a thousand, we all know this. But every piece of chicken in this soup was in fact white meat chicken from what I could tell so I'm happy with it. I'd say to buy this soup when you are in need of a saltless good time and don't have hours to spend hand separating your chicken carcasses.

Tune in next time for Jay's Soup Cube when I try another brand of canned domesticated fowl in liquid.

Thanks and have a nice day.

Healthy Choice Old Fashioned Chicken Noodle (with white meat only) - 0 0 0 0 o

Trying to think of a word I like better then Motto or Mantra because those words both suck

comasoftjay: Mantra… hmmm that is better then Motto I suppose but it is still not that great of a word. I need something stoic and possibly Russian sounding I think. Something iron and rust clad, something that sounds cold-war era and rigid. Something like (this is a completely made up word): Afrendendo… or... Carthogen...
cxxxxxxx2: than use that
comasoftjay: hmm but it doesn't mean anything... i just made those up...
comasoftjay: Cadre'
comasoftjay: I think really like that word despite its negative connotations. Maybe I could say The Imperial Cadre of the Divine Jay Ramirez say: and then place my statement right after that!
cxxxxxxx2: sure you can do whatever you want
comasoftjay: This would give the implication that I'm a tyrannical dictator of some hopelessly poor and backward country, and that my Cadre' of military police recite my doctrines in the street whilst dolling out fair or unfair justice heavy handedly on the oppressed populous, all while I’m resting comfortably in my imperial palace... eating grapes and watching American cartoons on the TV Lookiddy Box.
cxxxxxxx2: you are a very strange boy Jay…

Swimming lessons sucked

Growing up, my mother forced me to do a number of team oriented physical activities I had zero desire to do. One of the worst things I can remember was learning to swim. I understand the need to be able to survive in water, especially growing up in close proximity to Lake Michigan and having 2 boats in the family. But my mother would simply come home and walk into whatever room I happened to be playing toys in, and say “I signed you up for (insert sport here), you start next Wednesday”, and I would stair blankly back up at her, holding a few plastic dinosaurs or some army guys without saying a word. Later at night I would dread the coming shame and embarrassment that would befall a: shorter then average, weaker then average, Hispanic kid with no muscle structure what so ever, when faced with physical competition against 6 foot Dutch blonde people with size 13 shoes. (Our girl’s volleyball team never lost a game as long as my school existed. They’d just stand in front of the net with their hands up and block every serve from the opposing team. They always reminded me of those furry-footed creatures that lived on the Island of the Goons in the Popeye cartoons).

At first, I thought that swimming seemed more like a singular sport and that I might be able to just wade around in the shallow end and keep out of sight when they asked for relay race volunteers. Sadly, such luck would not be on my side. Right off the bat they wanted us to learn to jump in… the thought of which, my young mind was not ready to handle. (Jump in? You mean I’m all dry and warm right now and you want me to just jump in? It’s freezing for one thing, and looks deep as hell on top of that… AND well quite frankly, I’m not convinced that there aren’t any eels in there either just waiting to slither around my legs and possible eat them off). I remember kicking and screaming and raising a fuss about it, which was not easy to do in front of a bunch of super cute collage girl instructors who were just trying to make a few dollars over the summer to spend on booze and pizzas in the fall. One particular blonde instructor captured my heart in her bright red bathing suit, and after a while I began to warm up to the idea of jumping into certain death as long as she’d be there to blow precious oxygen into my lungs to save my possibly legless life after I sank the bottom and died. (Remember those eels would be starving).

Now I had been in deep water before, I was that kid at the public pool wearing those arm swimmies but still trying to pull off the cool thing… even though everyone my age was doing can-openers off the diving board without the need for self-contained inflated technology attached to their bodies. My arms were so hopelessly skinny when I was a kid that when I did jump in the water I would immediately sink while my arms shot strait up and the swimmies slide up to my equally tiny wrists. From a submerged window I would have looked like I was doing underwater jumping jacks I think.

Anyway, when the day came that I couldn’t weasel my way out of jumping into the deep end any longer, I decided that the only course of action to save my young life that I could take was to jump directly onto the young instructor while she treaded water in front of the spot I was suppose to jump into. I figured my charm and cuteness would negate any of the bruising about the head and shoulders our watery collision may cause her. My plan worked in the fact that I’m still alive and currently writing this essay. It did however make that young co-ed rather uncomfortable when my foot landed directly at the breast line of her red swimsuit and snapped down, exposing her collage aged boobs to everyone, as gravity pulled both me and her suit down into the water. I think I’ve liked girls in red bathing suits ever since that day. (High five).

