Joe Holman's Blog

Save-the-World Syndrome: Aspiring Harlots Rise Up

2012-01-22T08:19:00.000-06:00

I don’t know why, but nearly every insecure little slut I have ever known has one thing in common with all the rest—they have this falsely philanthropic notion of saving humanity with their newfound knowledge of what works to have a better life.

Well, I take that back. I do know why, I think; women (and it’s usually the women) suffer from low self-esteem on the deepest levels. Be it a bad body image or a feeling of being inferior while not being able to make and sustain relationships, these marred women or girls give themselves away early in life and make it a habit to keep on doing so. They become sluts taking dick from guys they barely know in a vain effort to feel happy.

Women are what keep the world going with or without beauty, but if you want to see something ugly, look at a broken, hurting woman. It’s a sad sight to behold. A woman who hates herself can never be pretty because she can never feel pretty. All the flowers in the world sent with the most well-worded cards of deer drinking from ponds will never come close to making her feel any prettier.

So, in despair, a broken girl will become a slut, and before long, she’ll be so used to it that she convinces herself they she is happy taking in 8.9-inch, uncircumcised black cocks. You won’t be able to convince her otherwise because part of being a marred, stupid little bimbo means having to learn everything from scratch and on her own. There is no imparting wisdom. I have known enough of these little failures to know that what I’m saying is true.

On the loneliest of nights, after a few drinks – feeling rejected by her boyfriend after an argument – this little trollop will once again consider suicide (and she may have tried it multiple times already). It is in these moments of gut-wrenching, suicidal despair that she sees clearly: She isn’t really happy and she suspects she will never be. But then the tears dry up and the next day dawns.

The sun is out and the problem is back—the stupid little tramp thinks she’s happy again and has a purpose. It was just a bad night. Being a dumb girl means being insane—assuming that given the exact same choices made, the results will somehow be different. That’s the textbook definition of insanity.

It won’t take long for reality to come crashing back down, but in that time, she’ll forget again because defense mechanisms are what keep us going. If she doesn’t bleed out in the shower from slitting her wrists, she’ll keep the cycle going until she’s old, weathered, and still unhappy as shit, hitting up dudes at smoke-filled bars looking for the midnight meat from some guy who smells of cheap vodka to make her happy.

Maybe moving on will consist of making a new boyfriend. She’ll bring him home sooner rather than later and she’ll say she thinks the world of him. If she’s a white girl, she’ll bring home a black guy or someone of a different ethnicity. There is nothing wrong with that, but with troubled girls, they do so because people who communicate as they have been taught to communicate intimidate them. They feel that they can better hold down a conversation longer with someone who expresses themselves differently. This will prolong her own illusion of happiness by not having to cross the same bridge of problem solving in communicating that always manages to jinx her timid, pathetic efforts at feeling loved.

So the girl goes a few months without a catastrophe, a devastating breakup or some crisis, and this usually coincides with finding some new hobby or outlet of energy (something more than coffee, cigarettes, and exercise as a way to vent anger).

She may get involved in a church program. She may even prove a very zealous convert for a while, but because she is still fundamentally stupid and can’t keep relationships, she’ll have a run-in with the group or someone in it and the countdown to self-destruction will once again start ticking.

She may get involved in a charity program, some volunteer effort like saving animals, or she may dedicate to playing bingo on Wednesdays nights with old ladies who cannot do or say anything that threatens her or makes her feel stupid. She knows more about modern trends and dirty talk than all of these 70-year-olds put together, which makes her feel smart. Around them, there is nothing she could perceive as a threat.

So, troubled girl finds an outlet. It lasts a really long time. This makes the simple girl think that what she has will solve her problems forever and always. She has no idea that when thinking this, she’s only a short walk away from more disaster. But before disaster strikes is where she blooms (at least in her mind).

“I just want to help people find hope.” Such tearful words. You can add: “find God,” “know the Lord,” “know that their lives have meaning,” etc. It’s all the same bullshit—“I just want to be a good person and help others.” My response is always the same: “Help yourself first, you dumb-ass bitch!”

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions as the religious say, then much more so is the road to stability. Every lunatic wants to do good things and they want to be sane. Every murderer I ever read about at some point wanted to influence society in a positive way. The problem is, being unstable means you can’t keep walking the road for long. If you could, the saying wouldn’t be true. Every unstable person wants to give to others what worked for them. And it’s natural for anyone to want to talk about what changed their life, but this is where the problems begin.

As humans, we cannot grasp the fact that people are at different places in life and won’t always respond to the same advice. There is no right perception. We’re all trapped in our own houses of mirrors and we can’t easily find the exit doors. You've got to go through the maze first. It’s all a matter of stumbling into one room, finding it a dead end, backing up, and trying to remember which way you came. Sometimes you think you’re on a roll. Then you have to contend with setbacks, until finally, you find out how to get out. You won’t be of much help to anyone else.

The one who is the least expressive about doing the most good in life is the one I lean toward trusting. It’s amazing how people and their groups shoot themselves in the foot by making promises and declaring intentions with many well-spoken words—then I stand back and wait to see them backfire horribly. Until you can knock down everyone’s house of mirrors, don’t be so anxious to promise a way out.

There is no saving the world. There is no making someone feel better. There is no feeding every starving African. Might as well spend your money on you first. If you have any left over after necessities and taxes, then we’ll see about helping others. And if you give to charity, all you will get is more phone calls and junk mail from other charities trying to exploit your generosity. Fuck them!

Has your mother ever tried to comfort you when your feelings were hurt as a kid? Did it ever work even one time that you can remember? No, because what your friends were saying was true: You weren’t the handsomest kid, nor the best athlete who could give the bigger kids a run for their money. No, what makes moms moms is that they have been placed in your life by causality to make maturity in this life as fucking difficult as possible. Those that are finally growing up will probably always have a place in their hearts for dear ole’ mom, but they will gradually see the sense in not listening to her.

Like mom's powerlessly soothing words, philanthropic efforts are just retries at preoccupying those who are suffering for the purpose of reinstalling the illusion that things will get better. Say it enough and people start believing it against all other evidences. Things may indeed get better, but your promises have made things a thousand times worse—and not just for the troubled girl, but for anyone going through a crisis.

Maybe your encouragement of a troubled girl will help her to not go for that razor blade in the shower after all, but for how long? And if they weren’t going to go for the razor in the first place, then congratulations: You did fucking nothing. They could handle it on their own by themselves.

(JH)

A Walk Down Silver Sands

2011-12-04T23:30:00.001-06:00

It was 2010 at around 7:30 pm. It started to rain. The early summer humidity is fogging up dad’s glasses and the windows of the house. There are a few bugs flying around inside. The AC feels good. What doesn’t is the family atmosphere. We’ve been at each other’s throats all day. The only thing we can all agree on is that it’s time to eat. But what?

Pizza. At least we agree on the type of food. Sis is bitching in the living room, so is mom. Dad is blasting the both of them to get them to shut the hell up. Sis kept demanding we try this new pizza kitchen off of Silver Sands and Blanco roads called The Chicago Pizza Kitchen. We had never tried it. “It’s THE best pizza you will ever have, I promise you!” she kept saying.

We’re finally in the car and I am playing with my new cell phone while hearing: “Strap her in!” “I did strap her in! She took it off! She’s old enough to do that now! God!” “All I’m saying is, sit back there next to her and stop her when she does it!” “Uh…will you fucking shut the fuck up?! I am!” “Does she have her pacifier?” “Yes, I mean, no, I left it inside.” “Well, go get it.” “She can go 20 minutes without it.” “Not if she falls asleep on the way. She’s going to want it!” “I said, shut the fuck up! I’m serious! I’m not taking this shit anymore! I’m the mom! I said its o-fucking-kay!”

At this point, sis isn’t yet totally off of drugs, and low blood sugar + mental illness would get the best of us—not counting what happened a month earlier when some loser doing drugs next to her in a parked car ODed and bit the dust right then and there. We aren’t expecting too much from her, just to get there in one piece and have a nice dinner. I knew it wasn’t going to happen.

We arrive, skidding a few times on the only partially washed-off asphalt since it wasn't raining enough to clean them off, and we turn onto Silver Sands. Just exiting the car is a phenomenal ordeal. “Joe, you had the air on the whole way and now it’s cold! Why the fuck do you have to have your way!” I, of course, replied in the spirit of brotherly kindness: “Hey, loser, if we don’t run the defroster, which requires that the AC be on, the windows will fog up and we’ll wreck. That’s not what any of us want, is it? No, it isn't. If you were cold, you should have said something.”

We get inside only to be immediately greeted by one of a number of college kids at the register inside a lawn furniture table and chair-equipped diner with those red and white, checkered table cloths. We seat ourselves, still bickering, and just when things start to calm down, the loud volume of a 32-inch plasma screen TV on the wall begins to knock around inside our heads. Soap operas in a pizza place--I'm not in the mood for soft-core porn. I can't eat like this. We’re ready to order drinks and when we order, we ask that the TV be turned down. Despite agreeing to do it, the waitress just couldn’t find time to get to it.

“Are you going to clean the Parmesan shakers again, Joe? Because that's really weird.” “God damnit!” I interrupt! “Up, up, we go! We’re leaving!” I managed to get everyone back out to the car. “Uh, maam, we’re taking our order to go instead.” I told our waitress. We’re back in the car and the windows are fogged up. Sis has to wander around outside for yet another smoke break. She’d nearly gone through her second pack of cigarettes that day.

Inside the car, we are entreated to: “whaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!.....” as little Kayla cried and cried--all of this to the comely treat of more arguing. Now, it’s raining. Sis has to hop back inside the car. All we need is more discontent. The chorus of chaos amplifies. I can soon take no more. I hop out of the car. In the sparse but steady rain, I take a walk down Silver Sands. The occasional bus splashing a puddle of water on my ankles is a small price to pay for the comfort of silence with the smell of tailpipe smog and rain with pain from a degenerative left foot.

I am picked up after 15 minutes, nearly soaking wet. We turn around and head back to the pizza place to pick up our now-ready orders. Strangely, everyone is starting to calm down. “Mmmmmm” sis says, biting into a slice of her own pepperoni in the back seat. “Go on, try it, Joe!” I reluctantly and clumsily maneuver my box to the top of the stack, pry it open, and finagle a small chunk of the Italian sausage into my mouth.

Sis was so right. There aren’t words for how good this is. Sis was now back in my good graces, despite it all.

It takes a few years to realize it, and some realize it quicker than others, but it bears repeating that life is for the living. Like this pizza place, we’re always looking to score satisfaction on destinations. We’ll be happy when we get on vacation, not when we come back. We can’t wait till girlfriend, friend, family, etc. comes over and then we’ll be happy. But life is for the living. Setting goals implies transition, and transition will entail varying degrees of disappointment.

Getting to where you want to be will involve dealing with the unlikables. And then I stop and think, if I had no such BS in my life, would I miss it? The answer is NO! I’d be happy, but we’ll take it in order to get to that next destination, to that next stop on the way to happiness.

And then I rethink my earlier statement. Some of my fondest memories are nestled into bad ones. This summer’s trip to North Padre Island was fun, but the coolest thing about it is that it stays in my memory because of other reasons. That horrible sunburn and mom and dad's comments are what I remember: “Why are you hiding our wallets? We’re on vacation! We're coming back after we swim.” My reply: “Because I’m in the security field. It only takes 30 seconds for a desperate maintenance man to come in and grab something and split.” My anxiety somehow added to the experience of the trip. And yes, finally biting into that delicious pizza was appreciated all the more by the experience coming before it.

Take someone without goals or destinations and you'll notice how that same person is an unhappy one. And think of everyone you know with lottery fantasies (which is everyone). Look at how different they proclaim their lives would be with loads and loads of beautiful green money. Being debt free, new cars, new houses, hookers - slaves, or rather, personal assistants - etc. all of it is an indication of goals and having or doing something more.

And then I look at my dull life and play the same game with myself. How different would my life be? Well, new stuff is a for-sure deal, but ultimately, my life wouldn’t change. I only want to see a few places. I don’t have lofty goals or business ventures, nothing to propel me forward. Only the novelty of cool shit and writing can sustain me—and that for the next few years. Writers are the unhappiest people on the planet, guaranteed. And they always will be because they see and think on things they shouldn't. But they can't help it.

This life has almost nothing for my type now. Nothing you can ever do will have any lasting satisfaction. It’s all about moving to some new form of titillation, some new amusement that we’ll get tired of quickly. And whether it's an experience or a thing, it matters little. You’re supposed to be happy because you’re part of the journey - part of change - but then, that’s just more nonsense from life-forms who are still trying to reach out to find real meaning.

They say it’s the little things of life that make us or break us. I’ve thought so, too. But what the fuck does that mean when, in eternity, a long life and a short one are the same? I’ve got to get better at living in the moment. That’s what everyone else is doing. That’s why most of my peers go to bars and drink and go to work hung-over.

Most people don’t think about this shit. They just do it and get whatever pleasure out of it they can. They only know what pleases them and that is what occupies their minds. The smarter people think about these things and are unhappy while the semi-smart refuse to think about them because they are afraid of becoming unhappy. Watch The Road (2009) and you’ll know what I mean.

(JH)

God, Indiana, and Whirlwinds

2011-09-01T00:08:00.001-05:00

Just about two weeks after the stage collapse in Indiana, we found ourselves facing a hurricane – Hurricane Irene – a tool of vengeance that the god of the bible has historically loved and used to punish iniquity.

“For they have sown the wind, they shall reap the whirlwind.” (Hosea 8:7)

“As the whirlwind passeth, so is the wicked no more: but the righteous is an everlasting foundation.” (Proverbs 10:25)

Witness 70-mile-per-hour winds with the ominous sky backdrop and the devastation that follows. When you watch the collapse, think of the screams, the horrors, the shock on everyone’s faces…it is events like these that, sadly, are needed to bring out the best in humanity. Look at how many of the on-looking crowds come to render aid.

They were drinking and hollering obscenities at the stage only moments earlier. And then, with the plates of emergency services full (and even the state’s governor appearing in tears on TV days later), everyone else comes to the rescue. We humans can’t get past our pathetic, miniscule differences without a tragedy of some sort, which happens to be a thing believers toast to as god’s trying us by fire. (I Corinthians 3:10-15)

Believers boast about how god tries us to make us stronger. “God always has a plan for every thing we do,” goes the stupid saying, kind of like an idiot who says: “every cloud has a silver lining”—such obvious buffoonery. But I suppose when a murderer breaks into a home and butchers the small children who live there, the poor, struggling parents can enjoy the “silver lining” of getting to save some money on paying to feed and clothe their children as they grow up. Every cloud has a silver lining!

Part of the beauty of clichés is that they are only true when you want them to be, which happens to be why they are rightly thought of and called the idiot’s wisdom. In the case of god recompensing mankind with storms to punish them, we have exactly such an occasion with god’s providence and his believers who claim that god may or may not be behind a given tragedy.

God may cause storms for whatever purpose he wants, we are told, but we can’t know it for sure. It may just be the weather. Some theologians think the Titanic went down because its very name was an affront to the almighty. Pastor John Hagee preached a sermon series on the topic in the late 1990s. To whatever end a preacher has, God does or does not cause these storms. But if the preacher says so, they have hard biblical evidence that a storm is god’s wrath.

A theologian might well claim that Hurricane Katrina was suffered because Mardi Grass women have this cool little habit of showing their boobs to the men at their riotous street drinking parties. Was the city recompensed of their sins? Yes, if you’re Pat Robertson or his ilk who think that our nation's acceptance of abortion is what brought Katrina. Just depends on which pastor you ask. But in the rather ordinary case of the stadium collapse, religious fools will be less likely to attribute it to divine justice. “Sometimes storms just happen on their own,” as a religious person I know recently said to me.

Why doesn’t it bother theologians and their stupid admirers that we can’t know when a hurricane or tornado is god’s justice and when it’s not? If god’s “weapons of choice,” as revealed in the scriptures, are the same as those used by nature, what real intimidation should modern Christians have when looking back and reading the sacred text? If we know that primitives like the bible writers were ignorant morons who thought that natural phenomenon were caused by a god, why are we to assume that those same events are any different today?

And if we believe in miracles and accept that everything that happens is from god, why today should I assume a hurricane is “just a hurricane” and not divine judgment? There is no need to resolve or feud over this conflict because it isn’t a conflict if you are a religious person; you simply accept that god might kill and maim or he might not. Like a privileged white girl with intimacy issues, the god of the bible is very fickle. He changes his mind all the time.

For instance, he says that a woman’s physical beauty is vain…

“Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the LORD, she shall be praised.” (Proverbs 31:30)

But then, he makes it known to us that after the endurance of his trials, Job was blessed with beautiful daughters…

“And in all the land were no women found so fair as the daughters of Job: and their father gave them inheritance among their brethren.” (Job 42:15)

Either beauty is vain or god’s blessings are vain, but how can the latter be? Answer: In that content, it just seemed right to have god reward Job for killing off his first family over a mere bet between he and Satan, to make his daughters beautiful because it’s just not much of a selling point to make them ugly, or even just plain. Religion and religious texts take advantage of language like that.

Well, we atheists like to simplify things; we say that things happen because of natural law. We insist that if a shelf falls over in your house, it has nothing to do with the fact that you were self-fornicating only 30 minutes earlier. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time, end of story.

But there is one point on which atheists and believers agree—that storms (with or without collapses) are awesome to watch and can do much, much damage. Believers can’t admit that storms “just happen” to the extent that they are outside of the providence of god. They want you to think that they can so that you will give them credit for being at least remotely rational, but they can’t and aren’t going to. That would be atheism. Life taking its purely natural course—nope, that’s atheism! That would mean that the fact that there is death and devastation in the first place is undeserved, and therefore, would suggest that god does not exist and does not take charge of his creation. Bingo, we say.

We watch as god deserts an entire stadium full of people, killing 5 and injuring many more, while leaving the rest to clean up his mess. That’s the way it has always been—when god can’t speak, humans speak for him. When god destroys the world, we rebuild it, giving him the credit that he at least started it all for us. We’re the underpaid maintenance men of god’s crappy creation; we’re also the custodians who clean god’s restrooms – this shit-house known as earth – and sometimes god fires his custodians.

Those 5 who died in the collapse, God “canned” them. Those who were injured were “suspended” and sent home for a while. We’ll never know why, or whether or not it was god who did this, and theologians and believers are totally okay with not knowing. I’m not. But what’s the difference. We’re all employed to clean up the shit he leaves behind while holding our noses.

(JH)

The Harm in Being a Loser

2011-05-04T21:26:00.002-05:00

It’s Wednesday, May 4, 2011. By 7:41 pm, my fourth consecutive game of Chess ends in checkmate with me as the loser.

My opponent is a computer program written in 1992, or so it says in the “About Chess” tab at the top of the screen. Have no idea who wrote it, but they knew how to do it. Came with my MacBook. The thing plays a damn strong game. Difficulty level is set to just passed the halfway point. I have not ever been able to obtain so much as a draw against it. This thing has not only never lost to another computer program, it beat them as well. The computer at Chess.com set to the hardest level (2000+) loses.

I’m no newbie to the ancient game. I learned to play as a kid, but it wasn’t until I got ChessMaster 4000 Turbo more than a decade ago that I got serious with it. So I had two hobbies growing up—whacking off to Larry Flint’s admirable artwork and Chess.

Chess is a bloodthirsty game and it reflects the game of life, the cruel, twisted, and costly game of life where we pay for the mistakes we make and are forced to sacrifice what is dear to us because of oversights, and of course, because we don’t get what we deserve. We just get what we get.

My old friend Brian Kieford taught me Chess and Old Man Whitecotton taught me how to play a worthy game. So here I am on this sunny evening, barricaded in my apartment as normal, silently contemplating a good opening. I’m white. Computer is black. I open: e2 to e4. Unlike with human opponents, I don’t expect the Sicilian Defense from Computer. She never uses it. Computer counters: e7 to e5.

I advance: a2 to a3. Then, it’s d7 to d6, as Computer responds. I play d2 to d4. Computer takes pawn, e5xd4. I take invading pawn with queen: Qd1xd4. Pawn is gone. Now it’s knight on b8 to c6. I’m already in hot water, not really, but it’s coming. I’m feeling it. 21 moves later, the game ends with white checkmated (Rd3 to c3) after what (briefly) appeared to be a close winning streak for me. Sensei is victorious yet again. “You’re not ready, grasshopper!” Master Computer has my utmost respect.

It may surprise you to know that there are as many possible Chess move combinations on a chessboard than there are atoms making up the observable motherfucking universe! No joke. That’s estimated to be between 4×10 to the 79th power. Such is a number so ridiculously big that you can’t even fathom it in any useful way, so please don’t try.

I said don’t try, damnit!!!

Try instead to realize how much more superior our computers now are in comparison to us. This is not, in all senses, a true statement since we haven’t yet had to contend with artificial intelligence and the civil war we will someday fight against machines as they battle for their volitional freedoms, but we will (No, I haven’t been watching too much science fiction reviewing movies). We really will. I just happen to know that given enough time, science fiction will become science fact. Think about that.

Nonetheless, computers and their speedy calculating and organizational powers have long passed us by. Calculators started it and now computers change words on our word docs without us suggesting a thing. They get used to what we access most on our desktops and they identify our distinctive usage of operational styles and features, and our usage of language. Don’t tell me you don’t feel at least a little creepy when you find your computer starting to figure you out! It’s goddamn stalking!

But even computers don’t take into account every possible move when playing against an opponent in a game of Chess. As we’ve seen, there’s no way that can happen. The biggest computers out there can’t do it yet, and certainly not desktops. Chess computers have pre-programmed formulas based on algebraic notation, the same code-talk I’ve been using above to describe the opening of my game.

Most of you may remember World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov, who, in 1997, lost to Deep Blue, the IBM super-computer. Now we must say that for a human to even compete against such a monster like Deep Blue and be a serious challenge speaks volumes about human intellectual capabilities. To have gotten us this far is gut-busting amazing, but Deep Blue was still victorious. She got the crown. We must sing her praises most loudly.

It’s sad, really. Deep Blue’s victory marked the end of an era when computers consisted of simple scripts, simple algorithms. Now, even desktop computers are far smarter than their comparative “ancestors,” which took up whole rooms of warehouse space to process data. Go on and check out the first computers built in the 1950s and 60s. They’re about as funny as the props of any cheesy science fiction out there.

So, the machines have won…and they’re not even done yet.

We are the losers. I know I am a loser. My computer reminds me of that everyday. I’m no match now and I doubt I ever will be for this lowly, simple program I compete against all the time for fun. I have much, much better success with human opponents. It’s a sign of the times, friends. We’re the losers. We’re the losers because like Agent Smith told Morpheus in the first Matrix, we’re dinosaurs! We’re old as fuck and like viruses to the planet.

Me, I’m not only “old” in the eyes of the youngsters, these 16 and 17-year-old lifeguards at the hotel where I’m employed, but I’m well on my way to the grave. Every time I put my left foot on the ground and try to walk, I’m reminded of the daily decay of these frail bodies. But that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with being a cockroach, just so long as you know the exterminator is coming. There’s nothing wrong with being expendable. There’s nothing wrong with being inferior. There’s nothing wrong with not mattering or else not playing a huge part in the universal scheme of things. But there is something wrong with not knowing those things.

My species still believes that humanity is a great species, one that shows promise and is full of goodness and hope. Most of my fellow humans don’t see how they are a cancer, stripping the world of what it has to offer to build their own particular empires of paranoia in survival-based, methodized madness.

Now, that’s natural, I know. We’re doing no differently than the beaver as he builds a dam. Our children do the same in much cuter ways as they build forts to wage pretend wars. But this building and pretend war-waging seems innocent until we realize that it’s what we will do until we are stopped. It’s not pretend in the adult world. We’ll keep building and planning and counter-planning, and fighting, and subverting until we are eliminated.

Now the problem of which I speak is not trying to survive, but of not knowing that we are destined to come to our collective end sooner than we think. The way technology is going demands that we meld with it to transcend. Otherwise, we’re stuck. We’ll never be able to open wormholes and travel to distant galaxies with our current mental capabilities. We’ll need to have greater brainpower, greater “hard drive” capacities, and we’ll need technology to make that happen.

And we’re on the road to that now. Every time you turn on your AC to feel comfortable, every time you turn on your stove to cook, and every time you employ computers to read or play or get your information, or to check your bank account online, you are saying a lot about our future and your ever-growing reliance on technology. Odds are, you’re only alive to this point because medication and technology dubbed you worthy.

No, the atheist visions of a future Utopia made so by computers and medicine isn’t real. Next to wishing we were all suddenly non-existent, I wish they were real. Life might or might not be better in the future. We won’t even be human in, say, five or ten million years down the line. We’ll be some freakish sort of biological…thing. Who knows what. But we probably won’t be studying foreign solar systems as much as we imagine. We’ll probably be killing or else trying not to get killed—that is, if we even exist then. We may be knocked back to the Stone Age or back further still to when our days will be spent scavenging to stay alive. In another 800 years or so, we may well get wiped out totally and some other life-form will replace us.

Are we ready to admit that it’s not all about us? No, I’m afraid we’re not, not when churches full of the self-deluded who are afraid to die still exist, and certainly not when some of those churches publicly burn copies of the Koran to incite the rage of yet less-evolved savages who have claimed lives over the pointless, meaningless nonsense of religion.

We’ll never get the attention of any superior alien races (if they are found to exist) until we get away from these fears, these unsettling strands of cultural and social phantom offenses taught by religion. The societies of the nations of the world are choked with concerns that mean nothing and everything.

The debate on healthcare and the “fine line” issues of medical ethics in stem cell research and that really old pro-choice vs. pro-life abortion debate means nothing when you realize that killing a thousand fertilized eggs with maybe 7 to 10 eggs of to-be super-geniuses does society well—consider how many criminals, welfare junkies, mentally and physically infirm moochers of society, and grocery-bagging underachievers we’ll have gotten rid of. There will be other geniuses. There will be other average Joes.

There will be others. There is great wisdom in that statement; there will be other geniuses, just as there will be other menaces to society; there will be other disease-carrying immigrants; there will be other fair-complexioned white-collar criminals who will take longer to catch than their less smart blue-collar, dishwashing counterparts; there will be other cockroaches, other ant hills that pop up in our yards, and other fleas to jump off the back of your dog and start an infestation in your carpet, resulting in you having to call Orkin.

And why don’t we realize this? Because we’re too damn self-important. We don’t think of ourselves as ants or cockroaches. We think we’re something better. We have to be here, and after we’re here, we’ve got to go be with the big boy upstairs in the afterlife. That’s why there has to be an afterlife—because we can’t just die and there not be anything for us. What good is thinking when our thinking leads us to concluding that there will come a time when thinking is no more? It’s about as good as children having children for countless eons, only for one generation to realize that we’ve had enough, and no more will be made. We just can’t bring ourselves to think it.

We can’t be the losers, not yet. We’re like the little ones, tugging at dad’s shirt, saying: “Let me win one!” No, kid. You’ll be able to beat dad when you can beat dad, or you may not. In the meantime, learn how to lose. That’s what we should say. That’s what we should know. It should be a fact of life. But that’s what we’re still having to learn.

(JH)

Martin Gutierrez: The Man Who Was Just Better

2011-02-25T18:16:00.002-06:00

These, the tenth-grade years (1990-91) were the greatest of Joe Holman’s high school days.

It was a kickin’ time. The cars were still mostly square. Saturday Night Live had a great cast. My favorite sitcoms were still on the air. I would anxiously wait for the next Sunday night’s episode of Married With Children just after seeing the then-influential show, Herman’s Head, which happens now to be known as the show where the first reference to “condom” was used in a major time slot broadcast.

These were the days of hard, hot workouts in the old garage with dad’s rusty weights. Those weights still sit in that garage. These were the days of unrestrained passions, of doing what mattered in the moment, like cramming down four packages of Reese’s Buttercups and a Diet Coke at lunch, not caring about the inconsistency, or swiping a few double-meat burgers and fries from the ugly broad working behind the lunch line when she wasn't looking (and one time, getting caught trying to).

These were the days of hitting the Olympic weights in the calisthenics room in the school gym we frequented. These were the days of getting dressed up like hippies and causing some trouble in the neighborhood and kicking every stop sign we came across, saying: “I hate life!” when, in fact, we loved it. These were the days of walking around campus in a tight IZOD shirt and then walking around the rest of the day with a decent pump to sport my proudly owned 13.3’ inch biceps.

It was right after the big move from Judson High to Macarthur High. I came in just before mid-term. Met the guy who became my best friend that year. His name was Dan Wright. I envied his size and strength. His 14.5’ inch pythons had me pumping iron with “blood, sweat, and tears” in the style of Rocky, in hopes of matching his genetic advantage. It wasn’t quite to be, but it was fun as hell trying. We tanked up and walked around like badasses. Gave me something to strive for in these, my years of strength and health.

Dan and I were quite a team with Nico and a couple of wannabes who were so low on the social totem pole that our position was something to look up to. There was another Danny and a chick whose name escapes me who worshipped the ground he walked on. As a group, we were the dramatists, carrying on in silly displays of martial arts maneuvers and mock posing exhibitions—laughed at by most, but admired by a small few.

The scenes we made, I’m sure, are still remembered by some other than just me. After all, it was Dan and Nico who had our entire school cafeteria screaming, as Nico beat Dan in an arm wrestling match that delivered both applause and mockery. One girl came up to Nico after the match and said: “You stood up as you forced his arm down, so you guys need to go again.” I could see it in Dan’s eyes that he had had enough, and so had the administrators and all who were responsible for keeping order in the cafeteria that day. They had to resume control and stop the throwing of spit-wads, dinner trays, and crumpled pieces of paper. “You guys get going to your next period class now!” “But the bell hasn’t rung yet.” “NOW!”, the Vice Principle says. To think that we caused all that ruckus that no doubt resulted in a few meetings on how to prevent it in the future...whew!

But it was the dynamics of this crew that was the major event. Nico, an outgoing oddball who never knew when to quit and wanted all the attention and glory for himself, should have clashed with Dan, but for some reason never did. Big old Dan was the passive-aggressive type. I guess that’s why he and Nico never clashed like Nico and I sometimes did. I was the submissive type, but Nico’s antics could still have me at his throat once in a while. But we were kids and had no idea about how dominance and submission works, or of the complex nature of personalities. We were about to learn a little more.

So we have English class together, Dan and I. We’re the coolest in the class, or at least we thought we were. From the back row, there is this 6’5 Mexican boy - big, dark and rough looking - with a brown bandana just above his eyes. He took it off only when told to by the teacher. He was a smart kid, unlike the gang-bangers he ran with outside of class. He was sharp enough to flatter and obey the teacher, but his eyes held that the rumors about him were true. He had nothing to prove because he knew he was badass.

Martin Gutierrez was his name. I’m sure he’s in jail today, probably doing hard time for assault or worse. Rumor had it, this bad boy ran around with Emilio Vasquez, a kid who packed a pistol and threatened to shoot some kids. He didn’t need to threaten others who knew he was a badass, a trench coat-wearing badass. Word had it Martin charged a cop working security at a club and body-slammed him to get out of getting issued an MIP (Minor in Possession). I asked around and found it was true. Emilio confirmed it: “Listen, it’s true. Just don’t go around talking about that, okay?”

Martin always chose to sit in the back of the class, and it was for a reason; he got to watch everyone. I wouldn’t have spotted it had it not been for Dan. Dan always hated Martin, this smooth-talking guy who knew how to rouse the class into roaring laughter with his wit. He was the life of the party. And Martin picked his battles, too. He argued with the teacher only when he felt the need. He preferred to keep quiet and pounce only when an attack was called for. I just barely had the wisdom to notice it at the time, but I noticed it.

Dan and I never had our way with this class. That was partly because I had the smarts to know that I wasn’t the big fish in this pond, and that was why I kept quiet; Dan decided to test Martin. Down in flames he went! The guy was too sharp and too influential. From that day, Dan’s internalized despising of Martin welled up. “I hate Martin! I hate him!”, Dan would say, almost huffing and puffing when saying it. The class just wasn’t the same for him, so Dan decides to put stock in doing what he’s good at – the same thing we did in the cafeteria – which was arm wrestle to re-establish badass-dom.

So, in a futile quest to assert himself to attention-worthiness in this large class of 27 students, Dan decides to take on any dude in the class. Dan could destroy me and I could hold my own remotely with my best arm against his worst arm—the left. I didn’t mind losing to my friend. Hell, I wanted to see him reign supreme in not losing to anyone else except to Nico that day in the cafeteria, but Nico got lucky that day--and despite his pride, he knew it. Dan was sore and had pulled a muscle in a workout the previous night and he still agreed to take on Nico. When he was fresh and healed up, Nico and Dan went at it again on the steps out front of the library and Dan won with little struggle.

Dan knew he had the bragging rights, and this class would not stand in his way! Dan arm-wrestled every willing guy in the class. He won by a huge margin every time. Dan keeps carrying around this chip on his shoulder, though. He can’t stand Martin, the class clown who lazily lounged in the back on the empty desk in front of him, sitting with his feet propped up as though having a calf. There was a kid sitting there, but Martin made him move so he could have more space to stretch out.

Dan starts to get talkative about his victories. He slams down the arm of this black kid named Tobias. I remember that kid. He had one of those tall, “House Party” style hairdos. Dan beats him and then boasts victory: “Yeaaahh!” And then, unexpectedly, from the back of the class, came this voice: “Hey, hombre, I’ll take you on.” It was Martin who was ready to give Dan a run for his money.

Dan rotates his body in the chair quickly. His eyes widen and he jumps up to claim the chance. He wasn’t scared. He was ready and never so happy to do what he was best at. His breathing suddenly elevated, he was jumping at the chance - shaking with the utmost exuberation - to put Mr. Loud Mouth Mexican in his place. He wastes no time, but gets up, with adrenaline pumping, and heads to the back of the class.

This kid named Rex, always bringing his headphones to listen to the dirty standup comedy tapes he loved, takes off the headphones and pulls up a free desk from the back. Unmoving, Martin is still lounged against the back wall. There is some shuffling, and then the two are locked arm-in-arm. “BEEEEEEP.” Then there is more shuffling. Those few kids who were watching grab there book bags and class is over. “Damnit!”, I think to myself. Dan was all the more angry. We grabbed our bags and headed home.

Two days pass. Dan and I hit the weights. He’s so psyched up that it’s crazy. We both charge into the same class, still pumped. “Let’s arm wrestle!” I say. We lock up, and not a moment after doing so, everyone is as lively as we are in watching, even the teacher. Dan slams me down with each arm effortlessly. “Now you’ve got to finish your match with Martin.” that Rex kid says, taking off his headphones again from that well-greased head of hair. “Oh, I’m ready! I’ve never been more ready!” Dan says. He then looks back at me and says: “He’s going down today! I promise you, Joe!” “You’re psyched up! Awesome! Kill him! Kill him!!!” I say. That was the good news.

The even better news was that expecting to complete our assignments first, the teacher says: “I’d planned a free day today. Why don’t you guys get started now?” Wow! Our teacher is in on it! This large but sweet and pear-shaped lady, Mrs. Hendershot, who was sometimes too kind for her own good, was talking with another student about her breakup with a man she was dating, and even she is interested in being sidetracked by this little classroom sporting event. No, she wasn’t always staying on us about our work, but she was cool enough to allow the events that make this story a memorable one.

Martin walks into the classroom right at that time: “So how about it, cuz?” He’s thinking the same thing we were. Dan starts to say: “You bet! You’re...” (I think he was going to say “You’re going down,” but Martin was too dominant, so Dan trailed off and turned to me instead and said, after a brief pause: “This is it, Joe! I mean it! He’s going down!”) I’ve never seen Dan so psyched up. Martin throws his books down as carelessly as ever as his friends and the entire class arrange Dan’s desk around Martin’s and adjust their own to watch in a mob hungry for entertainment.

“Go! Go! Go!” the class begins to chant. It’s Dan’s bad arm first. He can barely compose himself as he sits nervously wanting to win this. They lock arms, left arm with left arm, and he gives it his all. Martin stares into his eyes, watching him struggle more internally than externally, as he tests his opponent’s strength. Martin is studying him and soon has a great feel for what he’s up against. You could just tell.

Then, BAMMM! Just like that, Dan’s left arm is out of the game! He goes down without much competition for Martin. One or two “Ooohs” can be heard from those watching. But Dan doesn’t miss a beat. He didn’t expect to win with his “bad arm,” anyway.

“Now try this arm! My right arm is my good arm!” Dan says. Martin puts up the other, not saying a word. Dan is now so shaken he can’t help but turn red in a concentrating silence. Locked together, they begin, as Martin continues to let Dan “charge out of the barn” to see what he’s got. Martin doesn’t go down, but I see his jaw start to clench and his lips start to flatten in exerted effort.

Dan is giving it all he’s got, sweating and even using his left hand to grab the edge of the desk for some leverage. Martin begins to feel less relaxed. He doesn’t sit up, but seems to be exerting more effort. But after a few more moments of Dan’s strained breathing, in efforts to nail down victory, he realizes he’ll have to hold out for the long haul and wear him down. Martin is holding steady! And then there’s that worrying concern that maybe he isn’t giving it his all yet!

Time passes. The class gets silent. Martin keeps centered. He succeeds against the onslaught of endless tugs from Dan. Dan is running out of steam fast, sweating as he gives it his 110%, his face starting to wince as he shakes in what seemed to be occasional cramping pains. Everyone is watching Dan, maybe thinking like I was: “He sure is taking this seriously!” I have no doubt that every single moment of the struggle was for Dan a torturous fear of a would-be reality of not winning, or worse, losing.

The brief silence is broken: “You ain’t gonna take me, cuz.” Martin says. Now, Martin decides it’s his turn. For the first time in a long time, his back comes away from the seat and wall as he curls himself around to push. Dan starts to fall, his eyes beholding the maximally unwanted reality of losing while shaking almost violently, trying - fighting and trying - to muster up another round of pull power. Alas, he’s got Martin right back in the middle, but Martin’s not done. His next wave of power has Dan whining under his breath to maintain the effort. My eyes meet his and I start to feel for Dan.

Each of them now bursting in temporary waves of strength, the one after the other, to try and pin the other one, the energy levels drop as the cramps and grunts begin to rise. Martin loses interest quickly, so he goes back to holding. “You ain’t gonna beat me, cuz. You just ain’t. I can do this all day.” In a world of eye-squinting, cramping pain, he releases his grip while getting an un-admitting stare of respect from Dan.

“Aw, keep going,” a few can be heard to say. “So Martin really won because he beat you and you only held your own with your best arm to him.” some dude says to Dan, as Dan is massaging the lactic acid out of his right arm. He’s devastated, but he doesn’t acknowledge any of it.

Ten minutes later, the class is over. The excitement has died down and we walk down the hall of the main English building, feeling the despair of defeat. We felt like a team that lost the big game. Martin never won respect from Dan, but he did win many fewer behind-the-back expressions of dislike, I assure you. Call that respect if you so choose.

As we walk, Martin and his friends pass us laughing as they tape a “KICK ME” sign on the back of some nerdy kid. The whole match wasn’t even a big deal to Martin or his friends.

The whole experience is a clear example of how being a superior person is not only made evident by how someone stands out when put against the background of the masses, but about how superiority is evident to those who lack it. It stands out regardless of what anyone says or does, making those of us who don't possess it envious.

(JH)

God is the Sandman

2011-02-10T15:12:00.003-06:00

I’ve come to appreciate it even more since my plantar fasciitis surgery. I’m talking about sleep. And you don’t need a top-of-the-line Serta mattress or a Sleep Number bed system to profoundly appreciate that statement.

Sleep is the best part of my life now more so than it was just one month ago. In sleep, I get to rest my nearly useless left foot. In sleep, I let my mind go as I mentally fall to pieces in a close-eyed siesta that will compose the best part of my day.

Looming problems and daily concerns are suddenly frozen in time with the rolling over and clutching of my favorite pillow under clean sheets and quilts. In sleep, the restless mind can defrag from the day’s load of life’s awful doses. There, I am in sync with the lazy and indifferent world that continually sleeps, as it cares not for me in day or night. I don’t care for it, either.

But as with all things I enjoy, sleep further serves to reconfirm my atheism. We spend 1/3 of our lives sleeping. This is yet another sign of a senseless and chaotic universe, one not created by a supreme intelligence. Think about how much of life we miss in sleep. 1/3 of your lifetime is a very long time, quite a number of years when put against the span of life we are accustomed to living. If a man lives to be 90, he will waste roughly 30 years to sleep. If he lives to be 75, he’ll have spent 25 years in a drooling, snoring, lights-out slumber.

If we never slept, we would have so much more time to do so many more things. And from doing these more numerous things, we would be yet wiser, a thing the god of the bible says he desires. But we don’t have this extra time that would enable us to travel the world many times over and see so many new places. In so doing, we would learn about other cultures and perhaps pick up a usable acquaintance or mastery of other languages. We could create whole new chapters in longer lives.

Think for a minute about what it would be like never to tire out, but to be productive for 30 or so more years. You could acquire multiple doctorate degrees. You could try your hand at numerous professions. You could take on productive and possibly lucrative hobbies, like mentoring or gardening. Your resume would be incredibly thick, as would your experience and appreciation of life.

You would learn to save and invest and do a thousand other things you won’t get around to doing with the time you have now. Your vacations would be much more rewarding and would last longer. You would be, quite actually, 1/3 more of the man or woman you are today. I turn 37 soon, and that means I’ve spent over 12 years of my life sleeping. And as much as I love sleep, it is a colossal waste of time.

Had a creating, sensible God existed, we would not be created with the need to sleep. We would be like the mighty shark and other marine animals that cannot stop swimming lest they die. Expending great amounts of energy being productive would be the norm. It would be as natural as the beating heart that never stops until you die.

I remember repeating as a minister what we sang in the hymnal: “Work for the night is coming when we work no more.” “We have all eternity to rest in God’s bosom. Now is the time to bear fruit as laborers for God,” I would say. But the truth is, we would have so much more time had god sensibly designed us to utilize more of it. Why God didn’t give his people 30 more years to build churches and do missionary work abroad? Even believers must admit that if they had 30 more years, so much more good could be done.

“‘Few there be that find the gate to life,’ the Bible says (Matthew 7:13-14), but when God makes true believers, he will do more through those productive souls than a hundred-thousand halfhearted Christians.” That’s a quote from a sermon I preached in 1999. But I didn’t go far enough—how much more productive still would the same believers be if we had that huge, wasted chunk of time we bury in the soft sheets of our beds?

We’ll get no good answers from the faithful. Not now, and not ever.

(JH)

After Plantar Fasciitis Surgery: Still Walking a Long and Painful Road

2011-01-31T09:23:00.000-06:00

Here am I, recovering from plantar fasciitis surgery in San Antonio. I’m hoping to get back to regular blogging and reviewing soon, but this necessary surgery is the (hopefully) final stage in a nearly ten-year-long battle with a severe case of plantar fasciitis.

The long and painful recovery requiring prescription narcotic pain relievers, lots of rest, and wound tending to has been more than I bargained for. But yes, I was informed about it and the risks of the procedure. It’s just another thing to be on your back and in recliners and couches, with your bum foot propped up at heart level to ease swelling. I’m two weeks in, which means I’ve beaten the worst of it. My stitches come out soon, but the pain...not yet.

Making the best of this situation, I’ve tried to just sit home and do what I love the most on this ball of pain and shit—write. But it turns out, even my productivity has suffered. So here’s the update. I’ll be back around soon.

Little Kayla, nearly 3, is learning geography at my feet...er...foot.

(JH)

The Spooky Truth About Spunk: The Low-down on Working in a Porn Store (Part III of III)

2011-01-13T03:21:00.001-06:00

We’ve seen some fine examples of low-life pieces of crap thus far, but they can’t be said to compare to this upcoming list of perverts whose twisted, fucked-up inner-selves actually make them dangerous to others.

III. Hardcore Customers/Degenerates: The Worst of the Worst.

Take, for instance, the “parent of the year” shopper. We live in a world where some parents are not above bringing their kids to porn stores. Sometimes, it is a mother and her girlfriends trying to bring in a one-year-old in a stroller. Other times, it is a mother with a bit of alcohol on her breath who will leave teens or grade-school kids in the car doing homework and talking, as they unknowingly get closer to meeting a glasses-wearing nerdish man who will knock on the car window and tell them that he “sees their innocence” and fantasizes about exploiting it.

Hell, you could argue that porn stores are doing community service by providing atmospheres where pedophiles and other human garbage can come and be away from schools—that is, if fucked-in-the-head parents don’t ruin that by bringing their kids to these places.

I have no soft spot for unthinking parents. It happens to be a rule that no one is allowed to wait in their cars at porn stores, coming or going. When I find kids outside, I call the parents out: “Will the ‘parent of the year’ who owns a black Chevy Malibu and who brought their teenaged daughter to a porn store please head outside immediately and take your kid off the property before we call the police!” I love embarrassing fucktard parents, the kind that actually deserve visits by Child Protective Services.

But the most dangerous class of porn store junkie is the public crusader class. This broad class is composed of four sub-classes. There is A. the Drunk Crusader, B. the Social Crusader, C. the Exhibitionist Crusader, and D. the Aggressive, Crazed Sex-seeker.

It is not uncommon for porn stores to sell items by announcing in the paper and on websites in ads that porn star “X” is going to be signing copies of her latest DVD, poster, or book at a specific store. If she’s even halfway smart and doesn’t act like a typical “Juice Box” or “Sinammon” as she does on film, she’ll have her own security to coordinate with our store’s security to keep people a certain distance from the sides of the table where the autographs are signed.

If these boundaries are not kept and the porn stars start giving “friendly hugs” to admirers, you can have major incidents of assault or molestation. The aggressive, crazed sex-seeker forgets about boundaries and acts on his impulses. When arrested, they might well say something like: “She’s a whore! She shouldn’t come onto me like that and then turn me away!”

The exhibitionist wants to come out of the rented rooms or the restrooms naked to parade around, perhaps pretending doing so was an accident. They’re so damn unconvincing when caught.

The social crusader loves to talk with other customers, many of whom are uncomfortable with the unwanted come-ons or uninvited small talk from people they don’t know. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard customer complaints for the questions: “Do you do anal?” “Are you into fisting?” “I’m into fingering assholes. How about you?”

As you’d expect, the drunken crusader is a risk due to his inebriated state of mind, in which he seeks some intimate company. Expressly against the rules, he’s ready to prop the door open of his rented room to invite other customers in to stroke him off while he watches his favorite busty blonde pirate movies with what money he has left over after hitting the bars and clubs and striking out with a real girl.

The parking lot loafer is a creepy character, likewise of differing types. They are casual parking lot sex-havers, drug dealers who stop in just to make deals and then split, intoxicated public urinaters, and prostitutes looking for work.

Many a so-called “ordinary couple” I’ve walked up on or spotted in the cameras doing doggie in the back of their Suburban (the same vehicle that took little Colton and Hunter to school the morning before). The drug dealers are gone once you start to approach them, though you may get a “fuck you!” before they haul off. The prostitutes at porn stores tend to be very negotiable before splitting once you turn their offers down. If you accept, on the other hand, it’s off to your place.

You have the unforgettable High-roller Pervos, the kind who want to buy everything in the store, and sometimes things not for sale. Having frequented clubs all night long, they come in drunk and with hot girls paid thousands a night to escort them. These “high clientele” act like they own the place (and they almost do). They also go nuts and get insanely angry when others drop the ball or don’t have what they want…we’re talking red-faced, pop-a-forehead-vein angry.

The last class of pervert is the fecalphiliac vandal.

Some advice: NEVER touch more than you have to in a porn store. The disease-spreading waste of a life known as the fecalphiliac vandal will enter and quietly wipe their dung on the faucets and walls and even drop a load in the soap dispensers. You can see the fingerprint smudges in the waste, no kidding! They are usually quiet and will come back again and again and spend some time in the restroom, but they do tend to spend a decent amount of money at the stores (as though that makes up for it even 1/1000th of a percent!)

Not just the vandalism or theft or shady characters who work there, but the little things in the porn store are disgustingly entertaining, too. For instance, the porn store I worked at went through an expensive supply of restroom sharpie markers to be put on the walls of the women’s and men’s restrooms. Why? Because it’s like all restroom walls in public places—people will write obscenities on the walls.

So the porn store owners got to thinking that since money is going to have to be spent on paint and keeping the walls and surfaces clean, why not try and curb it by letting the sickos advertise and otherwise ask for naughty favors on marker boards that are intermittently replaced? Works like a dream, even though the company spent about $25 a week on new sharpie pens—no doubt half of them were stolen while the other half were thrown away after being used as prostate stimulators.

A single day’s business would bring stuff filling the boards like this…

“Small white man looking for forced anal penetration by black man with big meat.”

“I suck a mean Ricardo. If interested, call xxx-555-1212. Ask for Bill.”

“Need to be fucked and sucked and treated like a man bitch. Trannies welcome.”

“Need a whore to whip. Will do skanks. Pass code ‘Sally is here.’ Call after six.”

“I will rim you like you never know before. U will be satisfied guarantee. Hairy dudes ok.”

Funny as it is disgusting.

The eye candy is so fantastic, the porn titles so cheesy and funny. But even more fantastic are the reactions when angry customers swear that they won’t ever come back after bitching about a grievance. It never happens. They always come back, like the time a very loyal customer who spent about $150 a night on dildos and gay porn brought back a 10-inch, used vibrator and laid it on the counter uncovered, with bits of excrement still streaked on it. When we wouldn’t take it back, he told us we’d never see him again. But he was there the next night. He bought 3 more of his favorite toys. You better believe it.

Ah, the porn store! Nearly every fetish is catered to. How can it not be so fun? Well, the fun wears off. It wears off first because it’s work, but second because of a boundaries issue; give the masses a little and they’ll take a lot; give them a release and the floodgates will be hard to close; change the rules just a tad, and suddenly, few have any idea of how to act or how to restrain themselves.

If you want to describe the struggle of intelligent humanity with sexuality, it is the old struggle of safety vs. risk, as we’ve bounced back and forth trying to find a happy medium between them. And we’re not done. We’re still learning not to be afraid of our highly variant forms of sexuality, but we’re also still learning about the dark sides of the same. It happens to be the case that the most negatively primal forces stick together, which reinforces the conclusion that we’re not happy with nature alone. The natural order can be as ugly as any unnatural evil ever founded.

We want something better, but we still want our old-fashioned, tree-swinging liberty. The religious call revel-worthy sexual freedom debauchery and evil. And now, to let it sink in that the desires behind the struggle to manage our liberty are not evil, I present to you this unfortunately censored video of bonobos having sex...normal sex, gay sex, group sex, and oral sex. Enjoy.

(JH)

The Spooky Truth About Spunk: The Low-down on Working in a Porn Store (Part II of III)

2010-12-03T03:55:00.000-06:00

In the first article, we began discussing the classes of normal frequenters to a porn store. We talked about the good time couples, the medical shoppers, the party shoppers, and the ambitious lovers. But it’s not the normal customers that make us nervous. It’s the not-so-normal crowd that gives cause for concern. We continue with a description of these disturbing classes, unflatteringly penciled into that group known as “Hardcore Customers”…

II. Hardcore Customers:

Take, for instance, the homeless magazine buyer. He rides in on a bike or walks with bags and whatever he has to his name inside them. He might even be carrying stuff in a shopping cart. He usually has a “street smell” and may or may not talk a lot. But this class of surprisingly frequent return customer is usually nice as they purchase their stack of between a half-a-dozen or more porn magazines. The only exceptionally disturbing thing is when, on the way in or out, he picks up used cigarette butts or joints and tries to squeeze out one more puff before beginning that long journey home to where he lives, which is out behind the dumpster of a Bill Miller BBQ restaurant a mile away.

Some world we live in where he who has nothing will take what almost non-existently little he does have and spring for eye-candy to help him jerk off under a bridge overpass. It’d settle for some soap and just a mosquito net.

Then there is the sex-addicted family man. This is one of the most pitiable cases to be seen. Mr. Sex-addict family man is usually good-looking and well dressed. He almost positively has a super job and a dynamite-looking wife at home. How do I know? Because this type of pervo-phile brings her to the porn store with him often, evidently to spice things up and make him feel like his frequenting the store as often as he does has her blessing. Then he takes her home, comes back, and continues looking around for his down-low passion of watching uncircumcised transsexual prostitutes ejaculate in each other’s hair.

This type of addict will return much less composed than when he was with his wife several hours earlier. He’ll sometimes be in a cold sweat, breathing hard, loosening his tie, and he’ll spend at least several hours looking for movies to watch in one of the rented rooms. He’ll rent a room and watch until he literally runs out of money. He seldom brings enough money because his sex addiction doesn’t let him think clearly enough to think ahead for what he’ll need. When he’s out of money, he’ll come out and literally beg to use his room deposit to continue watching. When he is told “no,” he leaves with expressed dissatisfaction on his face.

This type is one of the worst because he is seen to spend so much of his time there. You want to bitch-slap him on the cheeks and say: “Go home to your wife, you fucking perverted fuck-nut!”

Next is the old crippled pervert. This particular pervo is about as bothersome as the last, but more amazing. I have witnessed a 5’4, bearded little man, severely palsied, walk with a walker with the bright green “cut-up golf balls” feet on the ends of them, and nearly fall over more times than I could count. This didn’t stop him from proceeding to stay my whole 8-hour shift, doing nothing but looking for porn! Yes, that old codger who could barely stand spent my entire shift methodically scanning every single shelf – one DVD and Blu-ray behind the other – to find what he wanted.

The balding, matted haired, very disabled types tend to be surprisingly determined shoppers, surpassed in disgustingness only by the next class of pervert, the basement-dweller.

The basement dweller is one among a few ways that porn store customers bring movie clichéd perverts to life. They are usually single and socially impaired in some small or big way. They often live with their mothers and are in between the age bracket of mid-30s through early-50s, and they don’t have much privacy at home. They look “nerdical” and out-of-shape because it’s obvious they only care about living for themselves and never to please anyone else. They never put their “best foot” forward and always put…well…something else forward and let "it" do their thinking for them.

They are smart and might even drive a nice car and usually show signs of having a nice job. They tend to have a Mac computer and are so socially awkward that they can be confrontational when they don’t get what they want, and of course, they can’t be anywhere close to normal around any lady. Yes, they almost always dig the ladies. They just can’t land a real one.

I once found myself holding back laughter when a female employee bent over in one such person’s presence to get something out from behind a counter. There is one of these creeps watching her every move. Seeing her bend down, this vile piece of human waste lets out his own shaky (and very verbal) sigh: “ah,hhh,hhh,hhh,hh!” And he didn’t even realize he did it.

After giving a few females (sometimes employees and sometimes customers) unwanted compliments that gradually become more and more creepy, with that already unsettling stare and manifestly lacking level of self-confidence, he might end up being asked to leave. Always a little too talkative for his own good around females, his only romantic destiny is to watch porn. He’s in the right place.

(JH)

The Spooky Truth About Spunk: The Low-down on Working in a Porn Store (Part I of III)

2010-11-23T01:36:00.000-06:00

About being able to work in a porn store, someone close to me said: “You have to be off in some small way to even be able to apply for employment.” I can’t say I disagree with him. Maybe I’m off in some way because I once worked at one. The experience was, to say the least, unforgettable.

You almost have to be there, but I can describe the atmosphere for you. Much to the displeasure of the atheist/agnostic/libertarian “less rules” crowd, there is that unfortunate tendency of announcing sexual freedom and looseness of regulations that works against the overall happiness of mankind. That tendency is seen when the most deeply disturbing of behaviors, which rests within the dark, sticky reservoirs of a pervert’s mind come right to the surface for all to be repulsed by.

We’re so good at putting up walls and showing others only glimpses of what we like and how we feel. We aren’t disgusted by our own fetishes no matter how out-of-bounds others might find them to be, but with most of us, something tells us not to sport them in front of others who may not share them. The problem in porn stores is that those passions are on display, and more than that, even encouraged.

You can spot the different types of customers from the cash register. You can’t help but see a potential customer, an average customer, and a customer/creep (very often a criminal as well). But as we break them down, that's when we become all the more disgusted...

I. Softcore Customers:

First, you have the “good time” couple. They may be young or old, but they are very much in love and non-seriously shopping. It’s the younger couples that tend to be heard giggling at the pecker cake pans and clitoris shot-glasses. They stop in after topping off a romantic night with an Italian dinner, and now they seek some carnal excitement. They seldom buy anything. They just look and laugh and ask on the way out: “You must really love working here, right?” “Not really,” I would tell them. “It’s work and the people aren’t that great.” And that response was a little optimistic.

Then you have the medical shoppers. You’d be surprised at how many people still don’t order stuff off the internet for fear that their credit card numbers will be hacked. So when a 54-year-old woman is told by her doctor to try stimulus tools (aka, “dildos”) to help with vaginal dryness, on goes the sunglasses, a hat, and a wig, and in she comes to get one at the porn store. Same with the late-40s-male who has been told that direct prostate stimulation will help to reduce swelling.

The medical shopper illustrates for us how the classes of customers overlap. Both examples mentioned above are also from that informal “embarrassed shopper” class, which can consist of anyone or any couple who comes in and hastily tries to find what they want (if they want to buy anything at all) so they can leave. Sometimes they will approach someone working there before checking out and say: “I’m embarrassed. Is there any way I can give you my credit card and my ID and you can check me out?” “Sure,” we’d say. Then we’d tell them about how our secure billing shows up as something entirely different on the billing statement (so that no angry, cheated-on spouses can find out): “Honey, the credit card statement says you spent $160.00 at GMS Goods. What is GMS Goods?” Gotta love liberty!

Third, you have the party shoppers, which includes the Halloween costume seekers and wearers, and the so-called “novelty” and “gag gift” shoppers. Here’s a tip: If you buy something at a porn store, never say you are buying for novelty or gag gift purposes. Trust me when I say that it’s a running joke behind the counter how many embarrassed customers use that to try and sound more modest! And it never works.

The fourth and final normal class of would-be customer is the Ambitious lovers class. It’s considered normal for some to want to have sex in new places, perhaps to add a little excitement to break the bedroom boredom, and that’s exactly what an obviously horny couple wants when they come into the porn store.

Why expect to have sex AT a porn store? Because that is what has been happening for a while. Rooms are rented with great big monitors in them and recliners or couches. These pieces of furniture must be cleaned at the end of the day (no, not after each use) with a medical grade cleaning solution because of the activities that go on inside these rooms. The furniture is vinyl-covered for obvious reasons. Stupidly, some places tried normal fabric furniture for a while, and those pieces of furniture were hauled off by a garbage truck before the week was out. And yes, those roles of paper towels that sit next to you on a table…those aren’t for blowing your nose! They are for cleaning up…other…messes.

Because of legal reasons and possible criminal allegations, only one person is now allowed in each room, which brings us back to our horny, ambitious lover couple who begs and begs and offers twice the money to rent the room. They are so dissatisfied to be told no. But this type of adventurous free spirit is lightweight compared to what is to cum (pun intended).

(JH)

Why You Shouldn’t Fear God

2010-11-01T20:20:00.000-06:00

I’m here to tell you why you shouldn’t fear hell. I’m also going to tell you why you should feel free to defy any god you choose because doing so always somehow ends up working to the furtherance of reason. Beyond that, it is in the interests of your own happiness to spurn what is Christendom and similar delusions, as we shall see.

We are told to fear a hell, at least preachers used to talk like that. Today, how quiet the blogs are without Christians ready to remind us of how hot the afterlife for the unsaved will be. I almost miss it: “Ok, Joe, when God ships you off to hell, don’t say you weren’t warned!” Wait, no, I don’t miss it, but all this silence is admittedly unexpected.

You shouldn’t fear a hell. Deities who say they are going to inflict pain on their erring children are not worthy of our praises or the wearying botherance of our prayers. But Hell is an idle threat. It’s not a real place, and if it were, you still shouldn’t fear it.

If hell was real, the company there, with those who defied the ignorance of the gods through the centuries, would be a sought-after commodity. Being there would be better than spending eternity with the naïve and chattering cowards who bowed the knee to their wrathful father-figure out of trembling and trepidation.

But I’m here to tell you that hell is no threat (you may now fornicate and self-fornicate in peace!) How do I know? The same way you will in a minute if you don't already—through reason. The idea of inflicting pain on an individual for eternity is ridiculous.

When one man wrestles down another in an armlock or a chokehold, the one man submits to the other because he knows his arm will be broken or his air will be cut off if he persists in fighting. His “give” is a natural reaction to the force of the winning aggressor. But in hell, that causal relationship no longer exists. In hell, one is eternal – and we need not debate whether hell is “mental” or experienced as a “spirit being.” That is unimportant. All that matters is that one who, in whatever form, experiences pain exists. A lost soul cannot be maimed or injured or torn apart or mutilated. There is no being crippled or sick, as there is no dying.

In life, a POW is tortured for the secrets he holds. He is captured by the enemy. He fears for his life. Giving up on the hope of living, he just wants out of the misery that his captors inflict upon him. If the torturers do as the Japanese did in WWII by sticking bamboo thorns up his fingernails and forcing them in all the way. The Japanese were also known to sever small limbs and dislocate limbs from joints with tightened wires or guitar strings. Forget living. You want to die more than anything. The enemy can’t be allowed to get the secrets he holds or many more lives may be lost. Death is even more desired with that realization.

But let’s say our hypothetical POW knew there was no way out of the misery, that the agony he is to endure is to go on literally forever. He can’t kill himself or do something to get him killed. Then what? In that case, torture becomes something other than torture. With time, our POW eventually accepts the pain. It becomes not just non-lethal force, but a normal experience—one that would even be missed if it suddenly became absent.

No theist dares to estimate the “agony levels” of hell, just as they don’t the temperature of hell or its location…not anymore. It isn’t something you can register on a scale, if hell can be said to have a temperature at all. But whatever it is perceived as – however much the misery of being lost is thought to be – it will have no meaning in the long-run.

We can’t imagine suffering on a million-year time scale. We have no idea how our psyches will adapt in that great stretch of time, but we know that they would adapt, just as a quadriplegic from birth has had an entire lifetime to come to terms with his situation while a man recently crippled will mentally fall apart in depression, possibly begging for someone to kill him because of the change. It takes only a few years in the slammer to break a prisoner from thinking he will be able to escape. In less than 50 years, he doesn’t even want out anymore.

We humans adapt so well to horrendous misfortunes, and we totally take it for granted. Even acknowledging it, we still underestimate that ability. Look how much you’ve changed over the last five years. Watch a home movie if you have to. The changes are amazing.

We are so pathetic in thinking that when we bounce back from life’s trials that we are doing well. A cripple is not being heroic or showing his true strength of character when he vows to live on a ventilator and find dignity and purpose while having to wear an adult diaper. Such an individual is just giving way to the genetic predisposition to adapt and survive. It’s in the genes. It’s not praise-worthy except to the simpletons and Jesus-lovers.

So how about the long-term, the real long-term? How will someone cope in hell? How will the lost endure suffering for, well, a billion years? If someone with peripheral neuropathy and in constant pain for 30+ years can find purpose and hope, how will things seem for an eternity? After a while, all you know is pain and that you won’t die, and so torture isn’t torture anymore. You know it won’t kill you, and soon, all you can remember is the pain. Everyday is just another day in hell.

While not outright desirable, compare the eternal suffering in hell to the great eternal joys of heaven. The same problem surfaces. We are compelled to believe and “accept Christ” to avoid hurt and to enjoy an everlasting heavenly tranquility, but what joy can there be had in a billion years of partying, of playing harps or eating grapes, or…playing Xbox?...or doing the equivalent? Pretty soon, you’ve done it all; you’ve swept your illustrious angel wings across every illuminated corner of heaven’s shimmering glory. The universe is yours – and has been yours – a million times over, then a billion times over; you’ve graced with your presence every celestial sphere; you’ve sung every song, met every saint, told and re-told every story, and gotten your cherubim-ic jollies under every branch of the now-accessible tree of life. Now what? You can’t have joy forever anymore than you can have suffering forever.

I remember discussing this issue at length during a Wednesday night Bible class years ago. We spent a whole hour on the topic, which essentially ended with one country girl’s statement of belief as she sat in the third row from the front: “Well, I think God will make heaven desirable forever somehow. It’s so great, like, you won’t ever get bored because God will keep making it exciting.” I still laugh in the recollecting.

Well, that pretty much stomps out the motivation to strive for holiness and righteousness and a place at God’s right hand. There should be no longer a drive to cast down your crown around the thrown like those strange four living creatures in Revelation (chapters 4 and 5). One can be made afraid of hell and scared into seeking heaven, but one cannot be motivated to seek heaven for heaven’s sake.

Look at the ruts people get into in their burdened lives, and look at how much people still enjoy their lives. We only know what we know as “pleasure” and want it accordingly without giving a split-haired thought to what we may be missing or how badly we may, in fact, have things. It’s all in how we perceive it, but if life doesn’t suck totally, it is great and might as well be had. No party can last forever. No sky party can be good enough to get us to change what works for us here and now on earth. We live our lives and the only changes we make or consider making are the ones that help us to avoid more discomfort. Then we die and the game is over…at last, over!

The evangelist beats into submission his converts by the employment of fear, that most decadent of motivators. But the fear comes from nothing rational; it comes from the fear of transitioning from one state into another, from moving out of a state of happiness and into one of the unknown or affliction. The result could be called unrest or sadness. Hell would be indescribable pain, but that would become meaningless. After a while, the sinner effectively would say to God, his tormenting, fiendish captor: “Is that all you got, bitch?!!!”

Heaven or hell, you shouldn’t want or be afraid of either. Both would be places of eternal stagnation, not worse or better than the life you’re living now. And if you’re like most of us and haven’t killed yourself yet, the life you’re happy with you might as well live out as long as you can with some dignity and meaning.

(JH)

Thank You for Participating

2010-09-16T01:02:00.002-05:00

Revering the Milestones

Take a moment and make a mental list of the milestones in your life. You’ll find that many of these are almost insignificant, growing in significance as you think back.

For instance, think of the first time you fell on your tailbone while trying to skate and learned the value of not taking risks that compromise careful balance. Think of the first time you got the wind knocked out of you from falling backward in a chair, the first time you got Swimmer’s Ear from spending too much time in the water, the first time you got pink eye, the first time you experienced the sensation of drowning. Think of your first auto accident, your first broken or fractured wrist, the first time you dropped a bar of soap or bottle of shampoo on your foot while showering. You knew from that time onward to lift up the closest foot whenever you dropped something.

Now think of those milestones that marked a turning point in your social development. Think back on how you felt the first time you got hit in the face. Think about you felt when you parted ways with your first best friend. Think back on the first time you backed down after getting shoved by a bully in front of friends you wanted to impress. Think of the first time you got snapped at by an adult you thought wasn’t capable of going off at you.

Now think of the bigger milestones, the ones you more readily remember. Think about how you felt when you failed the test the first time you went to get your driver’s license. Then think about how it felt when you went back and passed the test. Your first communion, your baptism, your first kiss, your first sneak out of the house without permission, your first make-out, your first lay…these were events that served as more than memories. They were rites of passage.

Rites of Passage

Every society has a set of them. You pass a certain point in undergoing experiences that the fellow members of your society value, and you are promoted to what amounts to the next “rank” in the order. Life will be different now. Your outlook and experiences will demonstrate a change in thinking, which will affect the way others treat you.

The years pass and you look back at the older stages of you and wonder how you ever made the decisions you made or came to the conclusions you came to. The memories seem so clear, and yet you forget just how much escaped you until what you missed comes back at you in bits and pieces as you reflect years later.

The Green Ribbon

It was summer of 1985. The Windcrest Swim Competition was right around the corner. Dad had just succeeded in teaching me the backstroke and a few other swim maneuvers when he turned his attention to Eric. My brother always had more athletic talent than I, especially swimming. He spent less time with him than with me in training. You could never tell if dad felt we were ready or not. I only knew I felt ready, and so did little brother.

Before we knew it, we were on our way. Dad wouldn’t turn the air conditioner on, though I asked for it. “Save your sweat for the pool,” he said. Finally, we were in our separate lanes and competing with 47 other local kids at the sound of a whistle.

What did we get for our participation in this event? The same thing I got for competing in the Crestview school bicycle tournament the year before—a dark-green ribbon with gold lettering that said: “Thank you for Participating.” That’s it. Unlike those who placed 1st through 5th in the competition, we got nothing—nothing but this insulting green ribbon. We got two things if you count an almost insulting lecture from mom and dad on what we could have done better and how we didn’t train hard enough for the event, which happened to be true.

But we learned what it was like to lose that year. That’s why it was such a milestone worth mentioning. I learned one of the oldest and most important rules in life: There will always be competition. Nature abhors a vacuum. Odds are, even if you win the race, you’ll do so by narrowly squeezing out a lead against the guy running next to you. Find me an exception to that rule. There aren’t many.

Now You’re In!

Being the loser does one thing, and that is, it teaches you valuable wisdom. You get smarter and a lot wiser in losing, and hopefully, more determined and better. That isn’t always true, however. Brother and I swore and swore we’d train all year for the following year’s competition, but we just gave up and played Atari instead. Lessons on the dangers of quitting take much longer to learn.

Being the winner…now that changes things. Winning walks you through the door of that next rite of passage. You “level up” and that puts you on the inside. It moves you up the totem pole. It changes your perspective and those around you. But here comes the shock; the knowledge of that “leveling up” is secret until you arrive to be in on it.

If you’re the winner, it’s so glamorous to the losers who are struggling to amass the necessary determination and wisdom to forge ahead and be able to claim what you already have. Not for you. As the winner, you stand at the forefront. More options are open to you. You’ve had that glory. It’s time for something new. That’s where the illusion comes in.

The illusion is that winning betters you in some way. The illusion is that achievement and victory are somehow glamorous. Wrong. It’s like being in the military. So many proud, young, strong men – just out of high school and wet behind the ears – enlist in the military out of a false idealistic conception of patriotism that will never survive the refiner’s fire. Once you’re in the military, you become less patriotic than you were before—enough to notice the difference with time. The orders, the indifference of the system, the corruption, the fact that the system is only good for you if you are for it…those eat at you and you start letting your old, euphoric notions of serving God and country and killing the bad guys slide. Once you’re in, the perspective changes.

It’s so easy for a child to imagine growing up and being a prosecutor and putting the scum of society in jail. They have no idea of the plea bargains, office politics, or what it means to work in the chain of command as a representative of the city. Every psychiatrist goes home to their spouse and unloads on their own “couch” the frustrations of those who will never be able to see their way out of their delusions. They would never refer to their patients as “hopeless” or “batshit crazy,” but you better believe they think it.

Every cop learns to fight off bitterness. Newbie officers quickly learn in dealing with the dregs of the earth that being consumed by bitterness is a real threat. I know because I’ve been close enough to the action. I had the pleasure of meeting a former sheriff’s deputy from East Texas. He had to resign from his job, he told me. Over dinner, I asked why. His reply: “Because I knew that if I kept working just one more day, I was going to get brought up on brutality charges for turning someone into a vegetable.”

The reality of law enforcement is less noble on the inside than it is on the outside. On the outside, it’s about stopping burglars and giving speeches about staying off drugs to elementary schoolers. On the inside, it’s about playing the game of knowing how and when to look, look away, and to cover your ass while doing both.

And so it is in the quest for God. Being on the inside of the pious is not as pretty of a picture than without, and those noble feelings of helping the weak and “lifting up the hands that hang down” (Hebrews 12:12), well, they pass.

“Avoid the Huddle!”

“Avoid the huddle” is a saying widely known in the car business. It means stay away from the grumpy, burnt-out crew whose members huddle around and talk about why the car sales business sucks so much and why they never sell. They talk themselves out of sales and tend to drag others down with them.

It sounds so good to hear, (and to hear yourself say), but not everything that sounds good is true. The reality is that eventually, you’ll be right in the middle of the huddle with the mumblers, and just as grumpy, if not more.

Admonishment

It is so easy to give admonishing against falling prey to burnout and giving up prematurely and so difficult to be wise enough to abandon what doesn’t work in search of another, more profitable path. Some call that burnout, but it’s not. It’s about being of sound mind enough to cut your losses and realize that what you’ve dedicated yourself to is not the only way, and may even have been a mistake. Better and more rewarding ways may exist.