Always with the soup!

There is something I will never let go of as long as I live. And that is my love of KillerSoup. When filling out social networking profiles or doing interviews for rock and roll stuff, the question is almost always asked about my favorite food. I think pizza is usually everyone else’s choice, that or sushi if they are female and a fan of Sex in the City. (I would venture to say that Sex in the City single handedly made sushi the most talked about food stuffs for 20 and 30-something females who get together in groups of 2 or larger. If they are not meeting for sushi later that afternoon, they are almost certainly feeling bloated from eating too much of it the night before but can’t wait until Thursday after Grey’s Anatomy to do it again).

ANYWAY, my favorite food is KillerSoup. KillerSoup is an Americanized and/or Bastardized version of the Mexican soup called Cauldo. (If you were talking to my mother, she would embrace the more negative connotation as she feels my dad ruined her mothers version sometime in the mid 1980’s). It was aptly named “KillerSoup” by accident. As I’ve said before my mother is extremely religious and does not allow works of the devil in her household. This means that my dad drinks and smokes in the garage and we all try our hardest to not swear around her (which keeps getting harder and harder the older I get).

Growing up my mom worked a normal 9 to 5 work day, but my dad worked second shift so he would leave for work at 3pm. That means that I would have the house to myself for a few hours after school pretty much throughout my school years. This worked out great for playing the drums every day after school without bothering anyone. And in high school this also worked out fantastically for my dope smoking friends that were hungry and didn’t want to show up at their own homes with bloodshot eyes until their bellies were full. My dad was a cook in the army, so he was always both: cooking, and cooking too much food for a small family like mine. So no one seemed to care (or know) that my high-as-all-hell friends would come over every day and munch on whatever my dad had cooked before leaving for work. He made this soup in a gigantic pot. I mean HUGE, you could stir it with an ore… it took up 2 burners on the stove… it was so big it pretty much meant that you’d have left over’s for a good 4 to 5 days. The day my dads soup became KillerSoup is still vivid to me. It was a rather warm Saturday afternoon in the spring and all the windows and doors were open blowing in some much needed fresh air after the long winter’s death-lock grip on our western Michigan community. My mother was in the living room watching her usual scam artist religious guy in a fancy pastel suit, bilk the elderly and weak minded out of their hard earned money. I was warming up some left over soup when my friends Jeff and Drew pulled up in Jeff’s black Grand Am (with sweet tinted windows no less). I could hear the Bulletboys playing Smooth Up in the tape deck before I heard the engine of his car outside the slider door.

Drew and Jeff came in smiling from ear to ear, no doubt high as hell and probably still laughing about something infinitely funny to only someone who is: 16, high, and male. They both sat down at the table and I added some more soup to my smaller pot which was nearing its eating temperature without even asking if they wanted any. Once the 3 of us had our bowls and began eating Jeff and I both began to watch Drew shovel the soup into his mouth with extreme prejudice. He was attacking the soup… he was owning the soup… he was devouring it’s essence for all he had and his long, stringy, bleach-blonde bangs were dipping into the broth without him even batting a bloodshot eye about it…

Jeff and I began to laugh at the sight of this kid going balls-out on the soup when Drew noticed we were making fun of him… He looked up from the hunched over the bowl position and uttered some words to us as some of the soup began to spill out of his mouth and back into the bowl: “This is some Killer fuking soup!” Needless to say .235 seconds after that my mother flipped out at this blasphemous speak in her godly household and we were all sent out of the house to finish our soup on the deck and contemplate our misdeeds in the eyes of god. Since that day there isn’t anyone that knows me that doesn’t call that soup KillerSoup. It just IS KillerSoup now.