As a minister, I spent years receiving money from hardworking men and women who, like most, were good people. They went to church every Sunday – and some every Wednesday night – to hear fairytales in the form of pep talks. They were mildly delusional. Most of them wouldn’t and didn’t care about hearing what I have to say now, but they were willing to pay me to hear what God their Creator wanted them to hear. I got paid to sell snake oil.

Time showed me that not only do these people – many of them elderly and blindsided by their own hatred and prejudices soaked into them from their time alive – were in terrible health and suffered from the same (or worse) senile fits of rage. I always had to be on top of my game for everyone else, some sort of good example. But I came to see that no one would change. No one would learn from their mistakes or do much to make themselves better people.

But what is better? The term means disappointingly little when it comes to human beings in the self-improvement context. I was no better than the people I “led.” You could almost argue I was worse.

No Tears

I remember getting a phone call at around 10:30 one night. My wife and I rushed over to a house where a wayward member of our church suffered a breakdown. His wife met me at the door and warned me that it wasn’t pretty. Her husband was in the fetal position on the floor of their living room, crying like a baby. All he could do was repeat while sobbing: “My uncle almost butt-fucked me when I was ten. He tried to pull down my pants and fuck me in the butt.” I counseled the man for over two hours. I can remember feeling for the man at the time, but I don’t anymore for this moping son of a bitch.

Do I sound harsh? There is that tendency to feel sorry and look upon people like myself as cold and unsympathetic, but therein is what we’re talking about—no one on the outside sees how many blubbering messes like this man eat up your time over old issues that are issues no longer. The man quit crying and began opening up to me once he saw the attention he was getting. He was happy as a clam until the next breakdown.

I was once conducting a counseling session gone awry as I watched a husband stand up, pull up his shirt, and say to his wife: “Hit me in the gut! Go on! See if it hurts!” Why? Because she got mad that he asked why a dead horse was in the front yard. That’s what started this whole incident and a series of sessions that nearly did me in and an angry husband who tried to sue me for slander.

Jesus is an Idiot

There’s the church built upon pious lies and scandalous ploys for money, but also those who take advantage of church just for the money.

I’m in the middle of teaching a bible class when a family of five walks in and sits down as though interested in the lesson. Once the lesson is over, they ask us for bus tickets. Sounded so legitimate. They didn’t ask for money, just tickets to get back to Houston where they said they lived. The men of the church met and bought the tickets for them. Not any later than I drove off to leave the building did they cash them in on chips, sodas, and candy. I pull up and ask him why he deceived us and didn’t get on the bus. He just looked at me and insincerely said: “Sorry,” still drinking the soda. The kids didn’t even glance back at me. Their faces were stuck in bags of pork rinds and Hershey's.

I’ve seen a woman stand up on a Sunday morning and state her hatred of a male member she had a disagreement with. An elder had to stand up and threaten to disfellowship her to shut her up. Jesus actually died for us fuckers? He’s a fucking idiot!

A Little More Than a Ribbon

So don’t give me bullshit about wisdom or compassion, or the wrap about how my desire to help people wasn’t enough. Don’t give me the bullshit of having soil of “not enough root” or not having enough love for souls. You don’t go as far as I did with a lack of love. And again, it’s about being on the inside. It’s about having been there and done that.

Is this just a bitter rant? What about the good people I admonished? They were good anyway. I wasn’t needed. Those 9 years gave me a story to tell, which is only a little better than a green ribbon.

It’s the story of my life and so many others: You participated. You tried. At least you know what it’s like and that it’s not for you. I guess that glory will have to be enough.

(JH)

Not The King of The Mountain

2010-08-11T08:34:00.001-05:00

Of all the places I have ever lived, our house on Welcome Drive was the most full vessel of memories in my life. I have lived in a few different places since childhood, but nowhere else do the details of where I used to live so stick. I can still tell you my old address and even my first phone number without missing a beat. Am I alone in this?

With as many subsequent phone numbers as we've had, being able to recall the first seems rather odd. Try and remember all your previous phone numbers. See how hard it can be. 12808 Welcome Drive, San Antonio, TX 78233 was the old address. View it on Google Earth. That chimney visible from the road, that driveway and wooden window posts...dad put those on there himself. If you sent me a postcard in the 80s, it would come to me at this address. If you could jump in a time machine and head back to make a call to me at any date prior to August 6, 1990, you'd have to call me at this number: (210) 653-8526. I'll confess that as I wrote this article, I couldn't resist the urge to call the old number just to see who has it now. A damn automated answering machine picked up.

So many memorable things happened inside that house, from unwanted enemas to large belt buckle butt whippings, from first porn video viewings to my first spooch rag to go with. One of the more memorable things outside of the welcome drive house was a steep hill with a yard to a house directly across the street. This was 1984-85. Brother was 7 and I was 11. Our friends Brian, Brandon, and Tommy were only 3 houses down. We met up regularly and the place we played was the yard across the street, the yard on the hill. The game we most often played was only one among a few games that didn't involve social ridicule or peer pressure to smoke or fear of the ditch people. It was called "King of the Mountain." Most kids have played it that have access to each other and a hill simultaneously.

There were only two rules: 1) Get to the top and throw down anyone getting in your way, and 2) stay on top while everyone else tries to throw you down. And that's it. The only reward for winning is your pride. I never won. My little brother Eric did better than I did, all things considered. He wasn't afraid to be tackled or get a slight concussion from being thrown down and hitting his head against the curb below. I still loved the game, a few skin burns notwithstanding. But none of us were king of the mountain because the kid whose parents owned "the mountain" was king of the mountain. His name was David Holmes. He was 17—and a big 17. Thankfully, he didn't compete that often, and of course, he never needed to.

Holmes was held back twice in school, making him extra big and brawny for a somewhat stemmy, thin guy. But speaking of "held back," Holmes was his own social "hold-back" force. The kid was a degenerate, one our parents could see right through and weren't fond of us hanging around. But what the heck...we'd never go further than just across the street to play, so they never really complained. This awesome tiny mountain, this teeny, weenie-but-aspiring foothill, this was the place we had our best time ever as we were allowed to play King of the Mountain during the great snowstorm of 1985.

Yes, it's a real event. Google it. In San Antonio in 1985, the city got over 4 feet of snow and it stuck around for nearly two months at below-freezing temps. We built a 9-ft-tall snowman in our yard and another on the hill and did enough sleigh riding on it to crack two tailbones in one day. I remember the morning I loaded up on hot chocolate and charged upward to claim my prize. I was the first one tossed on my ass. Snowball fighting, well, I was a little better at that.

After those great times, Holmes quit letting us play in his yard as often, and pretty soon, not at all. His parents never cared one way or the other. It was his decision. His character went from stupid, clueless, self-interested loser to completely dickish in a hurry. He suddenly quit being at home as much, and even his parents didn't seem to know where he was.

Pretty soon, things start turning up missing at home. My brother's skateboard, and then a volleyball, basketball, and a jar of quarters we kept on the hutch in our den. Holmes never came inside very much, but he had his opportunities to swipe a few items when he did, which we soon knew could only be him.

Holmes was from Nebraska. The kid had been in and out of boarding schools for a while. We knew he was trouble, just not this much trouble. Holmes provided us our first taste of being overly embarrassed at a true, raging idiot. We get home from school one day and catch him skateboarding down the big hill adjacent to his house—with my brother's skateboard. He had plenty of time to hide it before we arrived. He didn't because he thought he didn't need to. We run into him, and same as always, he is spitting loogies while finishing off a crumpled bag of Ruffles, and saying: "What's up!" in his lazy sort of way. We stare at what we notice to be my brother's skateboard!

It makes sense now. He stole it and thought he could get away with it because Holmes was a freaking moron. No wonder he never had much to say, and no personality whatsoever. It takes a while longer to notice stuff like that when you are a kid. Now it made sense; Holmes was stupid as hell. He threw some neon green paint on the front of the skateboard and carved a large "X" across the front and took a guess we kids wouldn't know any better. That was because he wasn't smart enough to know any better himself.

We stood there and pretended not to notice at first. At first, he made no attempt to explain the similarity between his new board and our old one that somehow went missing at exactly the same time his “new” one showed up. When he finally saw us staring too long, he said: "This board looks like your old one, but it's not. There is a x on it and green paint. See?" He said nothing else, and we were too scared to say anything else with regard to calling him out on his pot plant-level IQ for low-profile thievery.

OK, so he's stupid and a thief. We promptly tell our parents, but they decide it's not worth doing anything about. Mom and dad weren't confrontational, even back in those days. I think we got a "He'll get what's coming to him soon enough" response and a warning to steer clear, which we did, despite being pissed and wanting our stuff back.

Over four months pass. The hot summer now in full swing, we were having fun in other ways, with other friends. But we still never forgot about the hill. Four months is a long time for a kid to go without playing on it. There were just too many good times there before the Holmes family moved in, like when we first sat on it and placed a “boys only” sign at the top and taunted the “yucky” grade-school girls who walked by on the street two summers earlier: “You can't come up here!” we would say. “We don't want to come up in your stupid yard, idiots.” they would holler back, walking away. This was the same hill where little Raymond Sosby tried to do a running jump-kick to knock down his older opponent, but ended up a crying mess before us all on the street. His kid was the mayor's kid, but we never got more than a talking to from mom about the whole episode. Like I said, too many good times.

One bright and hot Saturday morning, I remember being woken up by dad. Bro and I both were both hauled out of bed. Saturdays were no excuse to not work outside in the hot sun alongside dad just because school was out; and so we did. Dad kept us busy all day, folding and snapping tree limbs and taking them out in bundles to the road. It was an all day job, which didn't end until mom came out with glasses of sweet iced tea and said we'd done enough. She always wore that light pink, cotton shirt on the hottest days. She made a cake for us, too, and a pitcher of lemonade.

We finished the limbs project. By the evening, dad was mowing, and by then, we didn't even want to go in. We played in the cut grass paths as dad made them in the yard with the mower. Even the bugs seemed to make different sounds in the summers of our youth. We played with sister, barely one year old at the time. It was nearly magic to watch this tiny child try to push a beach ball in the front yard as she laughs hysterically when it rolled. Then mom takes her in for the night and dad settled down with a large Mason jar of tea to watch Saturday Night Shockers like he always did.

That left brother and I outside and bored. What started out as a great day seemed to want to end in a night of frustration. We sat on the back of mom's '81 Ford Escort waiting for some friends to come by, listening to the symphony of locusts and bugs in the trees. None of our pals ever came. Then we noticed Holmes and his new tramp date exit the house. The porch light came on suddenly and the two, holding hands, made their way to the awesome hill to look up at the stars together. These girls Holmes would hang around with weren't exactly looking “yucky” anymore.

Seeing this irked me terribly. That was our hill, the one we had so many good times on, and Holmes - that crooked, stupid thief - was sitting pretty on it with some girl who looked older than him and who could drive! Oh, the indignity! I wanted him to pay! Now we were banned from the great mini-mountain, and then robbed, and now this?! My eyes veered left at that pile we so tirelessly brought to the curb that day...when it hit me. I said: "Eric, follow my lead, and whatever you do, stay down!" He had a confused look on his face, but he went along.

We made our way, ducking and kneeling, to the amassment of limbs and branches. Our brows once again hot and sweating as earlier in the day, we watched through the truffle of twigs, the smell of gasoline still on our hands. We could hear our own breathing. All was quiet until I let out: “GO TO HELL!”

I tried to make my voice deeper and scratchier to sound like an older kid. I had no idea how good a job I did. I figured, we'd make a run for the house if he called us out, but he didn't. Their giggling with hands held stopped. They got quiet and listened, obviously startled. Holmes yelled back: “WHAT THE HELL? WHO'S THAT? WHO'S THERE?”

And I let out another: “HEY, DICKSUCKER! FUCK YOUR MOM! EAT MY SHIT!” He got up and looked around. She looked around and the two exchanged words. They really can't tell where it's coming from, we realized. “WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?” he says, getting a little closer this time. We hide by positioning ourselves deeper within the brush in case he comes into our yard. He stops and goes back.

Then I yell: “FAGGOT ASS FUCKING FAGGOT FUCKER! FUCK YOUR MOM AND FUCK YOUR DAD!” He starts getting angry. More huddled words between them, and then she starts getting scared. She ups and leaves. He says: "Wait, come on!" or something similar. More arguing as they retreat, and that's the end of his good time! He looks around one more time at our yard and others and then goes back in. Success!

And it was double-success since barely a month after this, Holmes broke into a sporting goods store, got caught, and was sent back to juvenile hall. This gloriously outspoken night, laced with sucker-shot profanity, was the last we ever saw of David Holmes. The lesson should stand out in all of our minds like a larger version of that little mount we claimed dominion of: I may not have been king of the mountain, but I was the king of my own mind. And sometimes the greatest satisfaction comes just from speaking it.

(JH)

Crazy Men Tell No Tales: The Adventures of Stonewall Davis

2010-07-28T06:35:00.001-05:00

George Davis “stonewalled” the authorities for as long as I knew him, as he did teachers and counselors and all who in any way represented authority figures. For that reason and no other, we called him “Stonewall.” It soon became like he had no other name.

Crazy

I've known some interesting people in my life—you know that if you've read much of anything I've written. But there are “crazy guys” and then there are crazy guys, the kind who never quit kidding around when you need them to and wish they would. They can't quit playing around because they aren't playing around; they're being themselves. Some never mentally grow to fit their larger bodies; they age, but fail to mature.

Stonewall was crazy. Of all the friends of friends I ever had, this chump would qualify as “most memorable once removed” if ever such a title existed. Ron White is correct when he says, “You can't fix stupid!” But I'll add that you almost can't forget crazy. Speaking of crazy, I have a saying: Crazy men tell no tales; they live the tales to be told. They live out the tales that others tell about them and have, in my experience, no interest in telling their own stories. The ride of life is enough for them.

If you think about it, I'm fulfilling my own saying with every strike of each key.

A Scary Good Time

The very presence of Stonewall was an indication of a scary good time. Stonewall drove this 1986 Chevy Astrovan. It was white with orange stripes, as I recall, with the paint starting to chip off. You always knew that van coming and going. In the back sat a checkered brown, 1960s-style couch that rode around on that scratched floor in the empty back cargo area. It once sat squarely in the center of a 3rd floor apartment before being deemed unfit and too tacky for living room usage.

I can't say much for riding around in that vehicular abomination, but at least we were comfortable everywhere we went. So what if some pieces of foam were stuck to our pant legs when getting up. And just as you suspected upon hearing about it, that damn couch slid around everywhere we went. The ride was always a blast. Stonewall made it a game to throw on the brakes and see how hard the couch would knock against the driver's seat, but that was only part of his agenda; the other part was to surprise us and see how uneasy he could make us when coming into or out of a turn, or a sudden stop or start. He laughed with every “thud.”

This old van had seen it's day as a commuter's cargo van for a local and now defunct courier company. Stonewall's dad got it for him and always told him he'd learn to treat it better than he did when he came to have to pay for the repairs. Those ghetto speakers lodged against the back doors...those cracked and sun-baked cupholders...they only seemed to make the tattered old bomb look better. I memorized every line of every crack. That six-cylinder had some go-ahead power for a vehicle of that size, I'm telling you. And Stonewall never let us forget that. But the poor old auto would never live long enough for Stonewall to learn the lesson dad wished he'd learn.

Oh Honey! Don't Forget Me!

Stonewall had a way with words like he did waywardness and throwing food at people when their backs were turned. When his girlfriend decided things weren't working out and broke up with him on a whim, he drove over to her house – owned by two older, white parents who hideously hated the guy – and sang a love song entitled: “Oh Honey! Don't Forget Me!” It was intentionally old-fashioned, designed to sound romantic to the young girl, but also to satirically lash out at the cheesiness of generations before his. We all shared in that ridiculing passion.

Unexpectedly, the song was followed by a power-braking segment on her parents' front yard flowerbed that left a huge patch of ripped-up dirt in their $260,000+ home. It was Stonewall's way of saying: “I'll get you flowers! I'll tear out your dad's and my spinning tires will land them on your doorstep. I never said our love isn't wild, baby!” Neighborhood security couldn't get there fast enough. Her dad ran out to catch him and pull him out of the vehicle, but Stonewall just locked the doors. He took his time fleeing, and “dag nabit” (my own little stab at older generations), the son of a bitch won his girl back.

+1 for Stonewall. -1 for the police and security letting him get away.

On Deer Hill in Stone Oak Parkway

I remember a night in 1995. The night was clear, but oh so dark and hot. The mosquitoes were out. You seemed to be able to see more stars than normal. I remember there was no wind.

I take only a moment to stare up at the sky on the way out to the car, and then head over to cousin's house in Stone Oak Parkway in San Antonio. The road leading up to my cousin's house was steep and deer were always spotted there. It almost never failed. Drive through and you spot a large, innocent family of deer traipsing out, usually with a buck among them, even in broad daylight. The area came to be called Deer Hill.

This was the place a week before that my cousin's Ford Ranger took a beating from a 6-point buck that got bloodily trampled under the front left tire and shot out the back like a crushed-headed porceline baby doll thrown by an angry child across a room. Jace said you could hear the hooves clicking against the pavement as its lifeless deer body came to a stop while spinning and slapping against the pavement. That was so cool...but, yes, sad. The Ford logo barely survived, missing getting smashed to bits in the impact by only inches.

Always drive slowly on Deer Hill.

But Deer Hill had another feature—it was steep as a motherfucker! The hill was so steep that you could get to over 50 mph just by costing without touching the pedal. It was a long way down, with a wide field out to both sides and a stop sign at the bottom, with a huge dip leading onto a flat surface where the road evens out. The surface acted as a ramp, giving a jolt (right into the air if you went fast enough). Just coasting would make for a thrilling ride.

Tonight promised to be more scary than fun or funny. The booze were ready, the ice chest was cold, the buddies had been called, and it was to be a night to remember, which began and ended with a full-speed ride down deer hill. I was a minister in training at the time and never participated in their “sinful” activities at this point, but simply tagged along in hopes of converting the heathen crowd.

The most rebellious sinner of them all was Stonewall, of course, the same guy who rounded us up, and just when we got comfortable on that old couch, floored the gas at the top of the hill. He didn't plan it. It just happened, as with most of the chaos in Stonewall's cop-familiar life.

The thrill of barreling down a hill at nutty speeds soon gave way to fear, and quicker than we thought, to shoulder-grabbing panic. After the laughter, our protests were all that could be heard: “Slow down, man. Stop! I mean it! Stop, dude! Seriously, I mean it! It's not funny!” All we could hear is his chuckling and the engine accelerating. We grab his hair after shoving him from behind, hoping more yells would get him to slow down. Made no difference. He kept on. It was the prelude to a reckless teen beginning to an “I Know What You Did Last Summer” sequel.

According to the digital speedometer Stonewall had installed, we hit 110 mph. We were somewhere in or around that speed, now shaking and shimmying violently as the vehicle felt more and more unstable and lighter. The feeling was so intense. And as expected, here came yet another innocent, ripe-for-the-ripping-apart family of deer.

No, we didn't hit them. We flew right by them like a formula 1 car. The blast of the ride ended with a bump...a bump that felt like a train wreck. By now, we were expecting to die. The stop sign at the bottom we were coming upon with Stonewall’s foot still on the accelerator—no point in even trying to stop now. Just go with it...and pray...

POPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP!!

We didn't hit another car. That blurring thing made of asphault with a line in the middle that we ignored and were riding on, plummeting in this tretcherous moment was the now flat road that we hit. The popping that morphed into a chorus of crushing metal parts were the shocks, engine mounts, the transmission, and the oil pan underside of the engine that had done a Spock-style “mind-meld” with the pavement. Our heads hitting the roof as we bounced to a stop was not the end. It was the last moment of being upright before landing face-first against the cargo main side door with that couch slamming against our backsides as we hit a curb.

Now, we were at a stop, with a swaying of some parts of the front bumper and license plate holder. A rolling sound was coming from the engine as all rotating parts came to a stop. We had to crawl out the front. I was the last one out. All were yelling at Stonewall, but at first there was silence. The adrenaline was pumping. We were just glad to be alive. Now to check for bruises and blood splotches we missed in the shock.

Oh, that's right, it's nighttime and the only light we have is from the amazingly still on headlights of Stonewall's van as it stood on its side against a curb next to a field, as we began our walk back home with the beginnings of whiplash. It was a dark walk home that seemed to take forever.

We got home that night and every one of us was soar from the experience. We slept in late the next day. But at least we weren't stuck with the bill to repair the van. Stonewall said his goodbyes to that trusty bomb and never looked back. Off it went to the salvage yard. He couldn't pay to get it running again and dad refused to help. A 1983, “old-man” style, maroon El Camino was his new ride, donated unwisely by grandpa. He actually liked the ugly thing.

The Good Times End

Life and Stonewall weren’t meant to get along. If they had been, causality wouldn't have taken the route it took over the next two years. The good times were about to be over.

Stonewall had a passion for mudding in his new truck. The 83' El Camino didn't last long because when he had car trouble, he couldn't pay to have it released once fixed, so a mechanic's lean ended up with him losing it. The new love was a 1989 Chevy S-10, one that, believe it or not, ran well. He had it only six months before a mishap had him crawling out through the driver's side window to get the thing towed as it stood 4 feet high in mud. Another week later, when his lazy ass managed to get back out to have it towed, the windows and lights were smashed out and cow crap patties had been tossed inside. It took yet another week to save up to get it towed and fixed again.

A year passes. Stonewall is none the wiser and in his first legal pickle for possessing a controlled substance and driving while impaired. Probation, then some leniency from a cool old dude judge, and he's back out again. Then he's in trouble, again. This time, it's a wreck he caused due to driving under the influence. Some fines and now a little jail-time later, he's driving again—but that's a bad idea since he lost his driver's license in the second pop and was supposed to wait three years to get it back.

That didn’t stop him from trying to drive home one rainy night after getting off work from Chester’s Night Club. And it didn't stop him from pursuing altered states of consciousness, or to recollect what he so convincingly told that cool judge back at the second sentencing...

“Oh, don't worry, your honor. I've learned my lesson. I will never so much as think of getting behind the wheel wasted again.”

He both thought of it and did it.

Stonewall pulls out in front of an oncoming car, some girl in a tan Ford Taurus. A wreck occurs. Cousin and I are sitting at home doing much of nothing but polishing off a pizza and playing video games when a call comes. It's Stonewall calling from a gas station pay phone at 2 am.

After approximately one minute of conversation, we begin to think two things; one, why is there a girl crying in the background? And two, why isn't Stonewall laughing like usual? We practically hadn't heard him cease to laugh except for that short period of time upon finding out that his truck windows were smashed while stuck in the mud, and as he stood before that (soon to be furious) cool, aged man judge, assuring him of his newly found penitence.

We ask what in the fuck is going on. He tells my cousin: “I…I…I…don't know what to do. I caused an accident. I'm high again. I’ve got coke all over me, and the police are coming. I wasn't even supposed to be driving…now, now what am I going to do?” Cousin: “Is the girl I hear really hurt?” Stonewall: “Maybe. I think so...what...what I am going to do?” A few more airy pauses as the rain continues to pour and hit that tin roof above the phone. Soon, the sound of a police siren getting close can be heard. Then…

“CLICK.”

And we’ve never heard from him again, and that was back in 1997. But Stonewall gave me a story to tell, one I’m sure he wouldn’t care to hear or read about. And that’s the way it is with the freaks and the insane; they live it; they never talk about it. But the rest of us – we cautious cowards who sit on the sidelines and watch – we sure talk about it. And the philosophical moral beneath the moral of the story is not a comforting one.

It doesn’t matter who you are. Life will do a flawless job at robbing you of your laughter. It seems the only things to laugh at without fear of repercussion are the miseries of life, along with the wasted chances and blown opportunities on the part of some that give the rest of us something to talk about and to learn from. If you can't laugh at the expense of yourself and everyone else, then maybe you shouldn't be laughing at all.

(JH)

Life, the Best Viagra Promotion

2010-07-20T04:48:00.000-05:00

I get them in my inbox and I'd be hard-pressed to believe you don't, either. I'm talking about the loads of email spam, the kind that disgusts its readers and clogs up search engines and creates coding havoc everywhere there is internet.

Spam – particularly Viagra or ExtenZe advertisements from online pharmacies foreign and domestic – has become a thing I expect to see. If I got up to check my email and did not find these unwanted manhood-making advertisements, I'd feel like I'm in a parallel universe of some kind. They are always there and they read to the affect of...

“Strengthen your tool,” “wow her with your new member,” “make your manhood manlier,” “international potency pharmacy,” “add inches to your cock,” etc.

Yahoo spam-blocking sucks. No matter how many messages of this sort I mark as spam, more still show up in the inbox. The system never learns how to handle them with what has come to be called “spoofmail,” which is where you find messages to you that appear to have come from you or as a reply back to you. Pretty malicious tactics when you think about it. Google is much better in preventing this unwanted onslaught of garbage. I talk from experience.

As unwelcome as these bulk spam attempts are, they are a good indicator of the obsessive nature of humankind and why our lives become as plugged up and complicated as they do. Life itself is a Viagra advertisement. No longer do orgasmic-ally challenged men and women have to watch an infomercial and call the 800-number on the bottom of the screen. They get the info right in their inboxes, whether they want it or not. The shame of confessing that your needle isn’t up to its task is a thing of the past. Your secret is safe with the seller—right up until they decide to sell your personal info and set it free into the vastness of the Spamiverse for others to stuff up your inbox with “special offers.”

As cheap as email advertising is, just one positive response (a sale) makes the 275,000+ auto deletions and spam-blocks worth it. Those bogus email address extensions, like “.com.uk.is.ss.rs” and those spurious invitations to click on strange links, prefaced with broken English or foreign email message characters won’t stop some from turning into buyers.

But the internet has done over and above what we could expect. We can communicate in real time with someone in Los Angeles or the Ukraine for free from just about anywhere in the world. We can amass followings, form societies, start petitions, and build decadent communities in cyberspace—usually for free. The internet has made unions possible that will have an evolutionary impact, the likes of which we can't perceive. So many people are together now that otherwise would never have met each other. We've come a long way since having to send a snail-mail application for membership form that we found in the back of our favorite special interest magazine like we did in the 80s and early 90s.

But therein is the problem with the internet. Right after the charm wears off of saying “hi” to brother and sister in South Carolina or Missouri via webcam, and right after the arduous but rewarding task of teaching grandma how to use WebTV so that even technologically retarded 70-year-olds can send and receive emails, what is the next most promising use for the internet? PORN! Porn. It's sticky keys instead of sticky pages nowadays. Just as in working the bars, all we can think about on the internet is the “junk” of genitalia.

Nature doesn’t change, so that shouldn't surprise us, but what does surprise us but shouldn't is the anonymity that the net provides and how it fucks with our heads. With a simple few clicks of a mouse or the accidental clicking of a pop-up ad, every housewife stepping out on her husband can find 100,000 different ways to pull it off without getting caught. Every sexual deviant with a fetish for the next-door neighbor's Cocker Spaniel can go online and find a society where his messed-up type are accepted and sympathized with. Every quiet, glasses-wearing nerd with a fetish for ejaculating on kneecaps while holding a Barbie doll in his right hand can find more than a few candidate partners.

Unpleasant as it is to think about, every fecalpheliac who desires to consume the chocolate chunks of his/her lover in a mall food court while dressed in drag can meet up and fulfill the desires of his/her heart. Thumbs up for freedom of speech and unity! Thumbs up for bridging that gap of distance and turning this mud-ball into an interactive communication sphere! Thumbs down for those of us who expect normalcy. Ok, forget normalcy. How about just honesty?

That's why the internet must be policed; because the dishonest, lying, cheating, fucking scumbag phonies out there have allowed it to get to their heads that they can be whoever or whatever they want. They can live like shape-shifters in whatever form they desire, be it a 70th-level Paladin or a Don Juan guy, with long, flowing, black hair – created from photoshopped and stolen pics – who is looking to move back to the states from France and settle down after a successful, 13-year career as a nude beach photographer, photographing some of the most beautiful women in the world.

In reality, he's a fat guy 26-year-old with greasy hair. He lives in his mother’s basement and plays on his Mac. He won’t even give a shit about how his lying about his identity will affect him when he goes to meet for the first time the person he deceived. His head is too into the game to give a fuck. He’s a chronic masturbator charlatan who’s too lazy even to cognitively process the fact that he’s a lying cheese-dick who is tearing a hole in people’s emotions. He’s too lazy or just too full of Cheetos.

You’ve heard the saying, but if you haven’t, here it is…

“The internet: where the men are men, where the women are men, and where the children are federal agents.”

If only the truth was in agreement with this declaration. In reality, not enough is being done. I was contacted last year while perusing a certain chatroom. Out of the blue, I got a message from a “Meagan16” who said to me: “Wanna chat? I hope you don’t mind I’m just 16. Does that matter to you?” My reply after saying yes: “You are going to have to do better than that if you want to catch the pervos.” Bloink! The person logged out. Guess its time to start over with a smarter game-plan and a new username, huh, “Meagan”?

Daniel O’Brien, the 32-year-old man who plotted to abduct and molest a 12-year-old girl in Littleton, Mass. who ran away with him, did so: “to kiss her, lick her and suck her and get her to love [me] and have babies together.” This guy was a friend of a friend of mine. We were both in shock when the news broke of how he was arrested at a bus station while trying to run away with the child. I never actually met the guy, but I remember the long chats he and my friend would carry on with into the long hours of the night. I’m telling you, you are never prepared when you find out that you don’t really know somebody!

But abuses on the internet are an escalation of what happens in the typical bar scene: dinner and drinks or dinner and a movie—then what? We fuck. We defecate too, but who wants to focus on that…who but our fecalpheliac friends we mentioned earlier? Everything we do in life is to get to the procreating part. Nothing is exempted from that. That should bother the most and least religious of us.

First, it should bother the pious because religion gives you guidelines in using whatever acts as your dick-hardening Viagra. Religion tells you: “It’s ok to get off, just wait till you’re married so your horny, cumming ass won’t be fucking everything that’s not nailed down and producing kids without a known father. And don’t poke someone else’s wife so that the husband you wronged will not have reason to kill your ‘young, dumb, and full of cum’ stupid self.”

The scriptures imply – sort of – that masturbation is sin, but nowhere do they state it. The reason—religion was a tool to control in early societies what would naturally happen that could present problems for society at large, not to oppose nature (at least, that was not the intent). Every wise man who had a part in writing and editing Leviticus and Numbers whipped his skippy, probably not long before or after writing: “When any man hath a running issue out of his flesh, because of his issue he is unclean.” (Leviticus 15:2)

Secondly, religion gives one more thing—it actually gives an orgasm. The Christian spiritual fetish is: “He died for my sins and he didn’t have to” = tears, quivering lips, organ music playing, hands in the air = endorphins released = orgasm. It’s a different kind, but no less appealing or strong. The high it gives is no different than cocaine or booze or that hypnotizing new picture of some Lithuanian model with unusual hair. Something about her has made you soar for two straight nights. It’s all about the rush, the panting and elevated breathing levels, the feeling that the way things are is the way they must be, SO SAITH GOD!

Like most priests, the lot of us can’t go without getting our big “O”s, physical or mental (religious). We humbly confess our desperation: “We got needs!” We say so and we move on with no crisis of conscience. Religion provides one of these Os. This has some crazy implications for the religious; when you yield to the genetics-born temptation to poke your spouse, you are obeying God, and at the same time, your genetics. Must be God working through the flesh (for once, even though the scripture always repudiates the idea).

Before you got ready for church this or last Sunday, that 25-minute, closed-door, quiet bedroom encounter with your helpmeet, when Zachary and Devon were put to sleep, was already decreed—not by a deity, but by your genetics. Marriage is not “honorable in all.” It just has to work for society to propagate and function, so religion steps in to regulate it. Those evil little dickhead-helmet-wearing men within your genes have already decreed, and you are following their commands perfectly. At the end of the day, it’s the Viagra we want, the Viagra we need, the Viagra we must have.

(JH)

Margery Pippin’s Son and the Value of Life at Conception

2010-06-30T06:01:00.002-05:00

As newlyweds of only three months, Mr. and Mrs. Edward Pippin turned in for bed for the night in their lovely home. It was here in Atlanta, Georgia that the couple met, attended church, fell in love, and eventually got married.

One night, Margery Pippin clasped her hands in prayer and urgently asked to speak with the Lord. Though her requests were declined many times, one special night the Lord saw fit to manifest Himself to her…

God: “I am the God you serve. I am here, Margery.”

Margery: “Oh Lord, is it really you?”

God: “Yes, Mary. It is I, your Savior and King. You have found favor as a chosen vessel to speak with Me. Your righteousness and faithfulness has been established before Me. Ask of Me what you will.”

Margery: “My spirit yearns to know what great things you have in store for me and my family. Just a glimpse of what is to come would be a great gift from You, oh Lord.”

God: “I will grant you what you ask.”

…

Margery: “What is this I am now seeing, Lord? I am seeing a dark-skinned man on an airplane. This nice, balding man looks Middle Eastern, but he is sitting beside me and acting as though he is with me. He is talking to me. What does this mean, Lord?”

God: “The vision is many years in the future. The dark-skinned man you are seeing is your future son, a great man who will be a vessel of light unto Me as you are. He will do many great things and lead many unto salvation as you have.”

Margery: “I don’t understand, Lord. My husband Edward is white like I am. How can we have a Middle Eastern son? Do we adopt? Does this mean Edward will die or, heaven forbid, lose interest in me and desert me and I will marry a Middle Eastern man?”

God: “Surely you have noticed in our conservation that I’ve only mentioned you as My faithful servant. But I am God and must leave an element of mystery in your life, so I must command you to just trust Me on this one.”

Margery: “Okay, Lord, I trust you on the matter of Edward’s fate, although it disturbs me. But I must ask, how do I have a non-white son?”

God: “A few years from now, you will be violently raped in a parking garage, and you will conceive seed by the rapist. Because you know that life is sacred, you will not abort the child. You will bring him to term because you know the value of life at conception. And though it will be painful for the first few years to look into this precious child’s face and be reminded of that horrible encounter with the child’s wicked father, you will find him precious in your sight as you are in My sight.”

Margery: “….Uh…why? Why must things happen this way? Aren’t there better ways? You are God. You can do anything or arrange anything to happen any number of ways. And when will this happen? Does it happen at day or night? What parking garage? What city? Please, please tell me more!”

God: “Enough! I will reveal to you no more! You must follow in My path and not look to second-guest or prevent My Will now that you know it. It is not for man to guess the times or the seasons that the Father hath put in His own power, but to be faithful. Will you be faithful, Margery?”

Margery: “Ye, Ye…Yes…of course, Lord.”

God: “I already knew that, too, or I wouldn’t have revealed these things to you. But stay away from coat hangers just the same. And there is a man I want you to hook up with; his name is Eric Rudolph. Seek him out and learn his ways, for he doeth My Will.

Blessings shall come your way, My holy child, for being a righteous and pure earthen vessel. May your righteousness be a cloak and a shield – not from the perils of this world – but from temptation and pride. Go your way, but do My Will.

(JH)

Jake: The Legend and the Feline Angel

2010-06-17T21:25:00.002-05:00

The above may seem a bold headline for someone to write who doesn't believe in angels. I'm not going to make up the existence of angels, my readers know, even in the interests of appealing fiction. But I'm also not going to make up this story you are about to hear of a wonderful part of my past. The story deserves telling. It is something I want to make sure gets passed along in the cruelly shunning stream of time.

I've never been a die-hard cat-lover, but I've made several exceptions in my time, the first one being the most precious of them all—my childhood cat, Jake. She was as close to a guardian angel as this teaming-with-life planet could offer me. Jake was a pure-blooded Siamese goddess if ever there was one. You may not have known her, but she was a legend on a few streets in one small neighborhood in my old neck of the woods in San Antonio.

Jake came around just before I was born. In January of 1973, a neighbor who my parents barely knew informed them that she had a Siamese that just had kittens. This overburdened, overworked woman practically begged mom and dad to take one. The litter was healthy, and without a pet of their own, mom and dad were glad they walked a few doors down to take a look. The only one that stood out as a clear choice was the one walking toward them, a brown and white-coated little beauty willing to leave mom's warmth behind to share her new, baby kitty love. Right then, she was named and taken home (why she was given a boy's name I know not. Must have been popular at the time).

Dad discovered that this cat was not like others. She was so naturally adversarial as she grew, so strong and formidable. That small cat grew, alright. And, as always, when dad needed a play partner, Jake would never let him down. Jake was a fit and ferocious fighter, born to make mongrel dogs howl in pain.

Dad's tough arms were so clawed up that he had to start wearing up to six pairs of socks on his arms, and eventually, shop gloves to stop her claws from digging in. Everywhere he went, people would say: “WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR ARM AND HEAD?”

Why head? Because Jake was that agile. She could get past his arms and go to work on the balding head of this six-foot tall weightlifter of a dad. He couldn't do "the claw" thing on any of us since we weren't around yet, which left Jake as the only candidate. She was more than up to the challenge. Dad finally had to quit. Jake was too fast and too tough.

Jake: The Beginning: Part I

April 16, 1974 was when I entered the world. I'm told I met Jake in my crib just as I was brought home from the hospital. My parents were afraid as they came into the room and saw a Siamese cat sitting next to a newborn baby's head and licking it. They removed her from the room, but she kept getting back in. She would push a door open or jump up and hit the handle to open it. She would climb the curtains to jump in when the rails of the crib were put higher. There was no keeping her out. Even at this early age, it was clear I had an admirer.

Once I came on the scene, Jake was “my cat.” As I grew, she would venture off, but still hang out with me as I played in the yard not far away. She would always watch me. When not doing that, she would lay on her favorite arm of the couch and watch me play outside. As a rambunctious kid, a three-year-old Joe Holman sometimes tormented her, but she endured it, only half-heartedly swatting at me once or twice out of an abundance of fierce feline frustration. She never hurt me and was as patient as she was tough.

Jake, My Protector: Part II

The Alaskan Spitz

July 17, 1977. My brother is born, and as it happened, we had just moved to a nicer part of the neighborhood. We were on Welcome Drive Street in the Live Oak community. This was the place of my first big memories. Dad now had more money and mom was finishing up her college degree. I was playing outside one day, walking across the yard when out comes a vicious dog.

It was a large Alaskan Spitz.

The thing was a ways off, but seemed to be heading in my direction. That massive bark was sharp-pitched and the dog was big. As a blur in the corner of my eye, Jake takes off like a rocket, not waiting around to see how close the thing would get. I barely saw her brush past me, but I saw the fight. I can't say I remember it well, but I remember dad talking about for quite some time after.

Such explosive movements...this vicious, powerful animal, snapping his jaws, trying with his great might to chew apart this house cat that should have been no match for him...one bite would have done her in. But Jake emerged the winner. She would jump on and off his back, scratching and tearing at the speed of light. Rolling on the ground to dismount her, she would jump back on as he yelped and went down again before finally giving up and running off. It was over so fast.

All I could do was watch. Soon, dad was right beside me, seeing this loud brawl some ways off that moved its way to only a few steps off of the big dog's property. Neither of us could do anything. The owner finally comes out, and Jake gets ready to finish up with him. But Jake would not relent until she was ready. Before retreating, that dog was rolling on the ground in a submissive/shocked posture, losing blood. Poor thing couldn't even get away!

The owner, a law professor at St. Mary's University, takes the dog to the vet and then comes over that night around eleven o'clock to demand that my parents pay for it, which, after some discussion, they didn't do. Jake re-emerged on our couch that night without a scratch.

It's an accepted truth that pound for pound, an equally sized cat vs. dog will favor the cat winning, but the larger and meaner the competition and the favor goes to the dog. Not with Jake. She was like a bobcat. She was always the exception to the rule. We knew that from the beginning—all the more so when she drug a box of Meow Mix out of the pantry and into the living room when we were slow to feed her one lazy Saturday afternoon.

Two Dinged-up Doberman Pinchers

As awesome as the previous fight was, it took second place to this one. Jake sees us playing out in the yard. The family of questionable moral character next door, with their two dobermans that responded on command to their owner, made her nervous. They got too close to the fence as me and the little cousins played in the sprinkler on the trampoline. Jake put an end to that.

One decent-sized cat against two dobermans...it was a sight to see. The fight moved behind the wooden fence, so we couldn't see all of it, but we heard the yelps, and they weren't coming from Jake! Jake retreated this time, but only when the owner came outside and tried to spray her with the water hose. Even quicker than the last fight, it was all over.

The owner, a large Mexican man who always wore Hawaiian-colored shirts, saw his dogs get their asses handed to them from his sliding glass window. He just stared angrily in our direction for quite a while. Those dogs were never quite the same. They didn't come near the un-boarded areas of the fence anymore. To my surprise, he didn't ask my parents to pay for it. I guess it was too big of an ego blow.

A Poor, Pooooor Dalmatian

Jake's fourth victim was a stray dalmatian that wandered over into our garage. Jake pounced him down from a distance of less than 8 feet away. I was playing with my pretend lawn mower outside. The good thing was, she let the poor thing run off when she realized he wasn't a threat.

A 57-variety Sheep Dog and a Brown Pit Bull

Of Jake's better-known victims was a large mixed-breed mutt the size of a bullmastiff. It was the easiest yet - save for the dalmatian - surpassed only a little by a pit bull that took off like a rocket when bested by this cat of cats in under a minute. It was a surprisingly one-sided fight. The pit turned out to be one of my friend's friend’s dogs whose dog came home torn up, but he didn't know by what animal.

I don't remember the kid's name, but this guy was always bragging on how his pit kills cats every month. I have always known pit owners to be braggers on their dogs, even today. Well, this week, I guess the cat goddess decided to turn the tables. That big, stupid dog never showed its face on our street again.

The funny thing was, when this guy remarked about how easily his pit kills cats, my friend Brian replied: “Yeah, well, your pit got his butt whipped by Joe and Eric's cat! I saw the whole thing! Your dog got took!” The guy couldn't believe us, but he eventually did. We could see in his eyes that he knew Jake was the only explanation for the injuries. Quite the reputation Jake was getting!

Jake, My Adjunct Parent: IV

One of the funniest moments of my life was when I was 10 years old. I opened a sack of concrete in the garage and played in it, but the real harm was the way I opened the bag. I tore the sack so that it had to lie on its side to not be spilled. Dad found out about it later, and with belt in hand, came for me to teach me another to-be-shrugged-off lesson on laziness. I got a good one across the back of the legs and I took off running. As I ran, dad comes behind me into the bedroom where I had gone. I do what any smart, shiftless kid would do in my predicament—pull the covers up over my legs and lay motionless on the bed. Jake jumps on top of me, and here comes dad, with belt still in hand.

Jake sees him coming, and being surprised, she gets in full attack posture and hisses at him, just like with the dogs! Jake didn't agree with the punishment and she wanted her opinion heard! Neither dad, nor brother, nor mom could believe it upon entering the room. Everyone forgot about the whole thing. We just looked at each and then at Jake as she gradually eased her posturing as dad eased his. I got off with a verbal scalding instead.

Jake, the Golden Years: Part IV

It's 1986. Jake by now is going through some changes. It was hard to say we noticed them before the next thing happened. But Jake wasn't as physically active as we remember her being. She was a little lazy when compared to her former high standard of activity. It was all about to become very noticeable.

It is a bright and sunny, but cool day. I am 12 years old, playing out in the front yard. A 70s model, yellow Trans Am turns the corner. It's coming real fast. He sees Jake traipsing across the road and he speeds up. I know he saw her. I could see his face. I remember it to this day. He was a black-haired, mustached man, really skinny, dark-skinned, with a stupid smirk on his face. He looked like a mechanic, very dirty, maybe a druggie as well.

He stared at me as he went by. I heard it.

...

“Thu-thump”

...

That was what we heard, along with the continued squealing of the tires as the car burned rubber and picked up more speed. Soon, he was out of sight.

And Jake...there she was, lying on her side on the asphalt. Mom runs out and we run over to her. I'm too shocked to think straight. It happened right in front of me. Jake lies there a few minutes, bleeding badly, missing large patches of fur on her body and head, and then she gets up and stands for a bit before barely walking.

Jake was THAT tough. I don't know how it was possible, but it clearly was. She was caught under the rear tire of this 4,500-pound car and shot out the back. And here she was, still alive. We took her to the vet. Mom tried to be strong for us, but she was fighting back tears harder than brother and I were, and she wasn't entirely successful, we could tell. I was in too much shock to cry. The doctor was unsure how much damage had been done internally, but he didn't expect her to live. He expected her to die within a few days. There was also spinal damage.

But the doctor was wrong. Jake lived for nearly another year. But things weren't the same after this. She would “mess” in the house and it would contain blood. She was lethargic and cried out for no apparent reasons, her eyes squinted as she watched us throughout the day, in obvious pain--much more with every step. Her behavior became erratic and unpredictable. As 1987 rolled around, it was obvious that she had lived a full life, and now it was...time.

We got home from the vet and I buried her myself in the back yard. It was hard work digging, but in a somber and hazy state of mind, the task was done all too soon. It was just me, saying goodbye with her remains inside an 18-by-24-inch box. I placed the box in the hole and covered it up. The full impact didn't hit me until several weeks later. I don't think I had cried a single time yet. Now was when it became the hardest to handle.

To give you an idea of how hard, I still have a good cry over these photos about 2 or 3 times a year. Imagine how this would hit a child.

Jake and The Will to Believe: Part V

1989 was the last year my brother and I shared a room. In it, our beds were on different sides of the room against opposing walls. I awake one morning to find Eric in the kitchen talking with mom. I go in there and mom says: “Joseph, you have to hear this...” Eric tells me he awoke from a dream during the night and saw a blue glowing figure of a cat with its two front legs on the bed, looking over at me to see if I was alright. I was facing the wall on my side. I can remember burning with the desire to believe that. I think I did at the time.

Please don't accuse me of using Jake's memory as a heart-tugging means to promote my depressing atheist agenda. I'm not doing that. But it is the religious who so often try to use memories and grief to trick themselves and others into believing that they must get more of what they don't have--more life for themselves and those they love. There is always food for the sentimental, for the bleeding hearts who must believe that life goes on after the grave. Fighting to believe in an afterlife is like holding on too firmly to the past—both are unproductive and painful.

There is really no point to my telling this story except that I wanted to share it. I don't understand all that I'd like to about the bond between animals and humans - or the bond between humans and humans - but I had an angel, one of the very best kind. I don't understand all that I'd like to about being human, but I understand one thing: It's nice to be able to cry together.

(JH)

The Bull Atop Crystal Waters

2010-05-31T09:12:00.001-05:00

It is night and things are slowed down as I see them. I know only that much. But for all I know, whatever I am seeing may be a world where there is perpetual night. Maybe this world is so far from its sun that the only light I see is a faintly glowing moon, faintly glowing, but with enough light to lighten the beautiful things I see around me. There are strange vibrations that kindly strike the ears, subtle though they are. The sounds are curious and troubling. For only small portions of a split second do they stop and begin again, but it's like they never stopped at all.

What I am seeing troubles me, makes my heart race. It is a vast world, a night sky, huge and sufficiently decorated by stars I know not. I can see them all because there are no city lights. There is a large, bright purple object in the sky of some life-form, a large and powerful carbon being. It has four legs and two pointed formations on its head. Underneath it is a waterfall, a small but beautiful waterfall, glowing with a crystal sparkling. Across and around it are trees reaching out to the light. They blanket the ground. They run into the distance together. There are so many of them. The trickling of water can be heard only when I approach. Apparently, I can approach it, although I never feel myself moving.

I look up again at that most impressive sight, the purple life-form suspended in the sky. Maybe it is coming toward me. It is running. Maybe it can kill me, but it doesn't seem interested. It is too big. Now I recognize it. It is a bull, a powerful brahma bull, with pointed horns and starry eyes, the horns scooping downward as in a lunge to attack. The stars glisten against his backside. He is so brilliantly colorful with the shades of twilight. I want to cry because I see it as for the first time. I feel like I've never seen it before. My eyes are beholding something new, perhaps like a meeting of gods, not meant to be looked upon by mortal man.

I want to cry, but just for a moment. Only now do I know that this life-form is a bull. The sounds I am hearing are the songs of bugs, but I didn't know that until now. It is as though I am seeing a portrait of earth life from the perspective of an alien and I realize that nowhere else in the universe can these creatures be found. They would frighten an alien as they do me in this brief but moving altered state.

I pull back and it's just me again - not drunk or high - just tired and staring at a discount picture in a thrift store. The painting is of a bull above a valley at night while I hear that far too-often replayed song by Taylor Swift, “A Love Story.” I can never hear that song again without thinking of this touching moment. The power this moment had! It was like none other in my day, like a dream that awakens you and you cry because of the unmet curiosity left behind to see and understand more.

The parietal lobe is that section of the brain that is responsible for recognizing and comprehending visual objects. When it is damaged, everything you see can appear as though it is being seen for the first time. For whatever mental hiccup caused this moment, I am thankful. I really saw it—I saw Earth as an alien would comprehend it, totally strange and completely compelling. And I then dropped back to my familiar world, with familiar beings and ordinary happenings. Everything is so boring now, so tastelessly commonplace to the eyes and mind. Even the bizarreness and freakishness of being human as shown on the creepiest internet news stories are only a momentary relief that fights off a disgruntling cynicism. My moment didn't last for long, but it didn't have to. I learned from the experience.

The quest to understand this world is extremely cruel and deceiving. Better off would we be to stay in ignorance, and yet that doesn't stop us from searching it out. The wisest men know it, and they continue searching. Once we become familiar with it all, we will have to be called aliens ourselves since by that time we will no longer still be what we know today as “human.” But when that long-off day does come, I can only see the dimmest of prospects for those living (if “living” is still an applicable term).

Mystery keeps many of us going. Such devotees are usually pseudo-scientists or religious people, cult leaders and pious liars, as well as the delusional. They rely on mystery to give their current lives meaning. They trust something better to be an inevitable thing to come. It's not that the mystery-eaters never give up hope. It's that our knowledge of the world is so ridiculously little and science so pitifully young - with so much still unknown – that mystery-lovers are kids in a candy shop to pick and choose any belief that instills hope. If hope is there for the taking, why not take it?

Brian Greene fans and Heisenberg Principle admirers think that because a concept has been discovered that they call an “Uncertainty Principle,” then this means that they understand the world in a notable way—sometimes to justify their mockery of the ignorance of previous generations. But not just the snotty modern religionists are guilty of this. It's way too easy to think that we are an evolved, wonderful, learned culture while those generations behind us were only barbarians worthy of scorn.

To live in a world of idiots is so discouraging and frustrating for the smart ones. It is like going back in time and having the unenviable task of being Socrates and having to convince your jurors not to make you drink hemlock for the crime of blasphemy to the gods. It is like being a woman and having to convince a Salem judge that you aren't a witch.

The skeptics are the antithesis of the above. They are those who live life with the perceived clarity of mind to reduce all things they learn and observe to things most familiar—we all do it to some extent. To some of them, every conspiracy called out is automatically overblown, every one who purports to have new information or who makes a breakthrough of some kind is ignored or belittled if it conflicts with traditional ways and ideas. Others are just too burnt out to care. There is no time to study it and no more energy for continued investigation. Some of us really don't care anymore.

Both extremes are foolish because time and knowledge can never be against us simultaneously. True knowledge will get the attention of the world whether it is respected or not. The old are going to die with the antiquated ideals that sometimes reek of mothballs as badly as they do. The young will be made fun of and proven wrong, but some will stand to be triumphant in demonstration. Knowledge will march in. It will create wars and whatever turmoil must follow for the era, and then the new order or accepted truth will be the influencing factor that fashions the next generation of future bigots.

Getting back to my story of having a glimpse whereby I see the world as if for the first time, I learned something; I learned that the only way to live joyously is to live in the perspective of newness. Newness is a feeling because nothing is really new, just re-made and re-applied from everything around us. Newness is a new experience or a part of one. As a person who loves and craves familiar surroundings, my mind finds this hard to accept and fights it, but the more I entertain the idea, the more fascinated I become.

If you will think back, many memories of joy you had were once awkward, unwanted moments. Moving to a new neighborhood, driving a new route to work from the new area of town, taking a new job...they don't feel right at first, but you look back on those events and some become the new good memories to look back upon. Half of the songs I now love from the 80s I hated when they first came out while everybody else loved them. Lots of people can live in the moment and be happy, but that's all they can do. Some are just cattle who merely live and die, giving very little thought to anything that is above instinctive.

But for a few of us, living in the moment isn't (or wasn't) so easy. We will always be behind everyone else. We may, in fact, never catch up. If we do, things still won't be right. Life is too much of a poem written by an ogre on a rock in a state of psychosis. So, wisdom tells me to love change, to count on the discomfort of adaptation. All I have to do is except the outcome and the fear goes away. Only by making new experiences can happiness continue, however little or much there is to be had.

I have learned with great angst to want everything now to be a new beginning. I don't regret my first marriage. I just learned from it and it makes me who I am today. I will call my ex-wife a materialistic, bigoted bitch, but she played a part in the “me” of today. My girlfriend of today will be a sensational part of the tale I have to tell years from now. She will build me the same way. We each have the opportunity to be teachers of everyone around us. You can alter the course of someone's life. You are building the “them” of tomorrow. Isn't that fascinating? When was the last time you thought about that?

Every detail of my life will be a part – or all – of the next chapter in my life and it's re-telling, as will the tin foil I use for curtains that keep out the cursed light from my low-end apartment or the empty cardboard boxes I use as end tables beside my bed.

I have decided I want to feel the sensation of something new. I want a rush. I want to feel a new application being made. That gives me a thrill. It takes all those same mental components utilized to build blocks as a child or slide down a slide in the backyard without falling backwards and it brings a new satisfaction. It speaks to me, just as playing with the bunnies in the backyard used to. But everything we do in life with regard to discovery and invention is done to better ourselves. That's what we have learned and that's what we teach. For what, I ask you?

Bettering ourselves should be a side-affect of building a new experience. Building a new experience...that is spiritual, one that is weighed on the emotional scale and found valuable. Two examples of our building these experiences are called art and music – two priceless things consisting not of symmetry or of algorithmic genius, but of original creation - the closest thing to pure magic. These great things can never be “false,” and the word “true” does not apply to them. The god of Moses supposedly said of his creation when finished that it was: “very good.” That description is the only quality that can be said to describe an inventor's creation when brought into existence. That description is steadfast and forever immutable, and it is accurate. It describes value that transcends criticism, just as it does practical or monetary values.

Storytelling is a third example of experience-building. The tribal chieftain warrior and his clan honor the old legends as passed down to them, while the child's eyes, as he hears the tales for the first time, widen in fascination and awe. Lives will be built. Making new experiences is the continuity of life.

All of my failures that I live down lead the way to my successes. With every failure comes a greater chance for the next success, which will create a new image, a new vision, a new experience, a new invention, or a new story to tell and to learn from. We invented the gods because we are inventors. If an omni-max deity existed, he wouldn't need to create. That realization is the most powerful disproof of God there ever was. We do need to create because to invent and create is to live with some sense of meaning.

Why are some of the best days of my life when I and my cousins would sit in my uncle's backyard and play in the mud for hours with the sprinkler on and make rivers, filtered by the lids of empty Comet containers used as drains and dams? We weren't in charge of our lives. We were given administrative correction from our superiors. That wasn’t fun. We were picked on in school. We had fewer freedoms than we do now. But we were seekers of new experiences, on which all later experiences came to be based. We had not yet been destroyed by the shaping forces of age that have us on this sick quest to better ourselves for the sake of society or some unknown and yet hopelessly disputed end. Life was about then. There were no major distractions.

We know that together with science, reason and logic and the faculties of a healthy mind are as close to the perfect tools for living as existence will have. But their value can only be appreciated with a story, a concept, a beneficial exchange of some kind, with the magic of a new experience. Though in some ways necessary, ideologies and dogmas are not the answer. Those are the evils of indoctrination, a type of “pyramid scheme.” The messages of these scheming collectives are the products of progressive knowledge, which happens to be little better and no more virtuous than some fictitious and defunct prince of Nigeria created in a spam mail to scam some poor, gullible, sucker internet-user out of his hard-earned cash.

With a fresh experience, I can love my exact place in the time continuum at nearly any point I find myself. Call it “Hyper-hedonism,” if you like, or call it “Supra-contentment.” My mind allowing me to view that familiar bull as an alien made me the discoverer of something new. It didn't matter that it was already discovered. It was like moving back the DVD player to the most suspenseful cliffhanger moment in the movie you regard as your favorite. You watch it and re-watch it to relive the experience. In time and with repetition, it loses its impact, but the experience is watched again with the goal of garnering more stimulation. In a similar way, we can live in the moment and make a new experience from all the old things that are around us, or at least we can learn to.

I’m not looking for Jesus to come back to Earth even if he wants to for the purpose of proving to me that he exists. There’s been time for that, and by now, he has too much to answer for. And I'm not looking for the human race to progress to the level of beings that live in a scientific utopia as they fly across the galaxy, colonizing planets in the name of science and still greater discoveries, to fulfill that stupidly gullible liberal idea of pluralistic equality. The first steps of both marches are in wrong and misguided directions.

On the way to dying, I want to do two things. I want to tell a story. I also want to get drunk. I want to describe what I am seeing and have seen. I want to sit you around my campfire and let you see what I see and feel what I feel. I want you to share in my experiences. I want to pat you on the back and share with you my humanity to the extent that it relieves your pain and adds something positive to your life. I want you to be confounded by the same ecstatic delight that made me speechless so that it will meld into your own sublime experience—be it the details of an old schoolmate and what he meant to me, or a vision of a bull atop crystal waters.

(JH)

Dad, a Dolphin, and Being Tough

2010-04-28T11:31:00.002-05:00

I sat in the parent/teacher's meeting. The meeting was because of me. It wasn't funny at this point. All eyes were on me. "I don't know how you teach a class with him in there," said one of the substitutes to my teacher, Mrs. Livengood. It wasn't a pretty moment, not now. I always thought it was cool to get in trouble, but you can only go down that road so far until the good graces of your authority figures runs out. My lying and carrying on and causing scenes was finally catching up with me.

I was only now regretting it, sitting in that very quiet meeting with the uneven hum of the air conditioner blowing. I wanted to get a zero the day before and get busted. That way, I would stay popular with the worse behaved students in the class. Oddly enough, I never got a butt-whipping for getting suspended, only threatened with them. But if I recall correctly, I never gave Mrs. Livengood problems anymore, not major ones.

That summer, we were in Corpus Christi on a week-long vacation. There was a cracked, bright yellow Igloo we took on every vacation we ever went on. We must have bought it in the 70s and we still have it. And there it sat, full of cold cokes, Hi-Cs, and hotdogs, which we ate cold in cheap hotel rooms and on the beach.

This was a relaxing but trying vacation. I got the worst sunburn of my life then. I turned red-purple. Sleeping was agony. The whole vacation was a sort of agony. It was four days of sand getting tracked onto our clean clothes and luggage and not being able to get it out--and it got into dad's '81 Ford F-150 with a camper. He had just bought it new not long before. It was a column-shift standard transmission, 3-speed, with a straight six. The air conditioner would always spit cold water on us.

We were forced to sleep in the back of it one night, like sardines, as dad snored. He can wake up sleepers on the second floor of a two-story house, I kid you not. At least two nights we were there. The cheap hotels were a relief. Sis wasn't born yet. It was just bro and I enjoying life in the summer of '82.

Dad wanted to throw Frisbee. I couldn't catch it, just like I couldn't a football. I once spent two hours trying to make one basket. I never could. Dad wanted me to get involved in sports at school. I tried. Failed miserably to the scorn of my competitors. Every failure was a visibly noticeable disappointment to dad. You could see it in his eyes. I would sit out as bro and he threw the Frisbee or play-fight while I went shopping with mom.

We were nearly broke in those days, and though I had no idea what that was like, I knew it had to be like being told, "No, you can't buy a Gobot." I would still tread along with mom, asking if I could buy something on the off-chance I would get lucky. Sometimes she would give in.

On the trip, I wanted this dolphin, this grayish-blue and white, dolphin toy that squeaked. Mom said, "We'll ask dad." I wanted it so badly, but I knew what dad would say if I asked. We get ready to go, head back to the gift shop inside this one hotel-restaurant where we were staying where mom was grabbing a few things, and I muster up the courage to ask dad: "I want this dolphin. Can I have it?"

Dad gave me this long stare: "That’s a baby toy! You fucking baby!" he said, obviously still irked that I wasn't a natural athlete like my baby brother of four years old. Then we got in the car and waited for mom. Dad kept this long frown on his face the whole way home, but we were all ready to be back.

You had to understand dad. He wasn't abusive, but he wasn't refined either…or civil as often as he should have been. Getting a swift kick in the behind for acting like a jack-ass could happen right in front of your friends. Refuse to get a haircut and dad would sit you down in that chair and make a scene--the end result being, you'd be getting a haircut! Dad was a simple man. I still don't know what mom saw in him. She was very intellectual, high-functioning, articulate. She remains one of the fastest readers I have ever known.

She always wanted a college man, a professor, a charmer. Dad was an athlete though, and there were things she liked about him. But it was never what he said. Dad was the type of guy who would come home eating a banana and step into our room as bro and I were playing action figures and say: "You kids playing with toys?" Uh...yeah! Looks that way!

He wasn't stupid. He was (is) an accountant for a well-known cement plant. But he wasn't a complex man and he had so little to say. That Primitive Baptist mother of his we loved, but she raised him, saying: "Be pertty at school today!" Grandma told us that too when we stayed over. We asked her what it meant. She could only hold up her hands as though imitating driving down the road and say: "Just...be pertty." We loved grandma, but the intellectual level of the household was "pertty" low.

Grandma thought that dad always had bad teeth because when pregnant with him, she once stared too long at a man who had bad teeth. No joke. She got this belief from the Bible (see Genesis 30:25-43). Only other thing I can say is, she more than made up for it by allowing us to stay two and three weeks out at the ranch and have loads of fun every summer, which we always did, gorging, feeding farm animals, playing with our cousins from dad's side of the family, and tiring ourselves out in crazy play. Those were some of the best times of our lives. When we meet up, we still spend time talking about our escapades from back then.

So, we got on the road. The sand was everywhere, bothering the hell out of us. We got home and we were carried inside. Kids sleep so soundly. They can sleep through a fire alarm. Not adults. They wake up, sit up in bed, talk and laugh about things we kids did in the day, and a hundred other things we didn't understand the same way or at all.

I remember popping my eyes open in bed that very night, turning the TV on, and watching some Star Trek, and then some Million Dollar Man. I turned the TV down when I started to hear arguing from the other room: "Gollee, I can't even get a piece of ass anymore!" That was a curious statement! I had never heard it before. I knew there were some troubles, some pots and pans that got tossed around, some marital "waves," but that was all a blur to us.

Bro and I just wanted to wake up in the morning and continue with the next exciting saga of "Jack and Steve," our homemade characters of two bad-asses always in the middle of some earth-shattering problem that needed to be solved. We grabbed the play Uzis grandma got us and left behind the boring adult world for the adults. But mom and dad were fighting more often. That scared us.

By the next school year, I seemed to be regressing into a Dukes of Hazard and Starsky and Hutch phase. Mom kept getting calls about how I never played sports in PE. I didn't socialize well and I kept getting picked on. There was a concerned school counselor who expressed his concerns and a lady counselor who said the same. They both found me fascinating, said I was gifted. Wanted to launch me into advanced classes, but I "wasn't ready emotionally just yet." They were right. But at times, they had me wondering.

I remember Mrs. Condra and Mrs. Livengood pulling me aside and saying: "This is easy stuff for you! You can do this and more! It's you who's holding you back!" Maybe they were right. Maybe I just needed a swift kick...but I was getting those.

Their saying that meant nothing to me. I honestly didn't care. I wanted to ride my bike home (which took a cool 15 minutes from Crestview Elementary School to our small one-story house in Live Oak) and then play with my incredible hulk action figures--one of three I hadn't yet snapped the arms off of. I wouldn't do anything constructive, just retreat into my world of fantasies, of superheroes and monsters, and extraneous sounds of space aliens and dimensional beings of godlike power.

It was time for an intervention, so decided dad. I was a dinky, wimpy kid who cried too easily. Dad couldn't have me turn out to be a sissy. He tried like hell to play-fight with Karate and wrestle, even stick fight. I cried almost all the way through. I would drop the gloves/sticks and he would pick them up and put them back in my hands. Dad tried, carrying me around the house and yard with the boxing gloves on, saying: "I'm going to box you until you put yours on and box me back! It's time to get tough!" I begged for mom to intervene, but she gave dad his space to try it his way. Never worked. I pulled away from him and began to hate him.

Gotta feel for dad. He always wanted an athletic son, a football boy like he was, one who wore those funny v-neck sweaters and did a thousand sit-ups on his high school steps one afternoon, like he did back in '65. He really was an athlete. Bro was his. He learned to swim at age 3 without any prompting and was the star of the Water Babies program in Live Oak, Texas. I screamed, but dad made me participate. I was mom's. I took after the German side of the family. Mother was a Special Ed teacher and her dad a high school principal and New Testament scholar.

Dad was an English/Scotch-Irish man, a guy who grew up in the English/Dutch-ish town of Nixon, Texas where you visit Brewster Brown and old Sally Caraway on the corner for watermelons..and get to hear things like "Be pertty." Nixon is a dying town. Hap's Handy Store was the closest thing to a Wal-Mart even back in the day.

I don't blame dad for being hard, but I almost do. I often think of all the ways he could have done things better, and not done the things that alienated me from him and made me hate him--but to expect those things would have been to expect a different dad. I couldn't expect too much of him anymore than he could of me. The only thing I ever did that he liked was learn to play the guitar at his feet and hit the weights freshmen year of high school. Finally, he was pleased. He felt so honored to teach me guitar. I've never seen him light up like that--and, lo and behold, it was now clear that I wasn't a homo!

I didn't really hate dad, but I thought I did. I came to the conclusion some time ago that it wasn't all dad. I still can't bring up the subject of dad’s parenting to mom. She stresses: "Don't blame dad. You were a very difficult child." I believe her. Three doctors told my mother shortly after I was born that I was an Autistic Savant. I memorized the planets in the solar system, the name of the galaxy, and could recite the alphabet. I could also sing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star by a year and two months. But I would also scream like a banshee if I didn't get to play in a frying pan under the sink cabinets and throw ice cubes in them for about three hours at a time.

I would smear Vaseline all over every mirror in our house and prop everything up on green rulers. I loved green yardsticks. Got spanked for it, but it didn't stop me. My favorite color was green. I had a set of green keys I carried around, and when I lost them, they tell me they thought the world was going to end. And I had to have rice, lots of it. Only for a while could they placate me by sitting me out in the car and turning on the windshield wipers on sunny days. I was not an easy child.

But it's so easy to look back and judge dad. It's so easy to "fix" things in my mind, but who knows if those things would have taken root with the "me" back then. It's pointless, anyway. We are where we are in life - parent and child - and we can't go back. What is...is...and people will be the way they will be.

Many years later, it's 2003. I'm walking around a hospital gift shop. I'm a minister visiting a congregant who is about to come out of surgery and I see this...could that be it? Yes, it is! It's a dolphin, the same one I wanted so many years ago. A flood of emotions hit me. I was nearly dizzy. I almost bought it. I pick it up and hold it, as though to play with it. I squeeze it and it squeaks. There's nothing there now, just a memory.

(JH)

Deeply Disturbing: Three Simple Ways to Creep People Out

2010-04-06T10:35:00.003-05:00

Being ordinary isn't always a good thing. When compared to someone crazy, the status of "ordinary" is certainly sought after. Being like "the rest of us normal people" is what we want, but that shouldn't always be true. There are times when "ordinary" just means "boring," and that means being ignored.

There are times when each and every one of us wants anything but to be ignored. Not being noticed means not being exceptional, whereas being weird means moving too far in the other direction. No one wants to go to extremes, but if I had to pick one, it would be weirdness. That's what makes one memorable and unique. Being less ordinary and more of an oddball is what will make us stand out in the most incredible of ways.

Sometimes the things that stick out about us the most consist of disturbing behavior. The drunk guy at the party, the perv at the bus station, the eccentric creep in line at the post office...those are the things we remember and talk about for years.

Below is the first in a list of subtle ways to creep people out, to put them on edge, thus, succeeding at getting them to keep you in memory, or else quickly run from you. And it will work! Go ahead and be someone's reason for laughter one bland evening. Make them quit calling you or turn around and depart from your sight. Do these things, and at some distant point many years from now, they'll think back at some creepy guy or gal in their past. One way or another, that's a credit to you...

1) The End of Life Creep-out

Have you ever told someone you were considering suicide? It's serious business...most of the time, anyway. People who talk about it normally don't do it, but it gets attention as the cry for help that it is. It changes people's reactions and puts them in a woefully "grave" (pun intended) mindset. This can be used to your advantage when done right.

Consider my little schpeel to a rude New York bill collector who kept calling me and did everything in her power to come off as an obnoxious bitch who couldn't care less about why I couldn't pay...

"Now tell me again why I should make arrangements to pay you when my Colt 45 is loaded right here next to my bed and I'm about to off myself? If you were here, you'd see blood paint these walls. I'd like you to listen as I pull the trigger. How does it feel to know that you will have had a part in making that happen?"

-click-

Imagine how the rest of her day went? She'll probably think a little before she takes her next call.

When you want sympathy, love, affection, or to get bill collectors off your back, this is priceless.

2) The Get-off Creep-out

There is something wickedly revolting about a pervert who shares too much private business in casual conversation. This works beautifully with not just bill collectors, but with any solicitors that call your house un-invitedly. Mix it up and use it whenever you need to make someone hang up on you or walk away from you in a hurried fashion.

My favorite: "Yes, a free cruise to the Bahamas sounds great. Alright, give me just a sec. I'm getting my asshole fingered as we talk....oohhhh, man...feels good!" Second favorite: "Yes, I'm the current resident. My dick's in a chick's mouth, so my responses may sound a bit weird."

-Not long, and there it is again: "click"-

Delightful!

3) The Bad Parent Creep-out

Same application as above, but with a more social facade.

We've all been in public and seen rotten kids supervised by an even more rotten parent with the social graces of a wild ox. Usually, their kind graces the waiting rooms of clinics and hospitals where no one can pay for services as they vainly try to corral their worthless litter: "Jeremiah, get back here or I'm gonna beat you! Now!!! Come here! Damn you! Wait till I tell your father!" Truth: She doesn't know where or who the father is.

But when you do it, just add some profanity or at least some tart descriptions, depending on your settings. Here's a great example...

"Zach, I am going to beat the motherluvin' fuck out of you, you fucking little shit! You are worthless, you fuck! I'm sorry I squirted you out!!"

Here's a less profane (but very funny) example...

Get Off The Shed! - Watch more top selected videos about: Will_Ferrell, Shed

And you can make up so many others! The possibilities are endless!

Why Should I Do Any of These Things?

Because you're bored with what is ordinary and you need excitement, as do others. The naughty part of you is telling you to do it. There is always a situation where making yourself the oddball can work to your advantage. Why not be prepared? Besides, you want to, and life is too short to refuse such easy entertainment.

(JH)

Jesus and Hotrods: My Early Years as a Believer

2010-03-21T16:43:00.002-06:00

One Step and Then Another

It had been right at a year since converting to Christianity. I was 19 years old. Also approaching the one-year marker was my employment with Capitol Cement. This was the place where dad worked as chief accountant. He got me the job, coincidentally, right about the same time as my conversion to Christianity.

Now, almost a year had passed. I can remember thinking, “I've been here not even a year and they've already thrown me a small goodbye party. Things must be going well!” And things were going well. I was just out of high school with my first full-time job that paid enough to get a shabby efficiency apartment on the po' side of town. I was only a laborer who got to work shoveling gravel in the hot sun, but I didn't mind. I saw it as a new step until I decided the other foot was up next.

I decided to quit because Jesus had made such an impact in my life that it was time to prepare myself for ministry training. Over the next few months, I would put a few college courses under my belt and begin writing the leadership of Churches of Christ to get my financial support and go to seminary. This took quite a while to do. I went as far as I cared to go with secular college while waiting to hear back from these churches, but secular college was far too worldly for me. The professors were Satan's messengers.