Here is my KillerSoup recipe incase anyone wants to try and make it. Good luck:

KillerSoup, by Jay

This is a magical soup passed down from my grandmother to my father. Legend has it the Spanish Conquistadors would eat this soup before going out and Conquistadoring around… and during the infamous Spanish Inquisition they would lower you into a vat of boiling KillerSoup to see if you were a Christian… if you liked the soup your life was spared as long as you agreed that Intelligent Design is not a Science and shouldn’t be taught in our high schools… (I couldn’t agree more)… KillerSoup is great for a hang over and for a cold fall day. It is best in the winter though, when you can make a huge pot and eat it for days with out having to go out side and it warms your entire apartment while cooking, but you can still enjoy KillerSoup in the summer just remove your clothing down to your underwear before eating, that’s what I do, you’ll be fine.

Okay so measuring cups are for sissy’s so depending on the size of your pot… (I use one of those large soup pots you can get at Target or whatever.

Ingredients:
Stew meat. (Usually 2 packs of the 2.oo size at the market)
5 potatoes (Idaho makes the best ones I think)
Veggies (depending on what ones you like, must use Celery for the flavor though).
chopped 4 Celery, 4 big carrots, 10 mushrooms, 1 ripe tomato, 2-3 corn on the cobs (or can of white/yellow corn in the winter when cobs are hard to find).
1 big can of White Homney. Goya brand in the Mexican food section. They look like white Corn-nut shaped balls.
1 small cabbage. Either those little wrinkled Boston Cabbages or just use half of a reg. big cabbage.
4-5 beef bouillon cubes.
liberal amounts of the following spices: Italian dressing, A1 steak sauce, salt, pepper, cumin, lemon pepper, season salt, oregano, parsley, red pepper, save some of the top of the celery, the leafy part and chop it up) bay leaf.
Lime
Corn tortillas
Can of tomato sauce

Process:
put meat into some chopped onion and Worcestershire or a few hours or the night before your going to make the soup. (if you have the time).
fill pot half way with water and start that sucker boiling on high
you have some time to kill now so chop up everything EXCEPT the potatoes (they will oxidize and turn brown like a bit apple super fast).
when water is roiling add the meat and some of the juice along with the chopped up large tomato and bay leaf. Let boil for at LEAST 2.5 hours (the longer you boil the meat the softer it will be when you eat it). ck back a lot and keep adding water because it will evaporate away. After few hours the meat should be able to fall apart with little effort while slicing thru it with a fork. Add some more water so the pot is again little over half full
add 4 or so bouillon cubes. All the spices can of tomato sauce, three or so big squeezes of the Italian dressing, splash of A1, chopped celery leaves. The sauce should now look red… you can drop a splash of V8 juice in there as well if your feeling funky like that… let boil for a good 15 min…
when the soup looks good and mixed up (the tomato should be all shredded up and broken down by now). add all the veggies starting with the now pealed potatoes. This will fill a LARGE portion of the pot so good thing you didn’t put to much water in or you’d be overflowing soup all over your stove right now…
lower the heat off of high but still with some power and let that sucker boil. The cabbage and mushrooms should be floating on the top…

Option: Add a small hand full of white rice. (it will sink and you’ll never see it again!).

Essentially the soup is done when the potatoes are done… you have to keep checking it (DO NOT STIR IT A LOT or YOU’LL MAKE IT INTO MUSH). When the potatoes are firm but split in half easy its done… don’t over cook because when you turn it off its still hot as hell and will continue to “cook” for an hour or so. You’ll prolly screw this up a few times, so you’ll have flaky broken potato pieces in your soup but its still good and don’t be discouraged… Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Warm up a corn tortilla and chop the lime up. Serve in a big bowl with those lime as garish. Sprinkle a touch of parsley or your favorite spice on top, roll the corn tortilla and dip it in the juice… yum.

Sing this song after your done eating:

“Thank you KillerSoup… thank you…
For being so good to my face and belly…
Thank you KillerSoup… we will always love you
Until the day that we are dead and can’t eat soup anymore…
Harp solo
We are looking into a way to embalm our bodies with KillerSoup though…
Thank youuuuu.”

Then take a nap, store soup in Tupperware in frig, and make sure you eat It all with in about 4-5 days… Taking bowls to work to share with co-workers is a good way to make friends and get people to come to your rockbands shows, just tell um the story about it proper…

(Respect Knuckles… out)

Rain serves only the following purposes

- Making things soggy
- Messing up my hair
- Taking an accurate census count of worms

The Troubadours of Andromeda and beyond

The virus is a perfect design. Any alien beings that choose the dangerous occupation of interstellar space exploration would undoubtedly take the shape of the common T4 Virus. Our sun is a 3rd generation yellow dwarf about midway through it’s main sequence. That means it has been converting hydrogen into helium for around 4.75 billion years without any sticks in the spokes. Earth is roughly the same age as it was formed from the table scraps left over from the core collapse that formed the Sun. So the life forms on Earth have had slightly less then that long to evolve. (Keeping in mind that the Earth was molten hot for a while, then poisonous, and has had some major pain in the ass mass extinctions every once in a while… sorry Trilobites, you had your 100 million year reign).

But there are some stars that are much older then our star. Some red dwarf stars can shine for 100s of trillions of years and have been around since the dawn of our universe some 13.4 billion years ago. Now I know that it is precisely the material ejected from supernova explosions of massive stars that makes the periodic buffet-table so diverse today. We have fantastic elements to work with like Carbon and Silicon that make totally sweet chains and lattices for building complex organisms. But let’s suppose life arose on a planet whose star had been shining for 8 or 9 billion years; almost twice as long as ours. Life on a world like that could have had many millions or even billions of years to evolve. (Baring too many catastrophic extinctions of course). Intelligent life on that world could have a considerable leg (or legs) up on our primitive asses. One thing they’d want to figure out how to do is safeguard their species from mass extinction brought on by catastrophic events like large asteroid impacts, gamma ray bursts, or harassment from geological phemonia like planet quakes and super volcanoes. After this was handled they could get down to the serious business of making themselves immortal. We all know that one of the greatest thrills for creatures who have mastered self-awareness is the curious business of the exploration of the unknown. (Think about the sport of Sky Surfing or Half Pipe Snow Boarding). Any Intelligent beings would know pretty quickly that the vacuum of space is a foreboding place to play. Radiation, cosmic rays, extreme temperatures and distances… space junk… I mean there are a lot of things that can kill a squishy bodied traveler out there.

Some designs don’t change much over time. Alligators and sharks have changed very little in the 300 million years they’ve been around. Basically they are mouths with a propeller. Pretty good design! Some creatures will actually de-evolve when some of their given traits are deemed unneeded. Snakes, also basically a mouth with a propeller, decided to shed their legs altogether because they kept getting caught up on things when trying to slide down the burrow-holes in pursuit of some tasty snack. Possibly when pursuing a mole, who over time, decided to pass on the eyesight option. (Kind of like people who own convertible cars not paying the extra $900.00 for the air conditioning option).
The Arthropod would be a great design for space travel. Keep all your squishy stuffs, (or ‘innards’ like my dad likes to say), on the inside and protect yourself with a hard case. The common virus looks a lot like a very tiny crustacean. Our space heroes would have integrated the seemingly inevitable concept of bio-mechanics and perfected the design by the time they were ready to depart on the greatest journey of their collective lives. “Okay kids, everyone go pee and shed your dermis before we leave… we have 687 Quadrillion miles before our first stop”

The top of the virus shape can be the Super-Converting/Ultra-Filteration/Hyper-Propellant/Flux-Capacitor/Ionizer and Britta Machine. This way our intrepid friends can land on any planet deemed interesting without worrying about risky things like breathing toxic air or the local Rhinovirus. (No amount of penicillin will suffice against the dangers of some Jungle Flu from the carbon swamps along the equatorial regions of Proxa Phi -X4799-B3).

The bottom of the structure will be the landing gear and will also make a great set of legs for scurrying about the surface and turning over rocks in search of interesting goo. Over all size will not matter so much. Our explorers can be the size of a pea or as large as a hippo, the propellant system they devise will be more then adequate to get around.

The last thing our brainy friends will borrow from the T4 virus design deals with propagation of the species. That’s right, I hate to admit it but A-sexuality seems to be the best bet for making copies of one’s self one in deep space. And it will save a lot of time and money wasted on dinner and retarded romantic comedies every Saturday night. (Finally there will be no need for Ben Stiller and Mathew McConaughey any longer).

Have these beings been here to Earth yet? I’m sure of it, but they don’t look like shaved hydrocephalic toddlers bent on ass-raping rednecks and their livestock in remote rural locations. They simply stop in and look around, take a few notes and move on…

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Space Log 29938849930-1
-Liquid iron-core igneous and sedimentary rock planet 3rd out from main sequence yellow dwarf star.
-Healthy tectonic activity.
-Surface covered in liquid water.
-Planet nearly covered in carbon based life forms.
-Mouth and Propellant seems to be the dominant design.