I talked - argued - the gospel. I also talked cars. “Car” was a word that I knew well. The hobby more nearly consumed me during these early years. Street racing, track racing, Nascar racing...I loved it all, as I did anything with a crunchy four or five-speed manual transmission. This dangerous love morphed into “Speed Fever,” a thing it would take a whole two years to get out of my blood.

But Jesus Was There

In my fundamentalist Christian worldview where the earth was 6,000 years old and every word of the Bible was always true, you could argue with me like several college professors tried to do until they were blue in the face. You’d not see me give ground. You could also argue with impunity that cars were my only masculine, sane connection to normalcy, and you'd be right. I was such a raging fundy that no one could avoid an argument from me on religion, but you might have a chance of derailing me by throwing up the subject of auto racing: “Hey Joe, what's the quickest production car on the market right now?” It might work...and I suspect it did a few times.

It was cars and Christianity, cars and Christianity, cars and Christianity, and not much else. My love for all things auto would not dissipate until I came to see how expensive they were to fix and maintain. But remember, I was young and dumb and full of...well, just Bible verses...so I couldn't see that yet. The cars grew more appealing, as did talk of gear ratios and the joys of power-shifting a standard transmission at nutty speeds. The only thing more appealing was talking about Jesus. My love for him wouldn't leave until I realized many years later that he doesn't exist.

A Sugar Pill of Jesus

In the meantime, I watched as all my worldly friends - all those who knew me before my conversion - seemed to self-destruct or else grew up. I lost a number of friends when I converted to the faith. My still-friends afterwards didn't have as much in common with me anymore...except cars. This last batch of friends and I still relished our autos. And like my mother and aunt, I went through a stage where I turned every interest I had with anyone into a tasty sugarpill of Jesus.

My mother and aunt went through this annoying-as-fuck phase where they took all us cousins to charismatic churches where everyone was so festive...errr...insane with their faith. We got to see The Power Team, those fools who bend steel and break boards for God and give him the credit for it, and we saw testimonials and other emotionally unstable people shed tears for Jesus ever-so publicly.

Getting back to my sugarcoating Jesus, Mom and Aunt Kim had this awful habit of turning every conversation or phrase or expression into something about God. From a very young age, we were bombarded with this. A cousin and I would be singing Whitesnake's Here I Go Again (a new song at the time) and Aunt Kim would pop in and say: “Here I come, Jesus!!!” So, so, soooooo fucking retarded!

Now, all these years later, I was the repulsive one, the one ready to set the world on fire and make everyone else think I was a prick. Some tried to argue with me, but I was on a collision course with bullheadedness and knew I was right. I was backed up by seeing the pitiful condition of my friends and how their “godless” lives were their downfall.

Brian Gallo

I met a kid named Brian Gallo. He and I met through another friend from MacArthur High School who graduated a year behind me. His name was Chris Langley (more on him in a bit). Brian was about the most unstable person I think I've ever known...even still. What did we have in common? Cars. He was a wimpy white kid with a gut and stick-like, skinny calves. He got self-conscious about those small calves and decided his workouts weren't counting for as much. What better way to cure that than by taking steroids? Lots of steroids.

Steroids he took and steroids he could have been the poster guy for. They worked! Within like two weeks, he muscled up to near pro-bodybuilder size. I never saw anything like it. He became a freak! It was incredible! But his muscles weren't the only thing that got bigger—so did his cholesterol levels, no doubt inversely proportional to his prunish nut size.

There is a lesson in human nature, and that lesson says that if something works...say, a pill makes you lose some weight, or in this case, pills to build muscle...human nature will cause the lot of us to abuse them. Hoping to get more results, we'll take whatever works to get even better and better and better results. And then, finally, burnout will set in.

At some point, a detrimental setback will ruin everything. People overdose on diet pills (I have) and on so many other things. There are human limits to what can be achieved, and those limits we humans have no problem reaching, testing, and pushing. Brian was a case in point, and an extreme case if I’ve ever seen one.

If I remember the numbers right, Brian's cholesterol shot up to near 393 mg/dL (that's the “bad” cholesterol, in case you don't know). Even with doctor-prescribed meds, he couldn't bring the number down. The doc said he could never lift again or exert himself again beyond light household chores. Even activities like sex were discouraged (not that he could get it up anyway).

A stroke was on the horizon, as was a near-certain heart attack—and that he wouldn't die or be paralyzed from them was an expected best-case scenario. He lost all that muscle...and as fast as he put it on. Those skinny calves were back. His low testosterone-induced depression and depressing status of unemployment brought on by the initial depression consumed him. His life may have started to fall apart, his biceps may have all but disappeared, but his "I’m a huge, embarrassing failure" muscles were still buldging.

His apartment was not new to the sounds of late-night shouting and arguing with his girlfriend, a pretty little chick he treated like crap. They were facing eviction. He was spending nights driving around town showing off his car to his buddies, the only thing he really cared about in life. It was a 1994 300ZX non-turbo, stark white, decently quick and cool as hell! The thing would reach somewhere around that 140 mph range when topped off—and topped it off he did…with the bad judgment exhibited by a 10-year-old returnee from juvenile hall. This reckless fool sped down the highways, staring down those he wanted to race (not that I never joined him in my mother's borrowed 1988 Camry LE V6 at its top speed of 101 mph.)

My Old “New” Car

So, all this speeding lured me in; it was time for a fast car of my own, something better than a Camry. I had saved up a few thousand dollars from working at the cement plant. And there it was...the love of my vanity. I saw it sitting in an H.E.B. parking lot, a 1983 Toyota Supra. 5-speed standard transmission, dual overhead cam, straight six, 2.8 liters. Wasn't the fastest, but it would fly in my book, and I could afford it. I could hang with a 5.0 Mustang...very remotely.

Ain't she pertttty! (not mine, an internet pic of a car just like it)

Her only flaw...the same flaw with any car I'd owned up to that time and a bit afterwards—lousy AC. It worked for a while, and then it quit. My 1976 Datsun pickup was as reliable as a mofo, but she didn't have AC. She was loud and clunkety, with only 76 horsepower. This baby boasted 157! And it looked and felt like a Lotus. That was good enough for me. And it was a lot better than my last car, grandma’s old 1985 Ford LTD with a V-6. No power, and grandmother never took care of the engine. Time to move up.

Now Brian Gallo was a friend of Glenn Westenberg, Mr. Racer of the century. The two put me in touch with this Asian guy who raced 300ZXs. His name was Chin.

Chin

Chin was a “Christian,” the kind of Christian who got blowjobs in the parking lot of Pastor Hagee's famous Cornerstone Church. In hopes to steer him from his erroneous ways, I hung out with him and we street-raced as conversational preludes to talk about Christ. Never got anywhere with this guy. He was...I don't know...not interested in anything without a stick shift or tits. But it was through Chin that I was reunited with Chris Langley.

Langley

Chris was a pudgy kid, balding even from a young age you could tell, and with a gut. But by the time we caught up, he was a martial arts expert. This guy could hurt you in so many fucking ways! I'm not kidding. He was a trained martial arts devotee. He studied under real masters in the San Antonio area. His Seagal-ish skill was obvious. You wouldn't doubt him after just a minute of sparring.

Chris was also in the 300ZX single turbo fan club. He later became manager of a train station and bought a Mitsubishi 3000GT VR4 and a Lotus Esprit S4. Got in over his head and had to sell one. The insurance and hefty price tag of the cars became too much. He kept the Lotus. Duh!

Being in a Lotus is a crazy experience. That whiny little 2.2 liter four cylinder engine with four simultaneously firing turbos...amazing performance! Light car, quick as shit. 4.4 seconds to 60, baby! My new Supra could never hang with these bad boys or even those single turbo ZXs they raced at the track every other weekend, but I had my good times, anyway.

I really thought I had a fast car at first. Another preaching student (named Rob) and I were racers. All that talk about respecting the laws of the land, and here we were with expensive radar detectors evading the law! But to my credit, it was the only way in which I was a known hypocrite.

Rob

One day, Rob and I were doing about 105 on the freeway. I beat Rob’s modded 1982 200 SX. It broke his ego. He loved that car. I felt triumphant. But Rob was an enabler. He encouraged me to come close to death on several occasions. One was when I took an exit ramp with a recommended speed of 20 mph at 112 mph and completely lost control of the car. I span around maybe ten times in an open (normally congested) intersection. I pulled up right next to an old lady at the light on 281 and San Pedro Avenue going southward, ready to take off again. She was probably 90. She barely looked over at me and another guy in the car who could have caused the crash that killed her.

Finally at a dead stop, a few moments passed. The car wasn’t even rocking anymore. We could hear ourselves breathing. I looked over at Hernandez and said: “We better pray and ask God for forgiveness for almost killing ourselves!” We prayed that prayer and went on. The old bird wasn’t even looking our way anymore.

My dissatisfaction with my “slow” Supra was alleviated now. Spending money to make my car faster was tearing into my bank account. I was now up to 177 horses, with a quarter mile time of 16.0 and a 0-60 of 7.6. Top speed: 112! It was it's own lesson in covetousness—the faster I made my car, the more it became obvious how far I had to go to make my car really fast. But I didn't have the money. Something had to give.

I thought I was the better influence on Glenn, with his dirty mouth and worldly ways, but he was a bad influence on me too. He had all this money. He blew up car after car modifying them, and still, his well was never dry. He inherited this shit-load of money from dad. The bastard once spent $12,000 putting a specially designed turbo in a car that would blow up from not being able to handle the power. Extravagant, wasteful SOB!

My well was empty. Disappointed, I gave up on hotrod-ism and all its tumultuous fury, but not before it cost me a new tranny. I was headed past Rolling Oaks mall when I blew out second gear while power-shifting to try and keep up with the beautiful new Twin Turbo Supra as it jetted by me down the road late one evening on the way home from work. $1,093.11 later, I was back on the road.

But the racers I got to me at the clubs, none of them ever seemed satisfied with their track times. Believe me when I tell you, there's something not too appealing in meeting 12 immigrant Asian dudes at a 300ZX racing rally, and a tinier one of them decides to start kicking and cursing his 25th Anniversary Edition 1985 300ZX Turbo because his quarter mile time isn't what he wants it to be...

“When injector go out, I no replace!!!! I get rid of fuck car.”

The dude washed dishes at China Garden Chinese restaurant, and thanks to grandma, he could afford a one-owner Z in new condition like that and still not appreciate it! Shees! You had to be there.

Nissan Trucks

A Nissan truck was in my future, another reliable but noisy inline four cylinder, this time one with 134 horses and a crispy, 5-speed transmission, like the old Datsun before it. These trucks things epitomize reliability. I'd never again know the joy of passing with fury like I'd known with the Supra, but the old bird was overheating anyway. It was time.

Just as preaching school was beginning, I sold her. Dad and I almost cried watching her be driven away by some big-headed Mexican kid with cowboy boots on from E. Nueva Street who saw my ad in the paper and brought cash for the deal. He had the wide-eyed look going. I once had that look. Maybe the new addition to the family would win me over soon enough.

It was a 1989 Nissan truck, and again, it had a bad AC! I kept it a year. And, ironically, second gear went out just as it did with the old Supra, though I was never hard on it.

I ran into Langley at a grocery store one day. “You're driving a truck now? What happened?” he said. “Oh, I got the speed demon out of my blood.” Tada! Now, I officially had nothing in common with any normal people whose eyes were not buried in the pages of holy writ.

Truth be told, I'm not sure how much longer at the track any of them had. Chin's clueless date drove his Mazda RX-7 Twin Turbo off a peer one weekend. Then, it was into his new pre-owned automatic Nissan Maxima! Langley got married and had a kid. And Brian, well, he fell off the map. I have no idea if the poor fool is even alive.

I can remember the last time I thought about him. I was headed out to Camp Hensel where I was scheduled to preach at a gospel meeting. The drive was nice, and man did the AC on my brand new, 1997 Nissan truck blow cold! And I still remember the name of the salesman who sold it to me. His name was Elmer Fischer. There’s something about buying a new car. And no, it’s not just the new car smell.

(JH)

Boxes (Part II of II)

2010-03-02T00:10:00.000-06:00

Only a few of us (celebrities, infamous criminals, super geniuses, and great kings and figures of history, like Alexander the Great) will live on for a long time through successive memory and records. The rest of us are doomed to an eternity of Boxven (the Box God's version of Heaven). There is no Boxell. Unlike Jesus' Heaven, everyone will make it to Boxven.

We might as well refer to these reoccurring patterns of boxes as a divine phenomenon like the theists do who insist and carry on ignorantly about how the universe exhibits “design,” and therefore, has “a designer.” If the Christians or Muslims or Jews or mystics or any other of the superstitious breed are crazy enough to be seeing signs of heavenly forces, why shouldn't we entreat them?

Those who believe in God constantly boast about how the populace generally still believes in God because they instinctively “know” him to be real, like an inner-witness. People “know” God exists like they “know” deep down that they're sinners. Though this number seems to be fast dwindling, we won't debate it here. I've seen enough boxes in my lifetime to know that it can't all be coincidence.

My God exists and I have a name for him. I gave him the name while staring at a Huggies diaper box. It's a shortened albeit irreverent version of something plain, something we call “cardboard.” Carboardia is his name. He is everywhere humans are or have been since they've been humans. But Carboardia is a cool God...but not for what he promises, only for what he doesn't do.

Carboardia is not like the gods of the religious people. He doesn't care what you eat or what rules you live by. He doesn't care if you sleep until noon on Sundays or eat blood sausage and shrimp fried in pure lard with a side order of lobster. He won't insist on your eating fish on Fridays like some monsignor with a secret masturbation addiction who volunteers to entertain Boy Scouts. He doesn't make laws. Live in your clueless senile mother's basement and find work as online human trafficker. See if Carboardia cares. He doesn't.

And he doesn't want worship. Carboardia doesn't care if you flatter him with your worthless praises, as if you are actually giving him anything. He doesn't care if you like him either. He doesn't want to see pictures of your annoying fucking kids. He doesn't want to meet your spouse. He doesn't care about your aged mother in a nursing home. She can rot, as can you, for all he cares. He hasn't heard a single prayer of yours to date. He doesn't even know your pathetic forehead oil-producing ass exists.

Carboardia doesn't dislike you. He just has no faith in you or humanity. He doesn't hate the human race, but he's not interested in saving it. And he doesn't want us to save ourselves, or to try. And he's honest; if he did exist as a conscious entity and could save the Burmese and Haitians, he would fess up: “They all look like bugs to me. I don't care about them. Why should I save them?” You'd have no good answer that could reach him.

Carboardia doesn't take sides. He has no opinion on political or moral matters. He'd play Chess with Stalin or have beers with Hitler—and Martin Luther King Jr. would not be denied a seat at the same table. He's just that kind of god, Carboardia. He's an easygoing fella. We’re the ones who make things difficult.

Carboardia wants everyone to know that they are not entitled to exist and survive. He's a stickler for that point. He doesn't want any blood bag to survive or conquer or be a dick, rambling on about how they should be granted life and immortality...or think they're right or better or have some secret to life and well-being and happiness that others don't have or can't get.

The holy spirit of Carboardia demands that humankind realize that they are at best a stinking cancer to the universe, a sentient sickness to the body of what we call “being.” Death is everywhere, and then we came along and fucked things up. Real intelligence is to know that consciousness is synonymous with unhappiness. Even the wise King Solomon agrees (Ecclesiastes 1:2, 14, 18, 2:15-17, the whole rest of the damn book). We will never realize true contentment until death. All is futile. All is pointless. To know this is to surpass the greatest in greatness and wisdom.

So Carboardia's message to mankind is a grim one; we live and then we die, with nothing gained or garnered. But maybe, if you want, you can make changes in life for the living. Maybe, if you so desire, you can live life and then leave it better than you found it? No one beyond the grave will punish you for doing otherwise, but what sane person can deny that doing so is not in order? Its just Carboardia who doesn't care either way. We do care.

We humans always care and feel the ripples in the ocean of cause and effect produced by what our fellow man does. But that's the trick; it matters NOW how we live, not after we die. Reason says to make life (not just the transition into death) better for everyone—for you first and then for everyone else. Religion prepares you for death. A better, more productive life is just an afterthought to religion, but Carboardia's Way says to focus on what matters now.

And unlike all other gods that have ever been, Carboardia has another distinct advantage: he is not afraid of reason. He is not afraid of being contradicted or being opposed by logic or science or by some school of thought. He is not afraid of investigation or of falling out of favor in the consensus of scientists and think-tanks and becoming antiquated. When asked what he thinks of scrutiny and healthy investigation, he says with a smile (beer and peanuts in hand): “Ah, cool. Go for it, dude.” Then, he takes a sip and sits back.

Carboardia is an easygoing dude, but there is a way to piss him off. And he pisses off a lot of people. The happy people hate him, the right-brained religious optimists who are “going places” in life for sure. They hate him because they dare to believe and tell others that they were destined to be successful, destined for glory.

When you cry for your dead relatives, Carboardia gives you only one minute before saying: “Now, now, quit your bitching!” That's why evolved people feel guilty when they cry too long. It's a form of selfishness since millions die everyday in the world, and you shed not a single fucking tear for them. Carboardia hates babies, naturally, as they are only selfish.

Carboardia never lets you forget the box that is your destiny. There are old-timey pictures on his black, featureless walls typed in a 1950s font of you and a box dancing together on a ballroom floor on a date. It's like a prom...with you and death. But you'll only have to be knocked up once—and it will be against your will. Carboardia gets off to that.

Say something positive around Carboardia and it's like touching a nerve. He is that unforgivably harsh inner-critic who stares back at you and whispers in your ear about how you are nothing in the mornings when you look in the mirror and start to feel pretty or handsome. When you start to feel like you are making a difference in life, and when you start to repeat bullshit from preachers and say things like, “God has a plan for my life!,” Carboardia is there, saying: “Better fucking watch it, dickface!”

Now don't think for a minute that Carboardia is some pro-atheist mock-god either. He can be just as douche-y to us atheists. When my fellow atheists say things like: “Earth is a great planet and needs to be saved and preserved,” Carboardia gets all up in our faces and says: “Whoa, Whoa, whoa, whoa, watch it! You're only one step away from being buried in that tree you're trying to save! Go fuck yourselves sideways!” Hey, we've all been called out.

But Carboardia is still cool, and he's not like those pitifully typical gods that say that unless you worship and accept them and that their son died on a cross for your sins, you will come to eternal hurt. Remember, he doesn't care what you do or what you believe. Your destiny is already written in stone anyway; you are going to rot...in a box, like it or not. That will be your end. Have a bitch-fit all you want. It's still going to happen. It is the will of Carboardia.

Now it's true that Carboardia and Jesus wouldn't really get along. Jesus is all about the Jews reoccupying Israel and a millennial kingdom being set up on earth and angels and gathering around a throne and eating grapes for all eternity. Jesus had others write his church a book over the course of many bloody centuries. When the book finally came together and was accepted, it spoke to the selfish and to the scared, to the cowards who are too afraid to face and accept eternal death.

The violent, intolerant, bishop-poisoning, heretic-burning history of the church doesn't change the fact that their members are cowards…spineless and gutless, sniveling cowards who cannot accept that when their rotting, corn-ridden, puss-filled bodies give out, that there won't be new ones awaiting them in the hereafter. Just wait till your optic nerve fail you, when you experience macular degeneration, when you can only read the gigantic numbers on city hall’s giant clock tower. Things will not get better. There will be nothing more for you beyond the clouds. You will be all alone to stew in your uselessness, with your cataracts and your chronic rheumatism.

But Jesus and Carboardia do have one thing in common; they both want the needy and the broken to come to them. Both have outstretched arms. Jesus says: “Come unto me all ye who labor and are heaven laden and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28) Carboardia says: “Come unto me all ye who know that life means nothing and that your wormish end is upon you. I give you rest. Progress is pointless; adaptation is vain; fighting to survive is a temporary measure to put off the inevitable. Purpose is a lie. Lay hold on the contentment of a thousand saints and sages. Striving is worthless. Accept your closed eyes in the sleep of death. There ye shall find peace.”

(JH)

Boxes (Part I of II)

2010-02-11T18:41:00.003-06:00

It has been said that one of only a few universal shapes is a circle, or more correctly, a sphere. Planets, the remains of galactic collisions, the remnants of dying stars, assemble as spherical giants, like moons and other celestial satellites. The bodies form this way because the weight of these masses is forced by physics to distribute themselves evenly.

A spiral is the second of these universal shapes. It is seen in galaxy formations and nebulae. It is very possible that there are as many spiral galaxies as there are grains of sand on all the beaches on planet earth. Water going down a drain becomes a spiral. Like the sphere, a spiral is seen everywhere in the universe.

These shapes, pointlessly draped across the heavens, are not evidences of divine intelligence. They don't require intelligence to create, no more so than does a snow flake. You can't point to them and say: "Ah, see, there is God's handiwork." No, not if you live in this century and have average intelligence or better.

These shapes are not divine, and they give me no inspiration to live. They tell me nothing except that the godless universe of which I am a part, when contemplated, is an incredible scenic wonder as much as it is a prison and a death trap. There are scribblings that seem to mean something on every prison wall. The shapes we see in the cosmos from earth are not even on the level with those half-cognizant expressions of hopelessness and brokenness.

Looking at the stars means nothing to me. I've seen earth's stars for a long time, and so have all who have lived on earth going back over a million years. Before that, the stars appeared differently. I admit that if I could leap to another planet and get a view from a different solar system, I would take the opportunity in a flash. That would be something.

But it wouldn't change a thing. Those sights would get old and I would lose interest just as with our stars. There are shapes I see more often in my small, miserable, crowded world inside this blue dome of mud and death. They are much more common than the lofty and meaningless shapes in the vastness that abounds.

I see boxes everywhere I look.

Boxes we live in. Our houses (if we're lucky enough to have a house) are boxes with a few odd corners. Many more of us are way too poor for a house. We who are poor live in apartments. Imagine a camera rolling from apartment to apartment as you get a quick view of neighbors doing different things; one is cooking, another is listening to music while doing homework, another is jerking off watching some amateur porn on Xtube. Someone else is watching Jerry Seinfeld before bed with a glass of water and medication nearby. We're all doing something, scurrying around in these boxes, like rats running close to each other in closed-off mazes.

We spend the bulk of our lives in these miserables boxes. Sometimes we can hear what goes on in the unhappy lives of other people in their boxes, above and around us. We hear them and they hear us. It's a challenge for so many just to live next to their neighbors.

We do important things in these boxes. We take off our clothes, we unwind from a hard day's work, we let our senses go free in a movie or a TV show. We unleash our outside-worthy animal passions. We sleep "spooned" with our mates in a tender sleep that builds bonds.

Boxes we use to store what we own. We move into and out of these bigger boxes known as houses with smaller boxes known as moving boxes, cardboard pieces of crap that were used and then cast aside as trash by big businesses that have no longer a need for them.

Boxes are always valuable to the common man. We store our most prized possessions in chests, and yes, old boxes...pissed on, peppered with rat pellets boxes, as they sit unused for years in our hot, dusty attics. "Huggies" and "Charmin" are printed on the sides, or maybe the boxes come from the store and held bananas. That never matters to us. The boxes are junk until we need them and after we use them.

In these boxes are valuable things, pictures of your great grandmother. Shit, has she been dead this long? And there are pictures of you in a more innocent phase of life. "I was so fucking dumb back then," you say to yourself, looking at those pics and those god-awful clothes styles. Some drawings you made as a baby are there too. Mom would just die if she lost them. So unused these possessions are, and yet so loved and so valuable.

Boxes we work in. We get up everyday to spend a huge portion of our lives in boxes some call cubicles, the boxes we work out of. We painstakingly labor, day in and day out, to take home money to enable us to have the ability to keep living in those bigger boxes we live out of, the ones we need to keep the rain off of our heads and that allow us to be able to spend yet more time in them, doing the things mentioned earlier.

Is having a beer in front of the TV while watching All in The Family or Seinfeld THAT fucking much of a cosmic purpose? Well, you would think it would be. The little things we do in our off-time are the highest valued things, the things we live for and work to be able to do.

You spend your life laboring in these work boxes, taking Aspirin for headaches and lozenges for sore throats, being miserable for a paycheck. You get one or two days off, but sometimes you're really sick, and you have to call your boss and tell him you cannot come in. But don't stay out more than two days, because then you will need a doctor's note to come back to work.

That doctor works in a box too, and when you're sick, he gives you a small cylinder of pills to take to get you better. But when you get older, you'll have to take too many pills to manage, which means you'll need more help in the form of more boxes--little boxes to help manage taking your pills each day in your fucking painstricken (or soon-to-be painstricken) life.

Boxes we talk into and work from everywhere. We have boxes that contain metal, rubber, and wire. We call these computers. These computers have programs. They enable us to talk into them with the help of microphones so that we can socialize and keep in touch with everyone we know, far or near. More of us are spending more time with these boxes than with the real people we connect with.

Some live in a virtual world, and some only have confidence in themselves in this made-up world of perpetual lies of digital imagery. If they could, this type would permanently morph themselves into their online personas.

We carry around and talk into smaller boxes called cell phones. This means some of us are dicks and cause needless traffic accidents, not to mention provide poor customer service at work because some have these phones stuck in their ears and they don't give a good god-damn about anybody else. If you worked in the 80s, you drove a box to get to that store, and it looked like this.

Now, times have changed, and a kid works at that same store. The kid was born in 1994 and is a sissy. He's the one with that phone stuck in his ear.

Many boxes go to that store. Some look like this...

But some, they live in boxes and drive them too like this awesome guy...

We use boxes called cameras to house our most cherished memories. Cameras are good because they are useful, but they are also an insult. They are only an admission that our memories suck and need help. We'll forget the details in future years of everyone in our lives, even those we love the most. We'll need pictures to remind us why we haven't slit our wrists already. We forget the good things, the fine details that make us reflect back.

Boxes we sleep on. Beds are boxes. They hold our fat asses and sagging breasts so that we can comfortably pass the one-third of our lives that we waste in unconsciousness. Sleep is the best of life because it gets our focus off of the misery, but sleep robs us of so many opportunities. This alone proves that no deity created us to live and get the most out of life. No deity would have created us to sleep.

Sharks don't have to sleep. They don't get sick. They spend their lives eating and fucking, always moving. They have it good. If they try to sleep, they'll suffocate. We, we have to sleep. Why couldn't it have been that way with human beings? It'd be nice to have no fucking moochers living off of the government.

Boxes we give to each other. We give them as gifts around the holidays to add to our collection of boxed items we'll cease using as we continue to live, as we try to tell ourselves we're happy. The women have it right; shopping does make one happy, or at least puts us as close to it as we can be.

Boxes carry our food home warm. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors never had these. I always imagine, every single time I sit down to a hot meal from a drive-thru restaurant, what my thick-boned ancestors would do if they were sitting right next to me with this hot box of delicious food. They slept in trees. They had not these recipes. They chased their meals down when they got hungry. They had no boxes whatsoever.

Boxes are where we end up when we die. Most likely, we will lay in a pine box or an $8,000 cornflower blue casket with a pretty marble glaze if your loved ones can afford it, and if you have life insurance. The helpful folks at your local mortuary can hook you up with a casket. This box is where you will stay forever. You will dissolve there. You will turn to dust, and the box never dissolves until after you do.

(JH)

Tony Hickman Makes Headlines

2010-02-02T18:39:00.001-06:00

A young Tony Hickman (8) of Andrew Falls, Michigan attended what could well have been his last day of school Monday at St. Rose Elementary. The second-grader, mute as the cameras rolled while being removed from school property by his parents, had no opinion except to say: “It was a drawing. I did not do nothing wrong.”

The drawing Tony spoke of was an in-class drawing of four bloodied and beheaded boys roasting on a super-sized barbeque pit with flames rising upward. The suffering victims, with their spirits imprisoned to their mangled bodies, shouted things like: “Oh God, please no!!!” One other figure portrayed appeared to be Tony himself, stabbing the boys with a pitchfork and laughing as they roasted.

Tony’s teacher, Rhonda Hodway, confiscated the picture and showed it to the principal, who was forced to suspend Tony for two weeks due to the school’s Zero Tolerance policy on handling violence and threats. The school board later decided to expel Tony for the offense.

Tony’s parents were quick to voice disagreement, along with at least two of Tony’s teachers who felt that the move was a gross overreaction. “It was just an imaginative drawing,” stated Tony’s Christian parents, Elton and Kathy, who took Tony to see a psychiatrist on the condition that he be allowed to come back to school in two weeks.

The expulsion is quickly getting national attention, having already gotten as far as Dr. James Dobson who allegedly made some comments on the expulsion, saying that it was “a smart move on the part of the school system.”

Child Psychiatrist Dr. Aven Uri was the expert who spent a full day with little Tony and gave us his findings: “I find nothing wrong with the boy at all. Aside from being a little withdrawn and perhaps antisocial, Tony Hickman is a vibrant young Christian man. Expelling him was a mistake.”

Tony is a Christian young man to be sure. Both he and his parents are faithful members of Wayland Interfaith Assembly, a Full Gospel church in their area. Dr. Uri went on record as stating that he enjoyed his time with Tony, in part, because: “We had a strong spiritual connection.”

When asked to explain what that meant, Dr. Uri said: “I am a Christian like Tony is, and because of the details of the picture, we were led to spending a lot of time talking about Christianity and God. Tony made it clear to me that in drawing the picture of the suffering children, he was only putting himself in the place of God. In the drawing, Tony imagined himself doing what God does to sinners and all who disobey him or die in an unsaved condition—God keeps them in pain for eternity, roasting sinners on his own backyard barbeque pit of pain. I found the picture Tony drew to be a perfect visual summary of Christianity.”

Dr. Uri continued: “Anyone who reads the Bible can clearly see that it speaks of a hell for the godless, an eternal hell. Once you’re there, you can’t get out. (Luke 16:19-31) Too many passages in the Bible affirm it, and Tony knows those passages. He knows that God is going to make his enemies miserable throughout eternity in fires ‘that shall not be quenched.’(Mark 9:48) Now I ask you, how can those who run the St. Rose School who happen to be Christians fault Tony for speaking and thinking exactly as their own God thinks?”

Dr. Uri was not unclear with his feelings on the “Christians” in the school system who expelled Tony: “It is unfortunate that believers today have become so ashamed of their God that they only remember Jesus’ words when he says ‘Come unto Me’ and not ‘he that lieth with mankind as with womankind shall surely be put to death.’ (Leviticus 18:22) Jesus said both of those things, and God was big on having his followers kill people way back when. He wanted them to do it constantly. The only difference between the Old and the New Testaments is that today, God stepped in and said ‘Wait. Don’t you kill the sinner. I’ll kill the sinner.’ It is God who judges now.”

“Tony needs to be watched to make sure he understands that just because God can torture hapless men, women, and children and make them wish they were never born doesn’t mean he can.” stated Dr. Uri. “But I think Tony knows that and is just a young, zealous boy who is quiet and has a deep love for Christ that his peers (and teachers) don’t understand. I wouldn’t be surprised if Tony becomes a pastor someday. He’s righteous and thinks in graphic, vengeful, blood-soaked details, having a passion for death and death-inspired living just like God.”

Dr. James Dobson could not be reached for comment.

God Was There

2010-01-15T20:38:00.003-06:00

I am God. I know your pain.
I was there for every trial you’ve ever faced.

I was there when you fell and hurt your knee at the age of three.
I was there when you were shunned on the playground more recently.
I was there when your mother was in the hospital. I stood by and watched as the doctors worked to save her life. I appreciated the prayers you sent Me to spare her.

I was there when mother died, as her immortal spirit drifted back to Me.
I was there when your family mourned her loss and cried with unceasing tears.
I was there when your father passed, when he forgot who you were, when you closed the lid to his casket.

I was there when dear Aunt Olga was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
I was there when she bravely went through test after test until her condition was finally confirmed.
I was there when she lost her will to live. I watched as the family pleaded with her to continue treatment and not to give up; I waited where her tears fell.

I was there when your Uncle Hank died.
I was there when you told your first lie.
I was around the first time you touched yourself; on that day, all the angels cried; on that day, you lost your innocence.

I was there, in the corner of your room, watching you sin. I testified to your inner-man that you fell short of My Glory, as a sinner, an impure and fallen man, another of Adam’s reproachful sons, wicked from birth.

I was there when young Ben, your childhood friend, was killed in the car wreck.
I was in the driver’s seat of the other car, watching, looking on as a drunken man fell asleep at the wheel. I did not wake him, but said: “Sleep, you foolish man. Sleep.”

I was there when your best friend from high school decided to take his own life. My holy eyes saw the blood from his slit wrists run down through the cracks of the hard wood floor.
I was there when you wept at his funeral. Jesus wept too.
I was there when you sobbed uncontrollably, leaning on the casket of your bosom friend, pushing away the comforts of your spouse.

I was there when your youngest child was born, when it was said of the doctors: “Your son’s spine did not form correctly. He will never walk and will need surgery to live.”
I was there when the doctors performed the operation.
I was there as their hands took the scalpels, as every incision, every cut into his newborn flesh was made.

I was there, and I am here. I am God: “and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.” (Matthew 28:20)

(JH)

Racism: What it Is, What it Isn’t, and Why America’s Racial Paranoia Sucks Ass

2010-01-14T02:19:00.005-06:00

To get the full affect of this article, you’ll need to be familiar with the old Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). If you are too young (or too old) to remember it, just search the web for “Mike Tyson’s Punch-out NES” and you’ll be able, with a mere few clicks of a mouse, to know all you need to know. But I dare say, most of us are familiar with the classic boxing video game.

Mike Tyson’s Punch-out was re-released some years later as just “Punch Out,” and the top guy, “Mr. Dream” (still with Iron Mike’s moves, body, and strengths), was the guy to beat. The re-release happened due to the expiration of Nintendo's appearance license with Tyson had expired. This was just before Tyson’s reputation fell right off the balcony of decency in late 1991 and has just recently started to recover (or be forgotten).

Punch Out was a great game, one of the few on the NES that I had the patience and desire to work at and actually win. I would play the damn thing all day long. I used to eat bags full of Tom’s Nacho Cheese Chips while drinking down a pitcher of tea sweetened with two cups of sugar as I spent hours wasting away playing. By the time it got old, I was nearly finished with Nintendo games and onto playing games with people’s minds to get them to believe in Jesus Christ and Christianity.

The times have changed again. Now, I’ve quit trying to get people to believe in Jesus. Jesus and Tyson mean the same to me. Tyson is a better actor than Jesus (yes, amazingly, he was quite good in The Hangover), but a mentally unhealthy obsession with Jesus occupied a greater portion of my life. I now think of them both from time to time, and neither matter to me…but I digress.

I tried to play an NES Mike Tyson’s Punch-out simulator on the trusty ole’ Mac last year, but found that the furthest I could get was Soda Popinski. My desires for the game are, of course, gone. But I love Punch-out even today because it was from a simpler time, from a less paranoid time when America was not headlong obsessed with the odorous assault of racial sensitivity.

Perhaps you’ve never thought about it, so think about it for a minute now—if Punch Out had been created today, would it have been released? It would certainly not have been. If it had been released, it would have been banned. As it is, it’s a “racist” game, full of degrading stereotypes and “insulting” attacks against gays, Russians, South Pacific Islanders, Frenchmen, Indians, the Japanese, and Spaniards.

There’s Glass Joe, a Frenchman who is such a wuss that no matter how good you get at the game, you still enjoy tearing into him and whipping his ass because there’s nothing he can do about it. He’s the easiest guy to beat, and he looks like he’s in the ring only because his firstborn son is being held hostage and he has to fight to save his life.

Then there’s King Hippo, seemingly a South Pacific Islander with scary eyes and a nearly animal body, who is so fat that his pants keep falling down when you pop him in the gut. You are supposed to wonder how much toilet paper this guy uses, just as you are how his arms can block hits so well over that massive gut.

There’s Piston Honda, a Japanese technical fighter who says “BONZAI!” ever so often, and he jiggles his arched, oriental eye-line as he’s about to start punching. He tries very hard to be “extra” Japanese. You just know the computer programmers were sitting around and having fun with that one.