----------------------------------------------------------------

What are you a sissy?

For all intensive purposes, I am. To 99% of the male population on Earth I would seem that way at least. I wear smeared pastel blue make-up, nail polish, and girls pants. I know very little about and can’t stand sports of any kind, and I don’t ever say the word “Bro”… ever. The curious thing about all of this is that I have a very staunch stance on what I believe is ‘sissy’ as well. For instance, I would never wear sandals or say the words “Mocha Soy Latte” out loud. To me, smeared dirty make-up and long hair is the epitome of Rock N Roll. That’s 80’s Sunset Strip Glam Rock at it’s finest. And those guys nailed more females then almost any other archetype of male ever. (I am convinced that Silicon Valley Ultra-Geeks blow through 3 hookers at a time nightly, but they are paying for that sex so it’s not a fair comparison). I think the distinction here is that the perception of ‘sissy’ and the concept of ‘gay’ are blurred into the eye of the beholder. (Eye shadowed or not). To me sharing my bent-rim baseball cap collection with 4 other sports obsessed, porn addicted, high five throwing, beer-bloated roommates seems sissy.

Maybe ‘sissys’ are any and all males that are not like either Vince Vaughn or Crocodile Dundee. Those two chaps show us that ‘Real Men’ exist in both urban and rural environments. (Not to mention that they only eat food that requires a lot of chewing). And well, if real men can exist in those completely dichotic locations, then God-damnit they’re everywhere!

I guess I’m okay with being a sissy. I don’t mind it much… I get called a fag or Pete Wentz a lot, but things could be much worse. No one has thrown rocks at me or dropped an anvil on my head as I walked by a jagged cliff. I did almost get beat up by 4 frat guys outside of the Wiener Circle a few summers ago. I pulled out my pocket knife and told them that they may in fact kick my teeth in, but the first guy that charged me was going to have to be holding his innards from spilling out of his abdomen on the way to the hospital, and that it would make quite a mess in the backseat of his buddies Honda Civic. They left me alone and I found it ironic when I woke up the next day and was able to tell people that they were the ones hanging out a place called the Wiener Circle.

Hell

Forget all that fire and brimstone, horned half-goat fallen angel, and burning in lakes of fire for some eternal damnation bullshit. Hell is a never ending office job with no windows. It’s always 2:17pm, and you will be uncomfortable from over eating at lunch time in a vain attempt at infusing a tiny fraction of happiness into your existence. When you walk to the water cooler there will be people congregated there whose names you can’t remember but who know your name and talk to you about things you don’t care about… mostly how you look like some guy on American Idol and/or Chris Angel, or if you enjoy Ugly Betty as much as they do. When you walk into the bathroom, each stall will be filled with grown men flipping through pages of magazine and newspapers which will further perpetuate your already slightly above moderate germaphobia. You will not be able to relieve yourself either. Not because you have that clichéd ‘Urinal Shyness’ hack writers always use as lame ‘Dude-Joke’ punch lines in retarded frat-boy movies like The 40 Year Old Virgin, but because you are in fact in Hell and that would make things to easy. That coupled with the fact that the newspapers readers are also flatulating like a fuking 4 bassoon quartet and you just want to get out of the room as fast as you can. Running out the door will only return you instantly to the very spot you were sitting when you looked at the corner of your computer screen and saw that it was only 2:17pm and started to feel like maybe you should go take a piss.

Animals make a lot of sense

I can’t decide if I’d rather be a panther or a snake. I’m not all that crazy about heights and I realize that both the panther and the kind of snake I would want to be (the Emerald Tree Boa), live a majority of their lives in the canopy of the jungle, but I seem to really enjoy the idea of it. Maybe it’s some weird over compensation for being short all my life and never really getting to see the movies or concerts I went to all that well. Aside from the lofty choice of home base of these 2 creatures, it’s their sleekness and utter invisibility in silent hiding that intrigues me. Lying in wait for countless hours until just the right moment to pounce on your prey seems like a lot of fun. That and I think both creatures take an inordinate amount of naps during the day and I’m an all out sucker for that.