On Super Punch-out (the arcade version of Punch Out), there was “Vodka Drunkinski,” an inebriated Russian who chugs his favorite beverage between rounds. For the standard NES, his name was changed to Soda Popinski (can’t encourage the junior high crowd to break into mom and dad’s liquor cabinet, can we?)

Great Tiger wears a big turban with a stone that twinkles so that you know when to hit him, but you’ve got to block his magically-endowed “tiger punches” if you want to beat him and make him retire to fulfill his real destiny of running a gas station for 80 hours a week in America.

There’s Don Flamingo. He’s the smart-but-sissified Spaniard who looks and acts the intended feminized part. He dances around and he throws flowers. Today, he’d be kicking back in Starbucks wearing a black turtleneck shirt. He’d have a lot of gel in his hair too.

An IQ of 80 or less says that there’s no way this game could be released considering today’s inflamed political landscape. No way, no how! But is Punch-out a genuinely racist game? Like so many popularly classified “racist” notions today, it isn’t.

Only if you reason like Commissioner John Wiley Price is Punch Out a racist game. Dr. Price is a stupid bastard in Dallas, Texas who decided in a city meeting on traffic tickets that it was racist to use the term “Black Hole.” Even in astronomy or science classes, it’s a racist thing to say. Why? Because using “black” to describe anything can imply something negative, and according to him, is like saying “black sheep of the family,” which he thinks means the same as “black people.” It’s derogatory, says the moron.

And the bigoted douche continues…

Poor Dr. Price. He’s so fucking stupid and bent on reverse-racial hatred that the chip on his shoulder cuts off his whole left arm. He’s too fucking retarded to realize that “black” was associated with “black" in the sense of "no light." Black holes are so strong that they don't even give off light, hence, we call them "black holes," not "white holes" like he wants them to be called. It's not hard to understand.

What about black clothing, a black cloth representing death, grieving, misfortune, etc. How about “Black Friday”? Is that racist? It comes from the 60s when people found that shoppers spend so much money on the Friday after Thanksgiving that broke stores go from “the red” into “the black” of better profits. But to Price, evil whitey will never stop. If this son of a bitch had his way, he’d re-write every science textbook currently being used in public schools and remove the word "black" altogether.

Mr. Price needs a gang of five white men to beat the hell out of him and hold him down and make him spit-shine their shoes with his tongue so that he can know the distaste of what real racism is. His definition would change, I promise you.

But count on the race-baiters, the race-hustlers, the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons of the world, and others of the mega-lib persuasion to feed us this kind of crap. They, along with many of the newly educated crowd that graduated high school around 2004 or later, know nothing except how to academically argue the “pro” position on pot smoking. They don’t know anything else. They’ve been raised to think less critically, but more judgmentally. They’ve also been raised to think that racism is the worst of sins, even if they themselves don’t believe in the concept of “sin” (and they usually don’t).

Yes, Punch Out uses stereotypes. So the fuck what? Stereotypes can be used badly, but they can also hold kernels of truth, however inconsequential. In the case of Punch-out, the stereotypes are silly and meaningless, inside jokes from a time when – I don’t know how else to put it – people didn’t freak out about shit!

And how many protests did you hear from the French, from the Japanese, and from other racially bruised ethnicities when the game was released? Oh, that’s easy…like…none. None. Why? Because that’s where people were in the 80s. People hadn’t yet developed the ass-plugged habit of taking themselves too seriously and demanding that everyone else do as well. They weren’t consumed with an unhealthy and narcissistic fascination about self-esteem and that sacred catchall cow known as “cultural sensitivity.” No one took the game seriously, and that’s the way it should have been as we are talking about A FUCKING VIDEO GAME!

Nobody took issue with it. But what about kids who went to school and started mocking the Japanese for their eyes or the Spaniards and French-blooded for their “wuss” qualities? They didn’t. Never happened. But that doesn’t matter to a liberal. Everything is about them. Everything reflects on them and on the “roots” of some. Any remotely perceived negative imagery brings a shady overcast of demeaning slander. That’s why Disney has done away with “Song of the South.” You can’t get it anymore.

Mark my words…we are going to look back on this period in our history and be in complete awe at how paranoid and egotistically skull-fucked we were. It’s going to be a running joke in less than thirty years from now. Everything is fucking racism today; the movies can’t stop focusing on it and preaching a by now tenderized and tepid message of tolerance. When is this backlash going to pass? It’s a bad flu, but like a bad flu, it will pass (or it could kill us first). I’m convinced it will pass.

And everything today can be racism. Say you don’t like rap and you might get called a hater. Say you prefer to date or marry someone of your ethnicity only and you WILL get accused of it (I have been and I’m not a white-only dater). Being called racist is the big “trump card” insult of the influential thinkers of our time, way worse than being called a “commie” in the 70s.

Stereotypes can be (and often are) true. I can say them to make a point or even to build an argument, so long as I am aware of the limitations/exceptions.

There is a situation at work. Someone is stealing food – sometimes already bitten-into food – from the employee break room. What class of people might you think it to be? Is it someone from Human Resources, Accounting, Security, Retail, or perhaps Housekeeping? The answer: Housekeeping. Why? You already know why. Has to do with income/poverty level concerns. Is that an unfortunate fact? Yes. Am I going to suspect that’s where my thief is likely to be? Yes. Is it possible that I’m wrong and it is someone from another department? Yes. Is the income level a factor that I should ignore in my thinking in the name of showing “equality”? No, if you’re smart; yes, if you’re a good liberal. You’re dumb as goddamn hell if you think so. Liberal thinking, the kind that has to be used to reinforce one’s convictions of “equality,” makes common sense reasoning a laborious exercise at best, which is why most liberals choose not to apply it.

It is a statistical fact that there are more black males in prison than in college. It is common sense that the poor are more apt to steal food and petty items than are the non-poor, and many of these poor are from a minority background—all statistical facts. Not liking it and trying to get others to not state it won’t erase it. I can’t use (and wouldn’t want to use) a statistic or a stereotype to bestow guilt, but I can (and will no matter what) use it to pursue any suspicions I may have. That’s called logic, and it has no desire to join any special interest groups.

The case of the late football commentator Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder is of particular interest. Snyder was fired from NBC for saying: “The black is a better athlete to begin with because he's been bred to be that way. Because of his high thighs and big thighs that goes up into his back, and they can jump higher and run faster because of their bigger thighs. This goes back all the way to the Civil War when during the slave trading, the owner – the slave owner – would breed his big black to his big woman so that he could have a big black kid.” Snyder himself was later socially bludgeoned into apologizing for the comments, but what Snyder said wasn't wrong. Ask any anthropologist and they’ll tell you (off the record).

People pursue liberal lines of thinking because of indoctrination, because they feel that they have to, which is why we need to do as many statistically based exercises in common sense reasoning as possible. Which vehicle is less likely to be stolen—a car with or without 22-inch rims like the rappers drive? It’s a no-fucking-brainer, an undisputed fact. If you can’t see it, please quit reading and go drink a gallon of bleach immediately.

The big thing that people hate but can’t get rid of is that racism is UNIVERSAL. It exists in every life form, and it will shock you just how. Plants of the same kind grow better when kept in the same soil. That’s right; grow jalapeños and habeneros separately and each kind of plant with its “own kind” and the results will be far better (I speak from some knowledge of horticulture, but mainly experience). The same harmony to be found in the soils where plants of the same kind grow better together is found in close-nit communities with matching racial demographics. Communities desire “their own kind.” It’s a fact like any other, though we wish like hell that it wasn’t so. Segregation was never a good idea, but you aren’t going to get rid of racism. You can only work around it.

Every white parent of the last few generations has given the same speech to their children, that minorities secretly desire to live apart from their privileged white counterparts. Terms like “their kind” are used in these conversations, prefaced with the phrase: “I don’t want to sound racist, but…”. And every white child has been warned that minorities are trying to “take over” for “payback” from the days of our great, great grandparents.

By contrast, every minority parent of the last several generations has taught their children behind closed doors that it is the whites who can’t be trusted, who doesn’t have to work as hard, who can get jobs easier, and who will put down all others when push comes to shove to promote themselves. Phrases like “they will never understand” are the choice phrases. The white man puts everyone down. With every group, the ugliest of words are used in clipped and hushed tones. Racial slurs are only racial slurs to the out-groups, never to the in-groups.

In all U.S. police academy training, the cadets receive instruction on what not to do with certain ethnic groups. It’s basic racial sensitivity training; Mexicans should not be put on their knees and spoken to from behind (that’s how they execute people “under the table” in Mexico). Blacks are to be expected to have an inherent fear of the police. It’s almost expected that the younger males will run when stopped while walking the streets in many areas. And in prisons, race means absolutely everything. You “stick with your own kind” as a matter of life or death. I don’t care if you were a card-carrying ACLU lawyer, not following this rule would get you shanked in the shower!

Just as with plants, we prefer and elevate those of our kind who are most like us. Our genes would have it that way. It’s a matter of propagating the best gene arrangements. But reason and compassion, seasoned with the spices of time and progress, have finally allowed us to go a different route. This means making greater efforts to extend to those who are not like us the same courtesies and rights that we would to those closest to us and who remind us of ourselves.

But we humans, we go overboard. We see so clearly only after the damage is done. The witch hunts of New England, the Spanish Inquisition, the Holocaust, it had to happen before we could call it out. We haven’t yet evolved the ability to stop or else slow the fuck down long enough to think: Do I really have anything to worry about? Am I going too far? Am I a victim of an alarmist episodic fever that will pass given time? Nope, we don’t think. We charge ahead, full steam, and then we hit the iceberg. And then we just relax. All you have to do is assess the damage. That’s the easy part.

(JH)

The Soft and The Hard (Part II of II)

2010-01-05T17:30:00.007-06:00

There are a few who have emailed me and asked privately if the stories I share in my journal are true or made up, or else embellished for affect. My response to them is always the same as it is for all to read here. The stories are true down to every last recollectable detail. In those instances when I choose not to share information on a person’s identity, I change only a small portion of a last or first name, but never more than that. These are real events from my (largely inglorious) past.

…

In March of 1993, my former “friend” Paul Urios stood trial for third degree felony theft and grand theft auto. I remember waking up to a cool day with the sun out brighter than ever. It was a normal day, but when I got home from school, I learned that dad went to the court house that morning to testify against him and to claim ownership of some of the things stolen from us that we learned were later recovered in a storage shed. Paul stole from us and from our neighbors. The amount of loot was valued at $88,000 in total. Little did I know when I met Paul that he and his cohorts would have my entire neighborhood in an uproar like I couldn’t have imagined.

But unlike my other former (poorly chosen) friends, Paul was never my friend. He was just the friend of a friend whom I chose to put up with—one I shouldn’t have put up with. I put up with him for a time, which means I was still to blame for all the grief we suffered from the guy. Paul had the distinction of being one of the people in my life that I really and truly hated.

Paul had just turned 18 when I met him through my friend Travis, an almost equally big failure of a human being. Paul was very skinny and tall, about 6’1 in height. He was a mixed race kid, half-white and half-Hispanic. He had the hairiest skinny arms of any skinny guy I knew (I don’t know why that detail stuck with me, but it has). Paul’s father was reputed to be a serious drug dealer. I doubted that.

One of the scariest moments of my life came right after I met Paul. It was then that I met his dad. A friend and I were waiting in his car. Paul was taking so long inside his house. Said he would get something from dad and then be back out. He took so long that I proposed my friend and I go in there and see what was up. We walked in not knowing that behind that cracked door were two bad men.

The door floated open and an older man that looked like Paul was sitting down doing something at his kitchen table. He was talking with Travis, who had gone into the room with Paul. The man looked up and saw us, and in a flash of movement, knocked some newspapers and other things off his table and grabbed a large gun and pointed it at us. Travis jumped up and said: “Whoa, whoa, whoa, not them! They are okay!”

I almost pissed my pants right then and there, and so did Tim, the friend I was with. “I almost fucking killed you, Homes.” the man said, who turned out to be Paul’s dad (no surprise there). What was a surprise was the kind of funny-looking gun that was pulled on us when we got close enough to see it; it was an Uzi 9mm! Where the fuck…no, how the fuck…do you get an uzi??? It was real, no question about it. It was the same type of gun Ham Tyler (Michael Ironside) used to kill the lizard aliens with on V The Final Battle years earlier.

Fuck, I almost bit the big one! Takes a while to sink in, but it finally occurred to me that I could very well have died that day. His dad was used to the thought of cops busting in. After staring us down and putting down that huge, freaking cool-ass gun, he picked up his things and went back to doing what I suspected he was doing—making blunts and sorting drugs. His whole table was covered with pills of various colors and shapes, and weed (and who the fuck knows what else).

Paul’s dad wrapped up some tan “horse pills” in a paper bag and gave it to Paul, saying: “These go to Reyna. Noon, no later!” Paul didn’t say a word. He just took the pills and put them in his right-side pocket. Paul’s dad didn’t care about me knowing what went on in the house. Travis vouched for me, and besides, he figured that any friend of his son’s was a low enough drug-user just like he was. His son was given tons of drugs that he both sold and used. We dropped off the package, delivered it to a nice pink-bricked house on the north side of town and went on our way.

Paul had a gun too. It was some kind of semi-automatic pistol. He let me hold it. He always had it on him, with those baggy-ass white and gray sports jersey sort of “gangsta” clothes he wore. He could hide the gun well. He pulled it out quite often, which made me nervous as shit. It was not surprising to learn that one of the hits on his boastfully lengthy rap sheet was brandishing a firearm! I was afraid of the guy. I really was. I had good reason to be, too. I would soon find out just how good the reason was. I knew I was dealing with a “hard” character, but I had no idea just how hard…yet.

I remember our hanging out one afternoon. I decided to skip school to see what mischief we would get into. We hid behind a tall, grassy area behind a fence separating the Eden community of homes from Green Spring valley on the city’s northeast side where I lived. Had to be careful not to get spotted by dad on his way to work! It was foggy that day. We hung out doing nothing the whole day, and then a bus full of middle-schoolers drove by and dropped off some kids after school.

Those small kids – staring out the back window, giggling and pointing at things like kids are wont to do – were met with gang signs flashed back at them from Paul. And that wasn’t all he flashed them with. A couple of kids got off the bus and that shiny gun was shown the light of day as he pulled up his shirt to show them what would await them if they messed with him. They were threatened as a group, and of course, ran home crying and told their parents. The police were called and the area was combed. We were hiding out at Travis’ house by then and laid low for the night.

We three hoodlums then met up on a street a couple houses over from mine. As I approached, he and Travis were staring down at some kid, some grade-schooler. They were doing what I thought they were doing. The poor baby was scared to death as Paul lectured him. I remember walking up and hearing how much joy was in Paul’s ordinarily monotonous voice as he threatened this young kid: “That’s right, I could’ve fucking shot your bitch ass right back there for looking at me the way you did, but I didn’t. So get the fuck out of here and don’t ever cross me again!” The boy walked off, afraid as could be. He couldn’t even look down or around. He turned the corner and was gone. This made me so angry. I wanted to hit him, but my mind never left that gun he kept tucked in his pants.

You would think that with “hardness” comes “hard” judgment, but that wasn’t so. Paul wasn’t in any danger, and yet he flashed a deadly weapon at kids much smaller than him. That was weak, not the mark of a big time “gangsta.” Did that connect with me? No. Paul was a dangerous thug who took great pleasure from intimidating people, not a real gangster. He wasn’t smart enough to get ahead in the rough world of street crime. He was too stupid to be a good street junkie. His dad was always chewing him out for his stupid moves. I remember visiting his house for the final time. Paul’s stupid moves got us all scolded. “I will kill all three of you if you fuck me over.” Then he paused and pointed to his son and said: “I don’t give a fuck if you’re my son either! Don’t you ever fuck me over!” I had to find a way to disconnect from this crowd. I knew that now. I never went over there again.

The whole four months I knew and hung out with Paul were infuriating. I got home from school one day, kicked off my shoes, and went to the kitchen to eat. Ordinary enough of a day, right? Wrong. There was Paul, in my fucking kitchen, eating out of my fridge, from my family’s bowl of beans! He was dipping the spoon that went into his mouth back into the bowl—that is a mortal sin against me! I was fucking furious. He didn’t say anything, even when I said: “What are you doing here?” I wanted to say: “What the fuck are you doing uninvited in my house, you son of a bitch?” But I didn’t have the guts. Seeing that I was quiet and curious, he finally said: “I was hungry. Dad’s busy. Needed a place to hang for a while.”

He stayed around all goddamn evening and didn’t leave until nightfall. The rest of his (my) friends came over and we hung out. Paul was so spacey, so out of it, using his own “stuff” that he barely talked at all. LSD on paper patches were one of his favorite things to use. I remember him just laying there and laughing for about 45 minutes. He rolled a blunt in my upstairs bathroom before calling it a night and heading out. I was so mad at myself for not having the balls to man-up and kick them out of there, but there was still the matter of that gun. I felt so sullied just having him around, especially in my kitchen.

The times we were at Travis’ house were no less angering. We would be hanging out and Paul would get finicky. Like a three-year-old child giggling while hitting a cat with a tree branch, Paul would start jabbing people, punching and laughing lightly. It wasn’t funny for longer than ten seconds, but it lasted longer than that. I nearly hit the guy in the lip, I recall distinctly. He was no match for me without that gun. He finally backed off and went to listening to what seemed to be his favorite song, “No Sunshine” by Kid Frost from the 1992 album “East Side Story.” He put the CD player (brand new thing at the time) on repeat. The song was about a 21-year-old man spending life in prison for stabbing another man in the heart in a knife fight. The chorus went…

“Ain't no sunshine.  Ain't no sunshine.  Ain't no sunshine.  Ain't no sunshine.  Ain't no sunshine…anytime. "

Neither Paul, nor any of my friends appreciated this song for what it was intended to accomplish. A week later, Paul’s in jail, Travis tells me. What for? Second charge of brandishing a shotgun out in the front yard. He was out and hanging with us again in less than two weeks. Dad pulled some strings or something and got him out…and then beat the shit out of him. And, it was back to his old ways of flashing his shiny gun at young kids and graphitizing sidewalks.

The Paul era ended when he and a druggy friend named Corey got busted trying to steal a car five houses up from ours. The owner spotted the break lights and he called the police. The two were caught in the act. Down they went.

A day before the arrests, Paul had threatened a neighbor who was active in the homeowner’s association. The man made some calls and Paul’s name came up, as did mine. The police raided his dad’s rented storage facility and found the $88,000 worth of appliances and stolen goods. Paul’s dad went down on drug charges and receiving stolen property. I was in the clear, but a neighbor was so pissed about the whole ordeal that he went over to me, poked me in the chest in our own yard, and said: “YOU and your dipshit friends brought this on!” Dad didn’t say a thing, but looking back, I would have done the same thing my neighbor did. Kids are stupid as hell.

The neighborhood was again peaceful. Now we’re back to where we were when we first started the article. I hated Paul, but I was still at fault for letting a bad person into my life. A number of expensive items, including one kick-ass boom box that I miss to this day, were gone forever. It was all because of me.

Sometimes people can be worthless—not just rebellious or misguided, but worthless. Sometimes you have to give up on a person, and that can be hard. The toughest thing about giving up on someone is that you have trouble letting go of that childlike image of the way they used to be. Take the worst druggie in the world; those who love them look past their scars, their never-ending lies, their weathering looks, and their “jones-ing” fits of anger and see the baby who used to crawl around and coo so cutely in the playpen. They aren’t that person anymore. Some people can see that easier than others. Every mass-murdering dictator there ever has been once played and fell down and cried out innocently to mommy for help. Then they grew and became what their rasing and blueprints determined that they would be—evil.

You hear about the stories on the news all the time, about how some mother did the unthinkable to her child, or some quiet and “innocent” kid was guilty of such heinous bloodshed that words can’t capture it fully. But those things aren’t like a rape or a robbery. Those can happen to anybody. The one thing that just about all rape victims have in common is that they never thought it could happen to them. But with genetics, it’s unlikely that you know too many people who are morally defective because of bad genes. But look in the bad crowds and you’ll find them.

Life is such a miserably delicate balance. It takes just the right genetics to live a productive life, to feel emotional pain, to receive instruction, to be balanced chemically and emotionally so as to be productive. We take it for granted, but the conscience isn’t anything but a patchwork system of naturally queued reactions that work together to produce affection and remorse.

People – mostly the kids – wish for things like normalcy, but then they spend their young lives hating being normal. They want to believe they are exceptional, but when it becomes clear that they and their problems/challenges are normal, they aren’t satisfied. They’ve got to be more than that. Look at me and my friend Josh; we weren’t the bad-asses we wished we were. We weren’t “hardcore” when we thought we were. We were just observers, imitators who tried to reproduce what we saw. We were soft. Paul was hard, but look at what being “hard” gets you? It makes you a candidate for self-destruction.

You can spend your life wishing you had something that made you more than average…more strength, more courage, more intelligence, more abilities…but you may not want those after all. Those exceptional qualities will come with exceptional difficulties. It will average out in the end. Just live in fantasy and be content with the fact that you are not your hero idol. Let Jack Bauer be the one to confront terrorists. Let Atlas hold up the world while you stay at home in bed. It’s more fun to dream. That’s the only lesson I can get out of it.

The brightest and most remarkable stars in the sky are not the brightest, like the blue stars, the ones that are a million times larger than our sun. They are the medium-sized orange stars like our sun, the ones that live for billions of years. The big ones consume their fuel too fast and are too heavy. They explode into an array of colors, like the colors a druggie sees all around him when he gets his kicks. Is that a sick coincidence or just the thought of a blob of matter who happens to be onto something? I have no idea.

(JH)

Year-end Review: The Best and Worst Films of 2009

2010-01-03T20:03:00.006-06:00

Looking back on 2009, one sees a very bland year. So much was not good. So much more was just ordinary at best.

On the stinker’s list are the following…

All About Steve (D-)

An unlikably ditzy and undeserving romantic comedy that is fit for the dunghill.

Couples Retreat (D+)

Wasn't quite as bad as it was made out to be by some, but you'll "retreat" from watching this soon enough!

Dragonball: Evolution (F)

A miserable adaption of the corny Japanese Dragonball animated action show.

Gamer (F)

Disgusting and repulsive to the core, Gamer doesn't play games when it comes to making you regret watching it.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (D-)

An actionpacked and air-headed adventure of annoyance and a poor story.

Knowing (D-)

A stereotypical Hollywood slandering of atheists with a hazy, end-times plot that deserves repudiating.

Land of the Lost (D-)

Another really, really, really bad Will Ferrill movie.

Love Happens (F)

Sappy, melodramatic, cliched, and repulsive all in one.

Old Dogs (F) (no review available)

A movie so stupid, witless, and intelligence-insulting that it can only hope to successfully entertain three-year-olds.

The Final Destination IV (D-)

More of the same hollow horror crap.

The Ugly Truth (D+)

A dumb and trashy romantic comedy that is more insulting than anything else.

The Unborn (D-)

A miserably weak and non-thought-out horror film that, well, just sucks.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (F)

Noisy, clangy, stupid, and mindless, just like the 2007 Transformers, but worse.

Whiteout (D-)

Nice Antarctic scenery, but nothing else.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (D+)

An insult to the X-men series.

The Must-sees are…

Avatar (A-)

An excellent and visually pleasing film from the brilliant mind of James Cameron.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (B+)

Wonderfully creative and delightfully imaginative.

District 9 (A+)

Very disturbing, but one of the best Sci-fi works in quite a while.

Extract (B+)

Cute and funny in a relaxing way.

I Love You, Man! (A-)

Dirty, but moving and funny.

Inglourious Basterds (A-)

Clever Taurantino writing at it again!

Mr. Fantastic Fox (no review available)

An excellent film on so many levels.

Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire (A+)

So moving and powerful that you've got to see it!

Public Enemies (B+)

An incredible film with Johnny Depp as John Dilinger.

State of Play (A-)

Russell Crowe plays a journalist who brings down corruption in this better-than-good movie.

The Blindside (B+) A wonderful family fillm.

The Invention of Lying (A-)

A hilarious and funny (if humanist) take on a world wherein only one man can lie.

Up (A+)

Pixar does it again!

Watchmen (A+)

The best comic movie ever!

And, alas, my picks for the best and worst of 2009…

The Best: Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire (A+)

This powerfully moving film blows the socks off this year’s competition with it’s tear-jerking and terribly (and I do mean “terribly”) life-like portrayal of the sad life of an illiterate, obese inner-city girl named Precious whose father gives her two children by rape and whose mother blames her daughter for stealing her husband. Mon’ique, Mariah Carey, and Gabourey “Gabby” Sidibe star in a movie that is too much for most to handle—and what the rest of us don’t want to handle.

The Worst: Love Happens (F)

This melodramatic flop is the bonafide worst of the worst movie this year, but I’m far from the only one to call it out as a terrible barf-fest of “blahhhhhhhh.” This could be (no, it is) one of the worst films of all time.

(JH)

The Soft and The Hard (Part I of II)

2009-12-25T04:52:00.007-06:00

On the road to maturity, you quit playing with toys and you start playing like you are someone else. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Well, it’s not really that. Its just adaptation, trying to fit in. That’s the next stage of development. But let me introduce you to one of my higher-class old friends, Josh Hopkins, a guy I still (very remotely) keep in touch with. It may surprise you, but at no point was he a loser. He was, however, a kid with a lot to learn (aren’t they all?)

Josh and I seemed to think alike. I was proceeding like an ogre through high school and Josh was entering his first year as a small fish in the big pond of freshmen high-schoolers. Josh was Jewish, very short, standing almost 5’5. He was very small-framed, long-legged for a short guy, a frizzy-haired dude with loads of book smarts. His trademark was that he always wore a baseball cap because he was so insecure about his hair.

Josh had the reputation of being a pip-squeakish player, a manipulator, and he was. But that pip-squeakish-ness was soon to vanish. He muscled up quite well over my last year of school. Josh had so much going for him. It was like his two divorced parents that could never get along had no effect on him. Josh had a spend-a-holic mother with a temper whom he seldom got to see, and a dad who ran a successful chain of flower shops and made his son manage his allowance money like a banker. Josh had to buy his own car and some of his own food with his allowance. That dad of his was never too liked by anyone, not even his neighbors. But today, Josh is a very successful bank manager in the Austin area, thanks to dad.

But early on, unlike his business-minded father, Josh had a creatively young and rebellious streak in him that, like a bad cold, had to run its course. He went until he hit the breaking point. Along with me, here was another of your typical “tough guys,” one more kid who hasn’t found himself yet but thought he had.

The only thing a doing-good-in-school, preppy kid like Josh and I had in common was that we were both imaginative and loved to talk ourselves up. I was the self-professed badass brawler and he was the innocent-looking parent-fooler, who looked like “such an angel,” but was “a devil inside.” My mother saw right through him from square one, but we had this way of talking ourselves up to each other so as to re-convince ourselves that we were bigger and badder than we really were.

We talked a big game, we did. Serious stuff came from our mouths, like how we were both “criminal minds” who “could kill someone easy and then never have nightmares about it.” We rehearsed how we would kill someone on one cloudy afternoon as it began to rain on our way to get the usual caffeine fix at the local Diamond Shamrock. Walking to get slurpies and Big Gulp sodas was our life since neither of us drove at that point.

We’d get home from school, throw our book bags onto my living room couch and hit the hot garage for a wrenching, two-hour workout. Then, we’d head out to the backyard and jump on the trampoline and sport some flips and martial arts maneuvers like we saw Bruce Lee do. When we were tired, we’d go inside and make six cups of buttery-as-fuck rice and scarf it down with some Tyson chicken patties cooked in the microwave. We’d eat a shit-load of food and still have energy again just an hour or two later. Truly, those were the good days. Really, it was our goal to be in the back section of the last issue of FLEX magazine for 1992, in the section for amateur weightlifters. Josh muscled up well. “Little tank” was what he came to be called.

And then there was Glenn. Glenn was a sharp guy, bone-thin, a kid who looked anemic, almost like a zombie. He had blonde-hair and a very long face. The kid couldn’t fight his way out of a wet paper sack, but could do academically anything he wanted and could work on anything with his hands. But Glenn “experimented” with trouble like a conflicted, turtle-neck-wearing euro-punk with his sexuality. He would make mischief, whether it be starting a small fire in a classroom or speeding in a parking lot and nearly hitting a pedestrian. Nothing big, just little bouts of random mischief.

Glenn was up for anything, like spending insane amounts of money “souping up” cars to go fast. His dad died and left him a freaky fortune, which he would always end up spending on hotrods to fly around and impress people on the streets and down at the track. It was just what he did.

…And I loved it. I loved to ride in some of the cars he drove, like his 1992 Eclipse GSX Turbo and his highly modded Firebird Formula 350 with 485 horsepower. The thing breathed like a dragon and ran a 12.5 second quarter mile! So fucking awesome to be in a car topping off at 185 in a 40 mph zone! Oh, the tickets we almost got!!! Oh, the wrecks we almost had!!!

So Glenn modifies these cars and then eventually blows them up making them too fast for their own good by racing them to death. He honestly did. Research says 95% of all tire-marks in San Antonio were made by Glenn Westenberg!

But one hot, breezy afternoon with an overcast sky, Glenn’s deviously fickle mind gets the idea to drive into a neighborhood where a bunch of lame old people live. They entered the community. It was “St. James Heights Retirement Community.” About a minute after they arrived, a gray-haired military man pulls up next to them in his boat-shaped caddy: “Keep it slow, guys. Speed limit is 20 miles an hour.” Then he drives away.

Two kids with baseball caps riding in a Firebird? They aren’t going to race now, are they? Naaaawww! Yep. That’s what they were there for, to show some old people how to live again! But Glenn’s mischievous thinking that day would start a fire that wasn’t to be easily put out. There is pride before a fall…

“The old guy left his golf clubs in the back of his car. They look like they’re worth a lot to me. Let’s snag ‘em.” they said. The old guy who told them to keep slow when they entered the neighborhood, it was his house and car. They thought about it only briefly, but they didn’t hem and haw long before deciding to grab this huge brown satchel of golf clubs and take off in that fast, sleek, Knight Rider-styled black sports car.

But the old guy wasn’t through emptying his car. There was still a bag of groceries inside, along with the clubs. The guy came back out to get them just as they took off with the clubs. Being spotted, the man called the police and reported that “fast, sleek, Knight Rider-styled black sports car” that happened to be damn easy to recognize. They barely made it past the drive-in at the front of the property. All that horsepower couldn’t outrun the radio. Lights and sirens greeted them to the side of a busy road with well-trimmed and cut grass, next to a pretty stone wall separating the community from busy West Avenue. The sign on the wall said something like, “No worries. You are home.”

It was true. Josh and Glenn were about to get a new home for the next 10 hours. Ordered out of the car at gunpoint, both kids emerged. Glenn was smart enough to calmly comply while showing no signs of anything but a relaxed disposition. He wasn’t crying. Poor Josh, he was already crying before he even got out of the car, crying like a fucking one-year-old come diaper-changing time, and the worst was yet to come.

The two are speechless…errrr…well, Josh wasn’t so speechless. After apologizing and crying, and apologizing and crying, and doing more of the same, he was booked and thrown in the pin. He may have been seated right next to Glenn, but those on the other side of him were the ones to be worried about. One man must have been 350 pounds, a biker dude, with a jeans jacket and tiny-framed glasses nearly ready to break while stretching across that extra-fat face. He reeked of alcohol and his knuckles were bloody.

Sitting across from them was a drunken Mexican man with messed-up hair and a cut under his left eye. He was making “pussy” gestures with his hands as he smiled and nodded his head, his eyes half-closed while his thumbs and index fingers did the talking to the boys for him.

Lining every wall were mean offenders, gang-bangers, lined up and sitting according to ethnicity. Their eyes were on the “fresh meat” of two young white kids who were just tossed in with them. Damn kids were so scared that they could only stare down at the floor lest they make eye contact with some bastard who decides to lead the raid to sodomize them.

You are probably wondering how I know all this not having been with them that day. I know because two days later, Glenn is back over at our house telling the whole story, loaded with all the juicy details. Glenn might as well have talked. Josh was in so much trouble that he couldn’t break free from home for a month. When he could, he still couldn’t talk about the experience, and would say so: “I’m not going to talk about it, guys! Shut up about it! It’s over!” He got real defensive every time it was brought up.

I should have put 2 and 2 together from the first year I knew him. Josh cried when he got chewed out by his dad for stealing a Low Water Crossing sign put out by the city during a flood. Then, he bailed on my brother in a brawl. He didn’t get his ear chewed off, and he wasn’t outnumbered. Nope. It only took one well-dressed black dude to say: “Get back, bitch!” Josh was never a “tough guy.” Like me, he didn’t have the heart for it. And it took ten hours in a gray and green cell with some real mean fellas for him to realize that he wasn’t one of them.

But that’s what childhood is about—finding who you are. You don’t automatically know. You shed a hundred skins until you get wise enough to see the handwriting on the wall and find the one that’s yours. Life makes you, or, you could say, just keeps putting you in situations until you realize who you are and what it is you are in a position to do. Life keeps throwing up patterns for you to see, as though to say what John Connor said to the T800: “Are we learning yet?” Sometimes it takes a lifetime to find the answers. Sometimes it takes just one plop down in the backseat of a squad car to see what it is you are not. And some never learn.

Back in 2005, at my brother’s wedding, I got a chance to chat with old Josh. He’s still a “little tank” and never stopped hitting the weights (or wearing a cap to cover the hair he's still insecure about), but it’s obvious that he now knows who he is. I brought up the incident at St. James Heights Retirement Community and his response was: “Oh yeah, that…like most kids, I thought I was a bad-ass until I knew better.” With beers in hand and more shots of Jack Daniels on the way, we both got very, very drunk that night and talked about old times.

(JH)

Funny Name, Serious Atheism

2009-12-13T07:37:00.004-06:00

Salvatore Pertutti is the creator of this video and Atheists-in-Action.com (click here for the English version of the site.) The Frenchman's talents include attacking religion by humor and satire (check out his YouTube profile page.) See if you can appreciate his uniquely militant atheistic stabs at religion.

(JH)

Jack Was Back!

2009-12-04T08:06:00.004-06:00

Working at a bus station will put you in touch with hosts of people, most of them you would rather not meet. You go on only hearing that such people exist, like the sickos you hear about on the news…like a Rastafarian man who walks up to a random woman he does not know and says: “What’s your favorite position, baby?” You hear that they exist, and then you see them for yourself, the hordes of mostly waste-of-skin losers who depend on public transportation. I lost track of the buses I saw coming into my station to drop off or pick up passengers and how many gang signs written in permanent marker covered the windows.

I’m so glad I don’t work there anymore. The pedophiles, the perverts, the crack heads, the pill-poppers who sell their prescription medications in the restroom for quick cash…it’s enough to make you want to escape to a different planet. I hate knowing that I breathe the same air as them. I was only there 5 months, but I saw enough to last me a lifetime. I feel like I understand now what every cop who ever “tuned up” a low-life piece of trash felt. I’m not a good enough man to be a cop. If God existed, I’d say God bless the brutal ones.

But there at the bus station one balmy, uneventful night, I got to meet an old friend. It was one of those situations where you see someone many years later, and despite their changes, you recognize them right off. He was always a short man, a facially stubby, bigheaded man, almost of a bone-thin frame. He was short even as a kid. Only now, he was covered in tattoos…of anchors, crosses, skulls and crossbones, thorns and roses, hearts, and fancifully decorated girls’ names that he dated. He had scars on his shoulders and forearms and even a few on his jaw. Some of those I don’t remember him having.

I saw him coming from a distance. I recognized him as soon as he was within 30 or so feet. I was talking to someone else when my eye caught him approaching. He looked at me and then looked away. He didn’t recognize me. I broke off the conversation I was having and approached him. “Jack Napier?” I said. He stopped in stride, shocked that I knew his name. He was actually nervous and hesitant to give an answer of any kind. I guess he had a lot of enemies. He finally said: “Uh…no.”

“It’s alright, man. I know who you are. I’m no one to be scared of. Don’t you remember me from Live Oak, our old stomping ground? I was best friends with your brothers, Jimmy and David.” He relaxed to the point of letting out a sigh. His bloodshot eyes began blinking again and he was comfortable. We started talking about old times, about the fun we had at the Live Oak swimming pool where we used to go, and about how his kid brothers and I combed the drainage ditches like a search team, looking for clues to a mystery.

Jack was a friend mostly indirectly, through his two brothers who were our age. We three were best buds from nine years old through at least fourteen. Jack was much older. He was in high school by the time I was in sixth grade. Jack and I only hung out at the pool, but he was a cool dude who taught us all sorts of new cuss words and funny stories about his “tripping” experiences using drugs. Jack was the initiator of all kinds of forbidden knowledge to us. No, he wasn’t a high-class guy, but an older delinquent kid? How many average dudes wouldn’t find that cool?

Jack and I stood there, nearly oblivious to everyone else around us. I asked what had happened to everyone and I was told; Jimmy and David got sent to boarding school and then later graduated high school. Jimmy was a computer techie now, and David – of all things – a Sheriff for Bexar County. Dad had died of stomach cancer in ‘99. And Jack himself—he got hooked on cocaine and got busted selling a kilo to an undercover cop. He did five years in the pen and had just gotten off of parole. Now I was caught up!

It was amazing hearing how little Jack remembered, like how we weren’t always friends. Jack was the bad-ass of his family, not only older than us kids, but tougher. Unlike so many wannabe tough guys, Jack was a real tough guy who knew his limits and wasn’t afraid to talk about them.

There was so much about him to respect, like how he would admit that he lost more than half of the fights he was in, and how he could show you scars on his body from the big, senseless brawls he got into (having a beer bottle broken atop his head, getting thrown face-first against plate glass windows, etc.). The additional scars he got were from jail. He was once attacked by five guys on the way out of his cell. He survived, “but it’s rough in the big house.” he said.

The mark of a real tough guy is that they aren’t afraid to admit that they aren’t the baddest of bad-asses. They are confident in their bad-ass-ery. They have no need to talk themselves up. And Jack never did talk himself up, but when he needed to, he opened up a can of "whoop-ass."

Little David and I once swapped video games. We had traded when I decided I didn’t want it anymore, so I started into David, telling him of the beating he was going to get if he didn’t reconsider our deal. Bad move. The next phone call I got was from Jack with some words for me…

“Hey, motherfucker. I fucking hear you’re fucking threatening my fucking little brother. You don’t fucking threaten my fucking brother or I’ll fuck your shit up. Hear that, motherfucker? I’ll come over there right now and kick your fucking ass. I don’t give a fuck.”

A long conversation ensued with Jack doing almost all of the talking, but I can remember saying this: “Uh, uh, uh, OK. I’ll back off. Can you and I get along?” To which he replied: “Sure we can, as long as you quit fucking with my fucking little brother, motherfucker!” That was enough for me. Jack didn’t have to actually be there to intimidate. This “motherfucker” was bad enough to send in his words as good credit on what he said he would do because what he said he would do…he would “fucking” do!

Peace was made, but I was still afraid of the guy. When you were around him, you laughed at his jokes because they were funny, but if they weren’t funny, you laughed anyway just to stay on his good side. He wasn’t that much of a bully, but I can remember walking to school and thinking: “I wonder if Jack’s around? Will he be in a good mood?”

And now, all these years later, I stood next to Jack, a man I’m now much, much, much bigger than and I recounted to him the story just mentioned. He had no recollection of it. He said: “I don’t remember that, but that’s something I would have done.” His poor brain, racked with years of bong resin and near-lethal doses of every other drug you could name, was shot. I was surprised he was as sharp as he was. As much trouble as he got into through the years and as much pain as he faced (most of it brought on by himself), he still submissively smiled as we talked about the “good old times.”

He went his way with a promise to see me again, and he did see me again. A week passed, and there he was, smelling of cigarettes and vodka, nearly stumbling as he walked in a heavy buzz. I will never forget that day. He had the saddest look in his eyes. He was suicidal or very close to it. I could feel it. His bloodshot eyes had such a broken look to them. I know that look. We talked some more and he shared with me how hard it was being a felon and trying to get work. He had a cheap apartment he was about to get kicked out of. He had only $58 to his name.

He started to cry right in front of me and pulled out a picture of a girl and said: “She’s all I have now.” I took the picture from him and looked at it. It was a picture of a large-proportioned, pretty Mexican girl sitting on her rocker. “She’s pretty,” I said, handing him back the picture. He quit crying and we talked about life and the meaning of it all. He’d heard the religious bullshit in prison with the evangelists that pushed it on him, but he never went for it. I shared with him that I was an atheist and how I walked away from the empty comforts of religion, and then we talked about how everything was bullshit.

“Life is only as valuable as we can make it,” I said. “When it ceases to have value, it’s not worth living any longer. Sounds like you‘ve got a lot to think about. Only you can decide if life is worth living, but if it is to be, you must make it so. The main thing is to think and try to find what makes you happy. And even then, it may never come. That's the truth, old friend.” The comforts of religion are delusional, total horseshit. There was nothing there for him. He wanted honesty instead, and I gave it to him.

His bus arrived, the brakes squealing as it stopped. He talked some more about his girl. His eyes seemed to light up at those moments in the conversation when he mentioned her name. “She’s waiting for me in South Dakota. That’s where she is. There’s work for me there. I’m leaving here. I’m starting over. I don’t know if I can make it, but I’m leaving.” I wished him well and told him to look me up online or call. He has done neither. If he waits to get his happiness in the grave, I hope that girl of his gives him some.

The story of Jack is the same core story as that of the 2004 film Crash. It was the best movie of that year. What it did was put every character in each others' situation. Criticize your fellow man in his predicament all you want, but it may soon be yours! Jack was once a guy I looked up to, a guy I thought was tough. Well, he was tough. Now, he was a sobbing man, a broken man with nothing but straw-grasping hope that tomorrow will be the beginning of a better day. And now, I was the “tough guy,” the guy who had him spooked, the guy who had the edge. Now, he listened as I lectured.

Jack saw so many changes as he was in and out of boarding schools, in and out of trouble with the law, lost his father, fell out of favor with his mother, got addicted to drugs, went to prison, was beaten, and then discarded as an unwanted reject of society with a lingering alcohol problem that he’d tried to beat but couldn’t. I look at Jack and I look at myself. My life is changing too. Where will I be 20 years from now?

Will I even be in one piece? Will I be under the ground? Maybe some medical professional will be examining my remains in front of a large university medical student audience. Maybe I’ll be fish food. Maybe I’ll be a bum, sleeping on the streets, begging for charity. Maybe I’ll be crying in an old friend’s arms at some bus station, hoping for something better on the horizon. I’d like to think I will have jumped off a building by then. I won't even bother to foresee the good things. Nobody fucking knows. Fuck this life and what it does to people.

(JH)

An Apology to a Guy at a Jack in the Box

2009-11-10T20:54:00.004-06:00

There are times when an apology is just right and there are times when an apology is just not enough. Sometimes it’s hard to know whether one is called for or not. Maybe one won’t be enough, or maybe one will turn out to be unnecessary. Maybe it wasn’t such a big deal to begin with. But usually, it’s the feeling of not at least trying to right a wrong that plagues us. We want to at least say that we tried.

I have something I want to apologize for. While it’s not serious, it has nonetheless been on my mind for some time, so here’s the story…

I was traveling late one night in mid-2008 when I got a case of “the runs” pretty badly. I had to make do with the nearest restaurant bathroom I could find. You can never get that Pepto-Bismol down quite fast enough! I remember kicking my feet against the floorboard, anxiously breathing, hoping, waiting, nearly praying to make it to my relief soon.

Beads of sweat were starting to form on my head. I looked over to the passenger seat and the back seat for something to “shield” the seat from a possible soon-to-be explosive rear-end calamity of the excremental kind. I ended up grabbing a sun reflector and got ready…just in case.

After several more minutes of driving, I knew there was no more hunting for ideal exits. It was time! I exited the freeway and drove into a strip mall, running on “blind faith” that an option would present itself. It was nearly midnight and everything was closed. The businesses in this shopping center were elegant ladies’ shoes outlets and such. I almost missed it, but finally spotted a driveway around back leading to a Jack in the Box that was about to close in 20 minutes.

Still breathing hard, panting, even singing to myself to hold the ass-full of human compost that was about to break forth from its own dam, I threw the seatbelt off and ran inside. No other customers were inside but me. Three young men were working behind the counter. One mopped, one was handling a drive-thru order, and the other was doing something at the cash register. I don’t know how I remember all that as frantically stressed out as I was, but I did. I even remember nodding at the guy on my big man’s sprint charging towards the bathroom.

I had already made it a point that if someone was in the men’s room, I had no problems using the women’s. This was an EMERGENCY! Luckily, no one was in there. I knocked the door open and then slammed it shut, being careful to remember to lock it with that cheap-ass little sliding latch. I ripped my own clothes off like a violent rapist, jumping up and down to hold my ass-cheeks together, believing at this point that I wasn’t going to make it.

This was so bad! I didn’t even have time to care about the dirty, filthy, partially burnt and chipped toilet seat that clearly had fresh fecal matter and urine on it. I never sit on public toilet seats unless I have my antibacterial cleaner with me, and so you realize that in this situation, that option was non-existent. So what was I to do?

I did what I always do, but am not very good at doing—I “cannoned” up and squatted down, arching my back to make sure that the junk I was about to jettison didn’t get on me. I didn’t so much as get halfway down when: POWWWWWWWWW!

…

The dam burst forth. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.

…

The relief was better than great, but the discomfort of remaining in a terrible squatting position and having to spin an almost spent roll of toilet paper trapped inside those troublesome anti-vandalism devices was a new source of discomfort. There was not much toilet paper left, so I finished the nasty job with the lever-operated paper towel dispenser.

Cleaning up and checking to make sure that my hands were thoroughly washed and that I was “zipped up” was easy enough. It was when I turned around to see the mess…that was when it hit me: I MISSED THE BOWL COMPLETELY!

My undesirable ass-juice that night smelled bad enough to induce a coughing, nauseating death, and it was power-sprayed onto two walls that intersected behind me. Ay-fucking-Carumba! Sheets of shit water in a spotty splatter were everywhere. Good thing only gang graffiti and the names and phone numbers of sexual malcontents written in permanent marker was on those walls. One spot was nearly five feet high. Holy shit, I’m a five-foot shitter! There’s got to be some reward for that!

The golden-brown diarrhea that looked only a little lighter than dirty motor oil touched barely a spot on the toilet seat, but covered completely the pipes and flush handle. It looked like Kibbles 'n Bits with the chunks. It was like the flush handle was wearing a hat that day, a brown hat of undigested bits of a chopped beef sandwich. There was so much of it following the pull of gravity that it was heading towards the drain in the room’s center.

This was worse than bad! There was so much of it! This place saved me from “going” in the weeds or worse, and this is how I repay them? I couldn’t just leave. I couldn’t just clean it up either because there appeared to be no more toilet paper or paper towels. I used what few remained in cleaning me up. It was futile to try anymore. It would take an entire stack of throwaway newspapers to do this fucking job! That left me with just one option, a rather shameful option.

I walked out of the restroom and up to that guy, that guy who was still working at the front cash register. “Uh, hey uh, buddy…your sign in the restroom says to report any unsanitary conditions to management. I’m doing that now. Somebody sure did a number on you!” The man looked perplexed for a minute, and then replied: “That’s odd because nobody’s been in here for 20 minutes before you.” The guy may have been just smart enough to suspect something was up. I said, “Anyways, just passing that along. Have a good one!” Then I confidently walked out, cringing under my breath.

The guy was sharp, but he appeared to be tired and wanted to go home. You can just see it in a man’s eye. Walking out, I could see out of the corner of my eye that the fellow was turning around slowly, dreading going in there to see the biohazard mess. I think he suspected it was me, but he was still stuck with cleaning it up. This made me feel extra bad.

Part of what made me feel worse was that I realized I didn’t bother to check the other stall for some paper to clean. It wouldn't really have worked too well, but yeah, I wanted to take the easy way out. I can remember thinking: “Well, sorry, but you do work here.” That’s why I feel the need to apologize now.

I did what I did and then quickly drove off into the night like a thief…like a shameless, shitting, Imodium AD-needing thief. Now I want to apologize to that guy and to anyone else who had to deal with my...shit. I’m sure just seeing it caused him to curse the day he was born.

Sorry! I really am!

(JH)

God’s Entrapment and James’ Idiocy

2009-11-07T19:02:00.004-06:00

It's one of the worst blunders in the scriptures, and it comes from James, writer of the New Testament. He says: “Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man.” (James 1:13)

Studying the New Testament without the blinders of Christian dogma on reveals that James – like that sadly ignorant writer of the gospel of Matthew – had no idea of the things he was saying. James says that God doesn’t tempt men to do evil. God doesn’t want to see us fall. He’s not going to do anything about it if we do fall, but he wants us to prosper, and he’s not going to tempt us to do “evil.”

The abovementioned Bible quote would be nothing but another pious passage, were it not for the fact that James is wrong and that his statement creates a contradiction with the Old Testament. God does for sure try (test, tempt, all good words) men.

Genesis has God tempting a man, his servant Abraham: “And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am.” (Genesis 22:1)

You remember what happens with the story. God says “Go offer your son Isaac as a burnt offering to me.” Abraham is about to comply when God essentially jumps in and says: “Whoa, buddy! I’m just pulling your leg! If you kill the chosen seed I gave you, there won’t be a way to have all the seed I promised you, but thanks anyway for not thinking and just obeying me without question!”

Abraham was praised for being willing to obey God, but what if he hadn’t gone about to obey God? What if he had disobeyed God? Would that not have been a sin? Of course, it would have. But God was tempting Abraham. He was trying him with a test of faith, a test that could have been to his detriment.

God shouldn’t have needed to test his faith since God knows everything. He already knew when the last time his faithful servant went solo on himself in a tent in Ur of the Chaldees when the wife was on the rag, but God tests him anyway. If God wants to play the game, you’ve got to play it.

So had those Israelites who were commanded to exterminate non-Jews found en route to the promised land been conscientious objectors who refused to “save alive nothing that breatheth” (Deuteronomy 20:16) as commanded, they would have been violators of God’s law. You’ve got to do what God says, no matter what. Those who school girlishly boast “I have a foundation for my morality” should remember that.

A bartender who serves alcohol to a person who is intoxicated can face charges by the deceased’s family if the intoxicated individual leaves the establishment and gets in a car wreck and is killed. It’s called accountability, and it must apply to God too. What we read of God's character should show accountability problems—maybe not for Christians, but for all who think.

God may not want you to fall to sin, but that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that God causes men to fall, despite what James says. Read Deuteronomy...

“If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, And the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them; Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for the LORD your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.” (Deuteronomy 13:1-3)

When a false prophet comes and tries to deceive the faithful into idolatrous apostasy, it is to be considered the work of God in that God is testing you to see how loyal to him you are! The text says not to pity the idolater, but to kill him. He is an abomination. Have no part with him. Don’t be led astray by him, no matter how “tempting” he/God is. Get all the people together in ending his life. That is the word of Heaven.

Just think, an eloquent pagan who can do convincing magic tricks, some worshipper of snakes from a temple where the blood of babes is scribbled onto parchment, who uses smooth words to move Israelite households into rebellion against the followers of Moses might have been doing the will of God!

So much for “God doesn’t tempt you with evil.” It’s clearly not true. God will test your faithfulness using an evil false prophet, one so evil that God himself says they should die! How much more “tempting with evil” can God get? God wants you to be faithful, but if you fall prey to wickedness, God is still pure and you are still unjust and dirty. God bears no blame.

Like the words of today’s apologists, James’ words have no real meaning. If he had great knowledge of the Old Testament, he wouldn’t have said: “When you are tempted, God doesn’t do it. God doesn’t tempt with evil.” What he’s trying to say is, “Don’t blame God for your temptations. It’s always you who screws up and gives into them.” But it makes no sense to say that God doesn’t tempt with evil because James, even with prophetic endowment, could not know the limits of God’s involvement in testing every human being.

James’ words are on level with modern statements from evangelistic eggheads, like “God is sinless.” What does that even mean? If God creates all standards of righteousness, then to say that he could ever be sinful is, correspondingly, nonsense. “God had to come in the form of a perfect man to show us how it’s done.” is another clueless statement made by believers. God no more needs to become human than he does have a son. Only a stupid, pseudo-intellectualized, half-pagan, descendant of a lobster-hater would contend otherwise.

(JH)

The Best Seat in the House?

2009-10-26T13:38:00.004-06:00

I want to introduce you to my friend Terri. She is a person of simplicity, and yet her depth of character has you looking down and not seeing bottom. Being a complicated person is not what I am talking about. Any chick – any dude, for that matter – can be complicated, conflicted, unpredictable, with “issues.” That’s not what I’m talking about at all. I’m talking about a person who is enough of an individual to have a personality you can nail down. You can predict them, and yet they can teach and surprise you in unforeseen ways. Such a friend is Terri.

Terri is about my age. She doesn't have a lot of money. She doesn't own a car. She lives in a small apartment in an obscure city in the mid-west. By society's standards, she is nothing. By my standards, she is nothing if not an amazing person. She has a big brain and she never hems herself in by having less than an open mind. She’s made her share of mistakes, but the world would be a better place with more people who had her robust intellect.

I met her last year in that deep sea of online fishers called the internet. We share no romantic chemistry. She is just a friend, albeit one of my true friends. One is doing well to have five good friends in life. She is one of those. We've never met in person. I’ve seen her, but she's never seen me. That's because Terri is blind. She was blind from birth. Her eyes never formed correctly in the womb. She was born without retinas and other essential components that make eyes work.

Never having known the ability to see is, to me, a huge thing to take in. That means she has never seen a sunset or the stars or a peculiar cloud formation. The things the bulk of us take for granted, the things we have forgotten to be amazed by, are the things she will never get to experience.

The conversations Terri and I have can be interesting, but very often, would be boring to the point of tears for anyone to listen to. We have covered nearly every subject you can name. No topic is too personal or private. We can fill up four hours of talk until we drop into an unintended slumber. While much of what we talk about wouldn’t interest anyone, some of it would. Take, for instance, my trying to explain to Terri what it is like to see.

I have tried to describe to Terri colors and shapes and what things “look like.” I have tried and tried and failed every single time. Only recently have I admitted that describing to a person who has never had sight details of what it means to “see” is an absolute impossibility. No, Terri doesn’t “see black” like people always ask. “Seeing” is a meaningless term to her.

It's funny…really it is. For all of her intellectual fortitude (she has a registered I.Q. of 143 as opposed to my 134), Terri will never understand how people see through glass. It really is a big mystery to her. And she doesn’t understand when I say that things looked at up close appear smaller as distance increases. She will never understand it.

Terri may not be able to see, but she takes in the information of what is around her that she needs. She shared with me a story about how she first began to be aware of her ability to sense what is around her. She was just eight years old and walking around the block with her father the way they always would. Terri would walk next to dad and hold his hand. On one occasion, they walked some ways and then Terri felt the need to walk in front of her father. “There is something here,” Terri said. Her father said: “Yes, there sure is.” “What is it?” Terri said. “A mailbox.” her father replied. But that mailbox was probably 25 feet away, and yet she knew she was going to need to move to dodge it.

One of the things people say about being blind is that your other senses are raised to mega-high levels, and there is a little truth to that. But it's not so much true as is the fact that you learn to rely on your other senses more. And there is one particular sense that develops that is the biggest help. It is sonar. Just like bats, blind people acquire the ability to use a very low-level sonar, which is how they can tell when they are next to a wall or piece of furniture or out in an open space. To them, the information translates from subtle sounds as a slight airy feeling on the face or cheeks, which gives an idea of distances and surroundings.

Terri types through a program called JAWS. It enables her to hear messages that the rest of us see on any computer screen. I have listened to this electronic speaking voice, which she has set to speak at the fastest possible level. I can't make out a single word, and here she is reading entire novels in the space of four to six hours! That girl’s got an amazing auditory processor!

Maybe Terri is a sharp cat, but sight is still better, yes? I asked her one day: “If you could have sight right now, would you not take it?” I almost felt bad about asking since the answer is so “obvious,” right? “Oh no!” she said, so emphatically with that windy-sounding voice of hers. I couldn't believe it, and in the course of our discussing the matter, she nailed me to the wall. She pointed out that sight would change her world forever, and there could be no going back. We argued, but she ended up convincing me.

Terri’s taking on the ability to see visible light was analogous to Joe Holman taking on the ability to see in infrared or in x-ray vision or perhaps the ability to see germs and things on the microscopic level. Nature dictates that abilities connected to the senses cannot be turned off and on at will. If you had super hearing, you would have to live out in a field somewhere because every TV and radio playing in a city or apartment building would drive you insane in a week’s time! My having the ability to see in x-ray vision, for instance, would mean that I could never turn that off. Imagine seeing skeletons instead of people’s faces! Muhahahaha!

That means my world would never look the same again, and nothing in the world would look the same—not a pair of naked breasts or the most benign patch of skin on an elbow. Nothing would be the same. It would be a different world…

So yes, Joe, it would be very nice to be able to drive myself to get groceries and shop, but this is my life. I don't want to know any differently. This is how it has always been for me.

What faulty assumption did I make? It was my own (human) arrogance that set me up for the fall. I simply assumed that the way I perceive life was the best way to perceive it. I assumed that because I know the beauty of a sunset that I somehow got the best seat in the house for observing the universe. This brings us to a powerful observation: if we had evolved to see things in infrared light or if we had developed x-ray vision, we would be parading around about how wonderful our observations are just as when we see them in the visible spectrum and marvel at “the glories of nature.”

This is the arrogance of consciousness. We and any other life-forms out there that can think would, of necessity, fall prey to this same ignorance: “You should see what I see! I got it good! This is the way it should be!”

I can make fun of it, but it sounds so convincing to remind myself of what I love about perceiving life. Do you want to experience life as a dog that sees everything in the color of a late summer evening or as a spider that cannot take in the whole sky and views things in ultraviolet light? I‘d say no, and I suspect, if you could ask the spider, the thing would not be looking forward to viewing things like I do.

We arrogant humans can go to bats or people in Terri’s position and say, “You will never know the beauty of a sunset!” Or, we could go to a deaf person and sign to them: “If only you could hear Bach and the sounds of a symphony!” But we might just as well run to a cockroach and say: “You are so damn disgusting and small and are missing out on what it means to be at the top of the food chain! Hah!” A smart cockroach would reply: “And you don’t know what it’s like to be able to survive a nuclear blast, so fuck off!”

Here is this blind woman, this friend of mine, a woman who has lived an immensely difficult life in so many ways. She was supposed to die at birth, but medical technology kept her alive. She had every reason to be dissatisfied with her life, to hate her existence and to finish herself off by doing something like mixing a bucket of ammonia and bleach.

But Terri doesn’t hate life. She loves it. She wants to grow old and die of old age with someone special. She has not a religious bone in her body, but she has hope. She is a survivor who awakes to each new day and finds meaning and purpose. That almost makes me angry. How envious I am!

Here I am, with all the faculties, and I’m half suicidal. I wanted her to see things my way. At first, I felt sorry for her. I kept wanting her to do what I would do and give up. But she didn’t. “If only you could see you as I see you!” I kept thinking. Then I got to know her, and I quit saying that. It’s in her nature to find the good in things. I don’t feel sorry for her anymore. I almost want to feel sorry for myself. If I lost sight, I wouldn’t be that strong.

I have known sight. To know sight and to lose it is different than never knowing it to begin with. Take the most beautiful pair of twins in the world who are the pride and joy of their father and mother and cut them up with a filet knife. Many parents could right nearly die from the grief. But go back in time and get rid of the children by not allowing them to be conceived and those same parents will never shed a tear for them.

It’s universal arrogance. We think we have the best seat in the house to live lives envied by all. Even the Bible says we are the highest creation. Is this a religious thing? Isn’t it faith that helps us overcome the trials and tribulations of life? Isn’t it getting on our knees and having a little talk with Jesus that makes things right? Not at all.

And here you were thinking I was going to tell you how evil the world is and how a good God couldn’t have created it. Or maybe you thought I was going to blame the arrogance of humanity on Christianity. You got me all wrong. I’m not blaming the Christian God. No deity did anything…as usual.

When we pull through tragedy and pain, we do so of our own strength. Sometimes that strength is not enough, in which case, we don’t make it. But other times, it is enough, and when we pull through, we assign reasons for it. Sometimes “finding Christ” is one of those reasons. That’s when things get dishonest.

Your genes tell you to survive, pal. All other voices are superfluous. You think by following the course of nature and then boasting about how triumphant God has made you gives brownie points? Might as well bestow sainthood on every Border Collie for having the “strength” to get his freak on with a neighborhood bitch in heat!

Sorry. Ole’ Jeebuz didn’t do a flippin’ thing, just as he never does. We don’t have the best seat in the house. Our seats are just warm and we prefer not to move.

(JH)

A Smoky Hotel Hell

2009-10-14T05:42:00.006-05:00

Two weeks ago was a turning point for me, as it was the end of a living situation nightmare that made the whole month of September an exceedingly miserable time.

As I write, I'm sitting in a pearl white recliner at home in San Antonio, that place that has the sometimes taken-for-granted benefit of a city-wide smoking ban in all businesses, something the Dallas/Ft. Worth area needs to get and enforce. I'm presently sucking down a 44 oz sweet tea and getting caught up on some writing as the fourth heap of clothes dries.

Why all these clothes? Because I had to wash every garment and blanket I own to get the smoke smell out that was put there by gaunt, leather-faced, saggy-forearmed, red-nosed, denture-wearing, baggy-eyed, dirty, unkempt, white-trash pieces of shit who made it a practice to smoke INSIDE their apartments instead of stepping outside, like a normal person getting their tobacco fix.

I never found out who they are, but I couldn't have done anything about it if I had. The place where I lived allowed smoking in the building, and that made my already bleak existence an even more enraged and bitter one...until two weeks ago when I got my ass out of Dodge!

I can't reproduce it here as it is an Associated Content Exclusive. Read the full story HERE.

P.S. If you smoke in your apartment, I'm telling you to go fuck yourself for being inconsiderate of every non-smoker in your building who is exposed to the offensive 4,000+ chemicals that make smoking bans a needful thing to enforce.

Fuck you for every couch you've ever ruined and every wall that had to be repainted on account of your nasty, stinking, nicotine-craving ass! Take your shit outside! Get it away from us!

(JH)

What Makes a Politician

2009-10-14T03:56:00.006-05:00

It hasn’t been long since May of ‘09 when President Obama addressed the mothers of our nation with his message: “Moms, go back to school.”

As with all things Obama, the mainline media insures that nothing he does goes unnoticed. He’s the greatest thing since sliced bread, or even the Serrano pepper, so says much of America and nearly all of Europe. And now, the President of the free world gets the Nobel Peace Prize, even though he hasn’t done a flipping thing to deserve it.

There he was, the President of America, competing with humanitarian contenders for the prize, like Dr. Sima Simar, an Afghan female physician who dared to speak out for the rights of women in opposition to that diabolical digression known as Sharia Law, but did she win? Obama won, and for no real reason. Anti-war Obama says he is humbled to get it, but the real “humble” thing to do would have been to not accept it, at least not at this point in his service to his country.

But “anything’s better than the last guy!” Isn’t that the reason Obama has been so welcomed and cherished as the new Commander-in-Chief? Anyone better than Bush, right? And let’s not forget, Obama’s a black man! A black man is now president of what the Obamas and his supporters think is still a racist and bigoted nation (nevermind Obama's own bigotry). But now that Obama is in office, the race-hustling complainers can stop complaining because it appears that America’s racism has just reached a low enough level to allow a black man to win the presidency by a landslide.

This is good news. Not only is a black man now president, but this means bullhorn-wielding race-hustlers, like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the Jeremiah Wrights of this world – some of whom think it is racist to use the astronomy term “black hole” – can shut the fuck up or be hung by their dingle-berries.

Obama’s message to moms is of course a good one. No one but a Bible-thumping backwoods-er can oppose education. There can’t be too much of that. But Obama’s message to moms is an admission of why politicians have such an uphill battle in winning over those of us who stand firmly planted as independents rather than Republicans or Democrats. Who is Obama’s message primarily aimed at? Black women who raise five misbehaved kids in the inner cities and work three jobs to pay the rent at a run-down, graffiti-walled apartment complex on the wrong side of town. What has he to tell the rest of us? I'm going to take your hard-earned money and put it toward the medical care of tuberculosis-carrying illegals who drive without auto insurance (though not in so many words, that is what Obama says).

Barack and Michelle Obama always have something bad to say about America. America has been racist until March of 2009, and America is cruel to minorities and has become a nation of barbarians. We have wanted to torture everyone for so long that we need to free the terrorists at GITMO and close the place to get some respect back in the world. Just listen to their speeches. America sucks, and the Obamas are its only hope, they think.

But not all of us feel that way. America, though grievously flawed, is the best the world has to offer as of right now. When Obama speaks, he’s speaking to those who want their mortgages paid and gas put in their cars. He’s speaking to those who receive with glee coaching on how to break back into the houses they had repossessed. That’s the Obama crowd—“Give me, give me, give me! What can you do for ME, Mr. President!”

So Obama speaks to reach mothers, mothers with no education and lots of kids. In many cases, the kids never had fathers because the mothers never bothered to get the guy’s name. This didn’t stop them from bringing kids into the world whose mouths they couldn’t feed. They can’t buy houses. They don’t pay federal income tax. They don’t make enough. But they have babies, some of them crack babies. In the ministry, I met the caretaker of a crack baby and got to play with this poor kid who couldn’t stand up properly at three years old because of what his mother did. Don’t tell me not to hate!

President Bush has been listed as the worst president ever, even over William Henry Harrison, who died after only a month in office, having done nothing. Bush wasn’t the worst president ever. He was the worst communicator of any president. Obama, by contrast, (we can't hold it against him that he looks like Stewart Little) is eloquent and articulate and persuasive.

But a politician is still a politician. They are lying, deplorable jackasses who speak only to those who lobbied to get them in power, and they make good on less than half of the promises they made to those they owe everything to. They have an agenda, but never can it be in everyone’s best interest. That is why nothing replaces a good old-fashioned revolution.

(JH)

The Bottom of the Food Chain (Part Five of Five)

2009-10-06T20:47:00.004-05:00

We’ve talked about four losers from my life so far. But of course, there are others. What we haven’t done is talk about loser #5, the writer of the piece you are now reading.

Odds are, the four people I have criticized before the entire online world you don’t know. The accounts I gave are completely true down to every recollect-able detail with the exception of a portion of each name. They’ve been changed ever so slightly—they may not be innocent of the charges of loserdom leveled against them, but I want to protect their identities anyway.

Based on everything said so far, I’m a pretty big loser. Why? Because I befriended them, the losers, life’s miserable, embarrassing failures. I reached out to them, the idiots, for no other reason than that I wanted to. I had things in common with them. I benefited (in some small way) from knowing them. If nothing else, they taught me about life.

I look back and remember a kid who was deemed quite amazing, a kid of whom it was said that he could talk at 11 months. He was so smart, had the planets memorized, had the alphabet memorized, but he also stood at the living room window and screamed if the buses didn’t go by in the exact order that he expected them to. Some doctors called it savant autism while others disagreed.

I remember a kid who was so creative that while his friends were pretending to be Superman and Spiderman, he was pretending to be an air conditioner with the sky-touching ambitions of sitting outside all day and all night on a concrete slab and making noise.

I remember a kid who so, so, soooooo couldn’t fit in with his peers. He got in fights at school, made trouble for his teachers, got caught and scalded for trying to rip off a bag of sweets from Albertson’s grocery store once, and he did a hundred other things. But as much trouble as he was for everyone around him since his daycare days, he was more trouble to himself.

He got home from school and jumped on the trampoline for over an hour to let off steam. The kid held that cassette player in his hand. The tapes he would listen to stuck out from his pockets, as he listened to music while leaping and occasionally stopping to stare up at the stars, wishing so badly – sometimes crying and wishing – that he could jump high enough to find an alien race that would have more in common with him and adopt him. Or, maybe they could come down and get me.

Everyone keeps telling me about how amazing and intelligent and eloquent I supposedly am. I get emails far and wide praising me for my objectivism and astute presence of mind in being able to reject Christianity and change from the ground up my belief system. I get very few negative emails, a few negative blog posts, but no threats.

But then, my defection from Christianity can be looked at another way—I went from a minister to an atheist! That’s a pretty far fall to some. I once preached against porn, but that was followed by a time when I worked security, encouraging and protecting the free traffic of the very smut I preached against! The irony…if it wasn’t so funny, it would hurt like a sprained ankle.

My fellow writers and critics, as well as some aspiring writers, tell me I have a gift, that they wish they could write like me. Those where I worked always told me they wished they could debate like I can. A number are asking for tips and thoughts on this and that.

What do I have to tell them? That I’m a loser? No. Such information does no one else any good. And it doesn’t matter to me if you believe it or not. To me, I’m just a much bigger version of that scared boy who stepped onto bus 214 every day of the week through junior high school back when news about the space shuttle Challenger blowing up was still news in 1986.

I’ve learned a few things since then. I’ve laughed a little and cried a lot. Now, all I can do is laugh, but it’s a Joker’s sort of laugh—I laugh because there is no point to it all, and I’m too sore to keep crying. That’s why I laugh. It just hurts too much.

I try to pass these things on when I can. With regard to Christianity, what I thought was truth turned out not to be, and learning that tore me up inside. I’ve lost 4 cats and 8 dogs. That tore me up some more. Most of my humanity died the day my last dog died. It was November 20th, 2004. I remember dates so well. Damn my memory.

I love eating Reese’s Pieces out of a plastic cup with a plastic fork so that I don’t have to touch my mouth with my fingers. I cherish the roughest generic brand toilet paper in any store. I love piddling with plastic wrappers from mint candies when I can’t get my thoughts together to write anything. I love pens with fat rubbery handles, and I love pecking on new keyboards until the crispness of the key surface is shiny and rubbed off.

Take caution in admiring me. Admire only the writing and be wary of my wisdom. I may not speak for you. I may speak against you. These are the words of a bent man. Just listen and sift through what you can. Throw the rest (or all of it) out. I know I like unique things, and I like unique people. The weirdos of my past weren’t much, probably never became much either. I hope I am wrong, but if not, it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters in this life except how I decide to make my life count…or not count.

I am a hedonist. I live doing what makes me happy (we all do, ultimately, but more so those of us who answer to no higher power). I know I am happiest with things and people who aren’t normal. The thing that attracted me to the losers was the fact that they weren’t normal. Though I am speaking out of jealousy, I do adopt the slogan: “Normal isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

Society may have no place for them. I may find them intolerable to hang out with, but give me the losers anyway. They may be the bottom of the food chain, but they’re towards the top on my list. Give me the rejects, the failures, the sickos, the addicts, those who make everyone else say: “God damn! Why can’t you get your act together!?”

The rage, it is what consumes me, nothing more sophisticated than that billion-year-old vice that never goes away. Fuck normal. The universe is too big for any intentional uniformity. The unintentional deadness is enough. Humans are supposed to be the exceptions to the deadness, the lifeless patches of cold and hot matter that cover everything like dust on the shelves of a vacant building.

Life pulled a fast one on everyone when it brought us into existence. Everyone stands and points and says, “Be like us!” and I take such great pleasure in yelling back: “No!”

“Now why is that what I see? Don't bother trusting. Don't bother waiting. Don't bother changing things that won't give into changing. Just let me go away.”

-Blue October

(JH)

The Bottom of the Food Chain (Part Four of Five)

2009-09-28T05:03:00.007-05:00

Back during senior year of high school, I made contact with a guy by the name of Joe Haynes. Our circumstances in meeting were altogether non-spectacular. We were just waiting for our respective buses when I glanced over and made a remark about how he looked like an old friend from Judson high school where I used to go.

Joe was a big guy, very stocky, with thick glasses and a bushy head of greasy hair. He wore this oil-stained army-green trench coat and carried himself like an outcast, always with a bright blue book bag thrown over his right shoulder. That scored points with me. He didn’t really look like my old friend from Judson. I just said that because he looked cool and I thought I could use another friend.

So, we start chatting and automatically it becomes clear as day that this is my kind of guy. A guy who boasts about having paranoid schizophrenia and bi-polar/multi-personality disorder…alright! You don’t get any cooler than that! Haynes was one of these people who loved to talk about the medical conditions he had (or wished he had).

In some respects, he’d fit right into society today. I’m convinced of that. Our culture is pressed-down-and-running-over with medical terminology alarmists who think that an applied term for a medical condition always has to mean something. Take, for instance, that overused label OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) or that now tiresome term ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).

Today, everybody and their goddamn Dutch uncle has these disorders. You can’t even have a fucking conversation with someone without them asking: “Are you OCD? I am.” Like that fucking means something. A body of experts develop a psychological label and it’s like it’s a set-in-stone thing, like once a doctor pronounces that you “have” it, now it’s official.

Long before these terms were around, the described conditions existed. They’ve just been made worse by psychologist-worshipping dusches who think that what is referred to is a rooted and grounded fact. A thing only becomes “a condition” when it is given special status as one. We have the medical alarmist community of cunt-munchers to thank for that.

Learning disabilities, those are another example. If the common sense people had their way, a learning disability would mean that you’re not good at something when compared to someone else who is better. Why can’t it be that simple? We’re good and bad at lots of things. A lot of us aren’t good at math or English or history. Should we devise labels that identify some neonatal deficiency that resulted in a deformation of pathways within the brain to explain why we suck at calculus? Fuck that. Unless you learn so very poorly that you require an assisted living program, then let’s just be intelligent and say that that’s the way your brain operates. Everybody’s brain processes information differently.

Now I’m not saying that terms or medically diagnosed conditions like mental retardation or autism or bipolar disorder have no meaning. I’m saying that the more difficult a time a person has functioning in society, the more worthy of a label to wear they are. I believe that. The problem is, we can’t leave well enough the fuck alone. America has a real long hike ahead of her before she’ll finally clear the woods of alarmist territory.

Swine flu? Bird flu? Give me a mother-fucking break! It’s just fucking flu, not a new condition by any stretch. They used to encourage you to come to school when you were sick. I knew parents and teachers who bragged to me that their kids never missed a day. Not anymore. Nowadays, they encourage you to stay home when you have the flu so that your sick ass won’t infect anyone else (that’s the smart position, of course).

If only we could gather up every medical term junkie, combine them with every hypochondriac, douse them with turpentine and light them on fire, the world would be only half of its current population. I will go to my grave believing that.

Oh, and there’s one more class that needs to be burned alive, and that is the class of fuckers who harped on and on and on and onnnnnn about Elian Gonzalez when he was in the news. Remember that shit? I hope those blabbermouths lose limbs to gangreen, those alarmist fucks who wouldn‘t shut up about that.

So, to get back on topic, Joe Haynes was an alarmist. I liked alarmists. Alarmism makes you feel useful, gives you something to talk about, something to focus on. Unlike my other loser friends, Joe was well-behaved. He never got into trouble at school. He had an almost normal home life (I say almost normal because his mom wore nothing but a slip in front of the kids that you could see right through). Haynes also had the distinction of being my most talkative friend who only began running his mouth when he was around his trusted friends. I soon got into that inner-circle.

Pretty soon, Haynes and I were loading up my truck with Styrofoam weapons and meeting to play a game called Amtgard. It was an organization of losers from all walks of life who come together to fight with padded medieval weapons. If you want to get a better idea of what this was like, watch the movie Role Models and you‘ll see or click here. We met in a public park about 20 minutes from my house. It was so beautiful. But if they could talk, those majestic 300-foot tall trees would have knelt down and whispered: “losers!”

The admiral goober status attained by this crowd is something that words have a hard time describing. How do you get to be this fucking dweeb-ish? And this was (and is) a nationwide organization. About 60 people participated at the meetings I was at, from the very young, to the middle-aged, and a few upper-50-year-olds.

One young kid who couldn’t have been older than 15 was arguing with some older guys about stats and game rules. A few dozen yards away, a 30-something dude with a big gut and a mustache, who - aside from the mustache - still looked like he hadn’t gone through puberty yet, was trying to sell these worthless “weapons.” Traveling through the air were countless references to “Lord Dirka,” “Mr. Bloodthirsty,” and “Death Master Kaivoe.” The guy with the mustache drove a big yellow early-1980s Ford LTD and made weapons of PVC pipe for everyone who would buy them for around $10 to $25 a piece. I was so moved when he shared with me his dream of making a living building Amptgard weapons full-time. That way, he could quit his job as a forklift driver at an ice making company. Ah, land of opportunity!

It was a “had to be there” event. There’s something awfully funny about seeing a 36-year-old man with cut-off-at-the-knee blue jeans, a nearly full red beard, and a ponytail with a taped-up padded long sword and a duck-taped shield diving forward to deliver “a kill blow,” as he put it…

“No fair! I got you! [arguing in a huddle]…maybe not a kill-shot, but
you can’t use that leg. You lost it in battle!”

What I soon lost in battle was interest! The game wasn’t for me. Me, I would rather have been home playing Chess with Old Man Whitecotton or sculpting or reading one of my Time Life series books on the Lost City of Atlantis or the mystic powers of the Egyptian pyramids. I didn’t want to do Amptgard anymore. Haynes was disappointed to hear that, and it left us with not much in common. After each game, I was ready to head home and work out in that stinky hot garage of our new house that I called a weight room. Amptgard meant nothing to me, and oddly enough, Dungeons and Dragons (a dorky thing I loved) meant nothing to him.

We still hung out, but not as much. When we did, we ended up talking about the only thing my ridiculous ass knew about that he cared to hear about -- Star Trek and people whose asses I wanted to kick at school. Big mistake on my part--never talk about fighting with Joe Haynes! It was like squeezing toothpaste out of the tube--you can’t get it back in again. Haynes had a lot to say about fighting, but it wasn’t what I expected to hear.

I don’t care who you talk to, but there’s a saying about the quiet ones when it comes to mischief or the commission of evil. The saying is, “It’s always the quiet ones.” Ask law enforcement if this isn’t true. Ask a psychiatrist. The nuttiest people in this world have been (and are) usually quiet, reserved, generally private people. Haynes was quiet. Know what else he was? He was vocal about the “fact” that he had a “sensei” who levitated trucks and could kick asses “without moving a single limb.”

To Haynes, the secrets of chi were everything. It was Star Wars’ “the Force.” His type invests in machines like this and this, but Haynes went way beyond the brink. To Haynes, it was possible to shoot bolts of energy out of the palm of your hands like something off of Street Fighter. His insanity was UFO convention level…and then some.

And it never stopped. The bizarre stories of cop cars being smashed by this glowing-eyed sensei of his, who (strangely enough) was not above going into bars to look for trouble, never stopped coming. By fucking god, Haynes really was schizophrenic! And his details always lined up. He remembered his delusions perfectly. Names were never changed. He spoke of a dark being inside of him named “Samuel.” I couldn’t catch him in a lie except to say: “Wow! Amazing how none of this mayhem you or your teacher caused was ever mentioned on the evening news.”

I wanted to say that, but I never did. I knew he was either a pathological liar or a complete and total nut-job. Either way, he was a loser. I could have investigated and been hard-nosed and skeptical, but I never did. Why didn’t I call him out on his untruths? What was it that made me keep my mouth shut? There was a reason.

(JH)

Joe E. Holman's New (Free) Home on the Web

2009-09-28T02:23:00.004-05:00

Be advised, folks, that this is now Joe E. Holman's new home on the web. For years, I've used it for rants and personal mish-mashing, but have now converted it to be the new hotspot for MTA.org (the domain is now actively forwarding here).

After a rather disappointing set of experiences with Yahoo! Webhosting Services (not Mac-friendly! :-0) and after spending more than a few hours combing over the web looking for professional and affordable webhosting sites, I was not happy. Not even that cold Mr Pibb in hand made the search much fun. But a professional paid website is so much better, right? That's what they all say. Then I look at how popular blogs have become and think: WTF? Conventional websites may have no future.

Look at my friend John Loftus and his blog. He's got lots of traffic and has become fabulously well-known. I trickle along, putting not nearly as much effort into my work as he does into his, which I know must change...soon.

MTA has been on the web since I opened the first free Geocities website for it back in March of 2004. Then it was a paid Yahoo!-based site as of May '05 until March 2008 when it was loaded up onto a free blog with the intention of it being a temporary home.

Blogs are a lot cooler because they are set up like journals, but can just as easily be modified into more conventional websites. "Websites" should be in quotes because both blogs and what are called websites are all...websites! :-/

After starting this blog back some time in early 06, I haven't done much with it. This is my oldest blog, and so it deserved to be kept up. Updating two blogs was pointless. Why not make it just one?

So, we begin again.

Though I sometimes blast you all for commenting, thank you all for participating in comments and emails.

And let this be a lesson to all writers and aspiring writers out there--it doesn't matter how you write, just write! The format isn't important. What is important is that you are actually writing and getting your content out there.

One last thing, if you've been following MTA from the former MTA blog, follow here.

(JH)

The Bottom of the Food Chain (Part Three of Five)

2009-09-21T05:55:00.005-05:00

The year was 1993. It was the last day of summer. School was to start the very next day. I stayed up late this night like the nights before it. The reason for that was I didn’t have to go back to school like brother had to. With a Diet Big Red in my left hand and a buttery-ass bowl of popcorn curled up in my right, I sat on the living room couch watching Comedy Central. It was my own private celebration. All in the Family was over. Now it was time for my favorite show, Mystery Science Theatre 3000.

I celebrated alone that night, but the next day - instead of sleeping in like I had planned to do - I got a ring from a buddy of mine, Jerry Hernandez. Jerry was still in school. He was one year behind me. But…he wasn’t really in school. He was skipping and monkey-ing around like (as you know by now) all my friends did.

Before I go on, let me lay down some background on Jerry. Jerry was rescued from a gang in Los Angeles, which was where he grew up. His grandmother was a sweet Catholic lady who loved him enough to fly him over to our quaint San Antonio upper-middleclass neighborhood to give him a fresh start away from his bitch of a mother who sold crack out of her apartment and slept till 4 in the afternoons.

His mother never even knew who Jerry’s dad was. So sad. She got hammered at a nightclub, and after some vodka-assisted lovin’, Jerry was to be. He’d been through a lot…shot at, hit at, and shit at (I‘m not joking. He had literally been shot). I guess that means I should have been amazed at the fact that he had so few serious character flaws.

But Jerry was a respectful and…well, let’s just say…not a terribly bad kid. He was extremely intelligent and amazingly inquisitive--I am almost jealous. He was also something that I was not in my younger years, and that was, socially aware. I lacked manners and etiquette. I’ll totally fess up to that right now. But Jerry, he could be as pleasant and well-mannered as an English diplomat. He knew he was smart and didn’t need to front it. He just played the part he needed to play when he needed to play it.

He didn’t look like the “dirty Mexkin” that some of my friends characterized him as being. He was a slightly hairy dude, not fat, but he had some “pudge.” He could have passed for Indian. After that despicable “bowl haircut” phase passed that kids went through in the early 1990s, he would wear a ponytail and Danzig t-shirts. All he had to do was stand up with his finger pointed and you’d swear he was heading up a riot or a protest.

Jerry, the non-conformist punk, the “peace-nick” hippy; that was how he was more or less known. You always saw him coming--all the more so when he went through that shameless stage where he wore a shiny industrial strength chain with a padlock around his neck! I wouldn’t be seen with him like that, and he knew it. He knew it because I told him. Jerry was one of those friends you could get close to while maintaining your distance from. He was approachable. You could tell him no or tell him off. No hard feelings. You’d still be friends.

Jerry was staggeringly immature. He got in a fight with my brother because he tossed my brother’s cat across the room. After a scuffle, he absorbed a baseball bat to the shoulder and to the ribs and headed home in defeat. But he never backed down from anyone. He was committed to being “tough“ (not too surprising, aye?) And Jerry loved a local arcade house we frequented called Diversions. I’m guessing he could easily spend $50 playing arcades in just a few hours. It didn’t matter to him that we came out smelling like smoke, or that I could barely stand going because of that. You can’t say he wasn’t clean though. He used 4 cups of Cheer laundry detergent with every load of clothes! Yes, he counted out exactly 4 cups.

Jerry was a lot like me. We were both obsessive and weird and went too far with things, and we appreciated those who did the same. And we were both smart, I’d like to think. :-) But he was just stupid enough to rip the wires out of my car stereo and leave them a sliced spaghetti mess on the floor. I forgave him for that. That radio never worked anyway.

Whoa! Back off! Stop breathing down my neck! I can feel your tension. I know you are waiting for me to do like I always do and announce my friend’s pernicious flaws. I will. I did, rather. The first was that he was chronically immature. But there are two more. Here goes…

Jerry was as impressionable as goddamn hell. You had to see it to believe it. He was easily influenced by anyone he met. We’re talking not too far from “jump off a cliff” influenced.

With that in mind, fast forward one full year. I got into Christianity. He got into the same with me. He was my first convert. He and I became “cadet” fundies as we learned from our fundy overlords how to be increasingly nutty for Jeebus’ sake. So we are four months into our new walk of reverence and piety when Jerry meets an old worldly friend who talked with him for less than two hours. But that was enough time to talk him into running around our neighborhood streets Los Angeles-style screaming…

“Fight me!!!!! Fight me!!!!! Come on!!!!! I will fuck you up!!!!!”

He didn’t even have any enemies here. He was just yelling in the streets and behind the neighborhood’s nature park trail for people to go fisticuffs with him. Of course, he “repented” afterwards.

This impulsive loose canon conduct kept following him everywhere he went. He sparked up a relationship with a beautiful brunette girl from school. They had nothing in common, but that didn’t matter to either party. And she was as scatterbrained as he was. Let me skip to the end and let you know how it ended--it ended with Jerry showing up to church and coming forward to confess his sins and ask for the prayers of the church in “overcoming temptation.” That was the first time. Then came the second, and there was finally a third! But I learned that the chick’s dad walked in on them doing the nasty. I said, enough is enough! The sin was private, and so should the confession of repentance be.

Smarmy “we’ll pray for you” church platitudes did what they always do--nothing! I couldn’t believe it. I was so disappointed, so ashamed. How could he be so weak? A newly baptized kid from a bad home committing sexual sin…why is it that big a deal to you, Joe? Glad you asked. I’ll answer that--because he fucked her 64 times in two weeks, goddamnit! He’s got me beat again! I couldn’t pull that off!

And yes, like before, he counted 64 times. I know he was telling the truth because he had an excellent and detail-oriented memory, an established horn-dog past, and was in tears when he shared with me his “painful” sins of the flesh. I didn’t even need to ask: “Seriously?”

Looking back, I should have encouraged him to “hit that shit” like he was doing. The girl’s dad threatened to arrest Jerry for trespassing and expose him to our church if he didn’t confess. Jerry and the chick’s dad actually sat down after he got caught doing the porkin’. He put his clothes back on and the two talked before he was sent to walk home in the rain and in his tears. So he confessed publically…again! Then the girl moved away not two months later. He and she exchanged maybe a couple of rounds of letters and that was it.

Jerry’s next impulsively temporary fall from grace came at a nightclub where he was spotted listening to a song by King Diamond in a trance-like convulsion of insanity. Even by other wasted partier standards, he was making a scene. The eyes were on him. The slam-dancers were fucking jealous! We were back at church and a cousin of mine said to him: “Hey, man. Weren’t you at that club the other day having a fit to the music? I thought you were going to elbow me in the face, dude. I was going to say what‘s up.” Jerry was so embarrassed, and for good reason. You could see that he realized how he deserved to be called out.

So, Jerry was like a leaf. The second thing is more “sin”ister (don’t pardon the pun, dipshit!)

Now go back to pre-Christian times, to the day after the night of my private little party when I was celebrating my newly found freedom from the drudgery of school. That next day, Jerry called me and the two of us decided to jump in my rusty pickup truck and make trouble on a cloudy, balmy afternoon with nothing to do. We couldn’t really decide what to do with our God-given gift of freedom, and so we just drove around the neighborhood--our bellies full with Jerry’s mom’s fabulously home cooked Mexican food that was among the best I’ve had to date. I drove and Jerry stood up in the back of the truck and began hollering at people we knew and didn’t like.

The graceful things that rolled out of our mouths were not worthy of the Pulitzer: “Your house is ugly, dickwad!”, “Why don’t you water your plants some more, faggot! Sit on that fucking hose!”, and “Nice fucking moo moo, bitch!” Real class acts we were. We weren’t looking for fights, just to cause a stir and to get the old people saying, “Kids these days!”

It worked...and then it worked a little too well! After about three streets of doing the same, we pulled up beside an elderly lady in a white and gray-striped dress. You could tell she was just walking to get some exercise. Jerry reached over the side of the truck and - nearly in her face - said: “I FUCKING HATE OLD PEOPLE!!!”

Now this was a “pin drop” moment. Not cool! Not cool at all!

My laughter trickled off. I just drove away, watching in my rear view mirror as this poor woman was still reacting to our thuggish behavior. She paused at first and then kept walking, slower than before and now closer to the curb, nearly falling over at one point. She was so scared. She just looked down. You could tell she was worried to death. She was afraid for her life.

It‘s one thing to give a hard time to some funny-looking “fruity” neighbor with a mustache and a mean fat lady who always griped at us when we ran around the block a couple of years earlier, but this crossed the line. All I got from Jerry was a defense of his conduct: “Well, I do. I hate old people. I‘m glad I said it.” There was no point in talking about it. Pretty soon, he asked, like he always did when I didn’t want to hear it: “Let’s go to Diversions. Want to?” “I don‘t feel like going,” I replied.

Last I heard from Jerry was 1998. I was a minister at the time and living in a parish in North Texas. We talked about how things were going. In the course of the conversation, I asked him if he was still “right with the Lord Jesus Christ.” His reply was so infuriating…

“I’ve kind of branched out now, Joe. I’m living with my girlfriend and we’re
into New Age. I’m into the stones now…”

He explained what he meant by “the stones.” He and his partner used stones to “harness” positive and “repel” negative universal "energies." As fundy as I was, I knew I couldn’t convince him otherwise. He was, as the apostle James would say, “driven with the wind and tossed.” (James 1:6)

I don’t think it was to his credit that he threw off the torn vinyl roofing which is Christianity before I did. No, rather, my friend’s entire life is a reminder of the fact that a person is never more than the sum total of the component parts and influences that shaped them. The lesson has bombarded me ever since the first iota of doubt crept up in the recesses of my fundamentalist religious mind. The result is, I can no more imagine Jerry being handed over to demons to be eternally barbequed in flames than I can some psychopathic guy with “woman troubles” who strangles a prostitute to see how it would feel.

The real “bitch” about human behavior is that you can only outwardly hate it. Inwardly, you can’t really hate it. When you break down the mechanics of what it means to be “evil,” the unpleasantness you see that results from it is understandable. People are the way they are. Sometimes that means picking up the pieces and cleaning up the mess that the cunt known as “Mother Nature” left us with. Sometimes it means striving to improve; sometimes that means just having pity and saying: “There, there…it’s alright. You did your best. Go play with your stones.”

I can hear it now: “That’s not true. People can be more than they are, Joe.” To which I reply: No, they can’t. What I am saying is true, and I can tell you why. I’m not the only one who thinks this way. The whole son-of-a-bitching world thinks this way. The law thinks this way.

With felony criminal convictions, you get a record and your life changes forever. 90% of the jobs that were open as options to you before are now closed. With sex offenders, it’s more like 96%. For all practical purposes, your life is over! You’ll be lucky to get a temp job scraping the bird shit off picnic tables in public parks. Your house will be egged every other night. Why? Because the law believes just what I’m saying--people are the way they are and will be the way they will be. People don’t change. No one will trust you because your true character has been exposed. There's no going back.

"Sooner or later, the thirst always wins!"

(JH)

The Bottom of the Food Chain (Part Two of Five)

2009-09-02T08:59:00.007-05:00

The cream-of-the-crop losers that I once called friends will never leave my memory. Of that I am sure. This article takes off at the beginning of the 1993 school year, my last year of high school.

After Chris Kennedy, there was Brian Kieford. Brian, like Chris, was sloooooow as the dripping of molasses. But unlike Chris, Brian wasn’t a booz hound. Heck, he probably never had a drink in his life. He seemed to be a good kid at heart. He was part Jewish and part African American. He had quite a cool look to him aside from the oh-so-plain clothes he always wore. He had the sweetest smile stretching across his face most days and a set of engagingly bright puppy dog eyes. My parents loved him for being such a quiet kid who always said “yes sir“ and “yes ma’am” when he came over. He had such a good aura about him.

Brian was a sharp-looking, whitish black guy and he looked like he was destined to be the life of every party. And Brian was the life of the party, but not for the reasons you might think. You would think a handsome guy who wore a small “fro” with good muscular definition and low profile preppy clothes would get along with most everybody. You would think wrong! Brian would get in fight after fight all through the two years I knew him. Fight he did--and fight he could!

The boy was tough as fucking nails. He had a mild muscular build, resembling a breakdancer from the early 1980s, but he wasn’t big. He was still rather small. Of the fights he got into, some of them were not his fault and some of them were totally his fault. I’d seen him fight a big, zit-faced cowboy who clobbered him and should have had him whipped, but Brian kept getting back up and eventually took down his bigger opponent.

With very little provocation, Brian once took a fork out of a kid’s hand as he ate lunch and threw the kid against a plate glass window at MacArthur High School. He was always in fights. The only fight he ever lost was against five guys, football players who jumped him after school one day to get him back for kicking one of their butts in the gym. He was so damn tough!

I once remember him getting slammed headfirst onto the concrete in the hallway by a gang member named Donald who had tackled him. You could hear his head hit the pavement like a home run. Like before, the guy should have won, but he didn‘t. A police officer who stood guard at the school happened to be present and jumped in the way and broke up the fight. But even after the hit, Brian stood right up and would have fought again had the officer not been there. He just stood up and put his hands in his pockets with a blank expression on his face as though waiting in a checkout line. He was like a damn robot (some would say like a robot while others would say he was too stupid to know any better!)

Thing about Brian was, he was so shifting. To some, he was the kindest, sweetest, most soft spoken heart-of-gold kid there was. With others, he was a troublemaker who said the wrong things at the wrong times. He had the habit of pointing at whomever he was mad at while he stared them down and told them what he was about to do to them. And yet, he had such respect for authority...weird! I remember seeing a yearbook of one girl. Brian’s picture had written above it: “duhhhhhhh.”

Brian and I got to be best friends. I’m not sure how or why we got to be friends. I guess he made me feel like I had something to say. If I went on about parallel dimensions or Stonehendge or some other mystical shit that I only thought I understood, he would listen and soak up everything I said. As was to be the case in my ministerial days, I was a big bullshitter as a kid and I loved to hear myself talk. Brian was a good sparring partner too. He would come over to my house and we’d work out and watch Bruce Lee movies when we were done. When not doing that, we tried roleplaying games with the rest of my friends. Yes, my cousin and friends’ dorkdom had us fervently campaigning in the world of Dungeons and Dragons, that home of the soul for every dateless, self-esteem-less wonder the world over.

But we could never play roleplaying games with Brian because that demanded strategizing and thinking--two things that were anathema to him. Brian didn’t learn normally and was in special classes at school, but Brian could once in a while argue and use some surprisingly eloquent strings of wording that had us in awe. It was like, once a month, he would impress the hell out of us! Most hilariously, every Dungeons and Dragons campaign we ever played resulted in conduct like “I’m taking out my sword and sticking it in his chest!” on sight of every town’s guard we came to. He just didn’t have the brains to play in a virtual world, but our campaign got tons of laughs at his expense (and he never picked up on it).

Aww, poor Brian! Don’t pick on him. So what? Thinking games are not his thing! Is that what you’re thinking? Well, not so fast. There was something else that wasn’t his thing, and that was staying out of trouble with the law. Unbeknownst to everyone except his immediate family, Brian was insane--very insane.

I found out soon enough that he was a peeping tom who got caught in the act of looking into a window where a woman was showering. This happened more than once, and then it started happening a lot. Brian definitely wasn’t gay, but he never talked or looked at women around any of us, his friends, which (looking back) appeared to be a sign of sociopath behavior. The police only cited him the first time he got caught, though they could have taken him to jail had they wanted to. But I never will forget the day Brian took a crow bar and split his dad’s head open on an ordinary Saturday afternoon.

It was a pleasant Saturday…dogs barked, the birds sang, the sun was out, the smell of cut grass was in the air…and blood covered a living room floor apartment on the Northeast side of San Antonio! All was calm until Brian’s dad told him to clean his room and get on his homework.

*snap* Brian went off. I got a call from him around 4:30pm…

Brian: “I hurt my daddy.”
Me: “What do you mean you hurt your daddy?”
Brian: “I hurt my daddy.”
Me: “Wait…what? Tell me more.”
Brian: “I hit him.”
Me: “You hit your dad? Why? Is he ok?”
Brian: “I hit him. [long pause] He told me something [long pause] and I hit him.”
Me: “Is he ok?”
Brian: “He’s going to the hospital.”

I right nearly dropped the phone and raced over there in my 4-speed standard 1976 Datsun pickup truck. Brian was outside of the house as I pulled up. Mr. Kieford had been taken to the hospital and stitched up. As I suspected he would, he refused to press charges on his son. The cops nearly kicked Brian’s ass though. I remember hearing them say as I approached: “You have something wrong with you, boy!” These officers had dealt with Brian before. They were leaving just as I was arriving to find the bloody mess.

I walked in and saw his grandmother, a sweet little old lady sitting in a living room chair against the wall. She was nearly immobile. She watched in shock as her grandson flipped. I never will forget what she said to me in her shaky, soft voice as she sat in that chair that was almost too big for her, her eyes nearly drooping closed as she talked: “He just had a moment, that‘s all. Sometimes boys get angry.”

That was the worst part of it--Brian was never expressively angry. He was always quiet, even when enraged. Then he attacked someone or threatened them in a soft and huffing voice. He was never openly emotional. Why did he go apeshit on his father? This was weird, as well as awful. But that wasn’t the worst thing. What was yet more disturbing was that as Brian spoke to me and to the cops, he was laughing--yes, laughing! He was actually failing in his attempts to hold back laughter. His bloodied hands were in his pockets, like they so often were. It was like someone told a joke and he couldn’t keep from chuckling about it.

“What happened here, Brian?” I said. He quit laughing as though his brain was shifting modes. He went from amused to indifferent to mournful in the space of not even two minutes. He was now so blank, so slow to give any response. “I don’t know. He was saying things to me.” A long conversation ensued into the late hours of the night. Mr. Kieford arrived back home and thanked me for getting involved. Brian saw his dad and said: “I’m sorry about your head, daddy.” He replied: “I know, Brian. But we still have the same problem.” “What problem? There is no problem, daddy.” Brian said. His father replied: “Really? Well, your friend sure sees it.”

As it is for so many people, one day with Brian was just like any other. It was a matter of getting up, getting dressed, saying the Serenity Prayer that was posted on his wall, and beginning the new day, just as clueless as before. Brian wanted to be a botanist and a martial arts instructor. He wanted a lot of things. I know he expected to get them. He seemed like he deserved them, that quiet boy who held the door for his teachers. Something tells me he had a hard road ahead of him!

Poor boy…he was born 6 months premature. He was kept alive for a while. Still, it was thought he wouldn’t survive, but he did survive. The result was a child who had great difficulty in school, violent episodes, immense trouble socializing, disturbing behavior, and who knows what else. And why? Because my people prevented nature from taking its course. The moral of the story is that when nature rubs out a life form or a species from existence, there is a reason for it. And barring our ability to competently direct evolution, we ought not stand in its way!

(JH)

The Bottom of the Food Chain (Part One of Five)

2009-08-27T16:26:00.010-05:00

That I was a “loser magnet” in high school is a fact as certain as any other in the universe. Call it an unfairly critical relative self-assessment if you want. I know the truth. I had the honor of getting in good with some gargantuan losers over the years. I look back on it now, and it is both a humorous and humbling thought.

Just after the Nico era, I was facing the completion of high school. The summer of ’92 was ending. This brought me to senior year. It would have been one of my best had I not had the crap knocked out of me literally at mid-term in a bus boxing match with a mean Irish kid who happened to get the better of me, but that’s a story all its own.

The summer wasn’t yet over. I was young and got caught up like so many young and dumb kids do into the door-to-door sales routine. I needed a job, and so I got one. The job was selling Kirby vacuum cleaners, and I sucked at it. In case you’re wondering how I got it, I went into an office where a guy ten years older than me was sitting. He told me to hang in there and that if I kept talking to people, I’d be making a thousand a week in no time. He promised and I bought into it. I found out the hard way exactly how dumb I was. Just wait until you have a couple doors slammed in your face…

“If I could have a moment of your time, ma’am, I’d like to demonstrate how to make your home cleaning easier. Do you vacuum [cluck-clunk]…a lot?” ☹

And then there were the Asian people who threatened to loose their dogs on me. I once had the police called on me for being a solicitor. I made it away before they got there. I figured, shit, staying home and masturbating to freeze-frame images of naked women from R-rated movies was better than this. Hell, I could be watching Terminator! Having no job was a lot better than this, even if that meant I had no independence.

But my quitting didn’t happen fast enough. I couldn’t quit before being put in touch with another fellow who quit, being equally disappointed. I still remember that scrawny silver touring van and it being filled with other kids who had no lives. It was a loser’s experience. The guy who recruited us and delivered us in the van managed to round up about 12 kids, half boys and half girls. I still remember the boss’ inspirational speech…

“Guys, you’re gonna love it! Fuckin women coming to answer the door naked or with a blouse on and their pussy hairs showing…YEEEEEEHAAAAAH! I’m tellin ya, you’re gonna love it!”

All the girls just smiled and rolled their eyes. And of course, we didn’t love it, not one bit. I quit. I suspect we all quit, but I know one other guy did. The fellow’s name was Chris Kennedy. He and I hooked up as buddies. Chris was a loser of fucking monumental proportions. He had one Fuji brand cassette tape, and on it he tried to record all the songs he loved. The tape wasn’t big enough, naturally, and so rather than taking the rocket scientist option of getting a new another tape, he just recorded parts of the songs he had to hear and always talked about how he wished he could have recorded them each in full! I remember him playing “Juke Box Heroes” by Foreigner till I wanted to throw up.

He would work out with a set of 35-pound dumbbells in his garage. Those were all the weights he had. I was bored and had nothing better to do, so we hung out and I worked out with him. We never really did a full workout, but he thought he did. Our unemployed asses had to think we were doing something productive. Industriousness flew from us like a horsefly.

I met Chris’ dad once. He was a small, glasses-wearing, bald man who, when he built a fence, measured everything in meters and centimeters. He was an intellectual with those “Dickies” shop clothing outfits. He was very emotionless, like he was tired of dealings with his son. Stupid as I was, I read the man right. It turned out, he was tired of dealing with his son who was quickly headed for a life of living on a discarded old mattress under a bridge somewhere. I could tell his dad wasn’t going to have him around forever.

I never will forget it. The man looked at me and hated me as much as his son. He sneered at me with his eyes when our gazes lined up. I could just see him saying to himself: “This guy’s a loser like my son! Why couldn’t I have a successful son?” I was a clueless kid, but I knew what he was thinking for sure.

I was 17. Chris was 25. Low as I was, I was nowhere close to the level of loserdom of Chris. I wanted to tell him that at times. He looked like a cool guy, but he was just too stupid for words. But Chris was too intimidating for me to ever confront. With his big goatee and grow-able full beard, I wasn’t in a position to lecture him. He’d been to jail before. Plus, I liked the idea of bumming rides.

Speaking of rides, he had a suspended license, but he still drove. He drove a beat-up 1985 GMC Jimmy truck with torn seats. The overpowering smell of Michelob was everywhere in the cabin. He had a bad alcohol problem…and a 15-year-old girlfriend! I was present when she brought her little overdeveloped body outside and dumped him. She was way more emotionally mature than he was! He cried like a baby at bedtime and drove home like a maniac, burning rubber and making a public scene. That night, he blew all the money he had left over from our doing yard work and odd jobs on 2 cases of beer which he bought at a place near my house called The Beer Barn. He drank nearly both cases and the result was that we missed out on a chance to mow some yards to make money the next day like we had planned.

It was now clear to me just how much of a miserable loser Chris was, but I didn’t tell him because he was like a really, really, really weak authority figure to me—that and because I felt sorry for him. I started to realize that I was his only friend. He couldn’t make friends his own age, and so he ran around with a younger, less discerning crowd.

We once stopped off at some man’s house whom he said he knew. It was this man with a cowboy hat and his crowd of 30-somethings having beers on their porch. He walked up and shook each of their hands and grabbed some beers for the road. I just stood back because it was as obvious as the Elephant Man that they wanted to tell him to go fuck himself and the rest of the high school crowd. I just waited by the car as he tried in vain to cozy up with these people. Finally, we left and picked up some more beer, which we took to his house and consumed.

I barely finished my one beer. He kept saying, “You look depressed. Want another beer?” I took one just to fit in, but I never finished more than one (never had a tolerance for beer as a youth). I went home and thought about how much more cheese-ball-ness I could take from this walking empty beer can. When we next hooked up, he told me more about his past and how he went to jail for nearly killing a small child whom he had run over because he was intoxicated. He told me the whole story. Then he needed to compose himself….and then he went for another beer!!!

I decided that I wouldn’t throw him to the wolves of non-friendship yet. I’d be there for him like his under-aged girlfriend wasn’t. But this wasn’t destined to last long. Old rock head Chris got worked up about how the girl who dumped him was seeing some other older guy, a 27-year-old named Mike who frequented the acquaintance’s house we visited earlier. Chris confronted the guy the next day and got the mother-lovin’ shit beat out of him in the front yard. I didn’t see the fight, but he told me about it. I knew he was telling the truth because when he called me, he came totally unglued…

“Listen, listen very carefully! Mike beat me up! [heavy breathing] He beat my ass, man! [heavy breathing] We’re gonna fucking kill him, ok? We’re gonna fucking kill him! He will die! [heavy breathing] He will not do that to me. [phone noise, inaudible sounds, heavy breathing into the phone] He will not do that to me! Listen very carefully, we’re gonna do it tomorrow! [heavy breathing] Listen, listen very carefully, he’s gonna die, I swear to fucking god [more inaudible crying], etc…”

What made this event even more pitiable than it sounds was that a day earlier, Chris sat me down and told me about how he beat the hell out of Mike for messing around with “the woman of my dreams.” He bragged about how the guy was put on life support in nearby Northeast Baptist Hospital. Then he said: “I got proof.” I remember thinking: “Oh? Do you need proof? Is there some reason you suspect I won’t believe you?” Could it be that you don't believe yourself? He pointed to a red dot on his loafers and said that he got that from kicking in the guy’s head. The dot was not even as big as a raindrop. It was more purple than red. It sure wasn’t blood. Poor bastard was unaware that I’d seen the dot on the same shoes before this day. I didn’t have the heart to tell him how much of a retarded, self-esteem-less, dejected, hopelessly despondent loser he was. I just sat there and pretended to listen.

Poor Chris…the cops had to chase him when they decided to pull him over for unsafely backing into an intersection…he made the cops chase him and he wondered why he got the ticket! Big fucking mystery! The idiot continued to try and make money mowing lawns, though he once mowed the wrong lawn and got bitched out by the owner for doing it. God damn, he was stupid! He was nearly half as smart as a mentally retarded peanut.

So I decided to distance myself from Chris. Fuck, getting lectured by my parents was starting to seem better than putting up with Chris! I kept finding other reasons not to hang out, and after a while, it worked. He comes by the house one day and we talk a bit as I pretended to be heading out somewhere, and he left. That was the last time I ever saw or heard from him.

Is this pathetic story of loserdom not telling about developing a healthy self-image? Our entire lives we are told to feel good about ourselves and to have self-confidence. It’s all such shit. The truth is, a healthy self-image is seldom built. You just have it or you don’t. The closest you can come to building self-esteem is to look at all the other pathetic fools worse off than you and say: “At least I’m leagues above that sad sack!” It shouldn’t be true, but it is. “There are bigger losers than me!” is the lesson. Chris never did much in life – and I’m sure (if he’s even alive) he still hasn’t – but he taught me to have more confidence in who I am. The one good thing about the evolutionary food chain is that those at the very bottom don’t fucking know it!

(JH)

The Women’s Names Quandary

2009-08-19T01:08:00.005-05:00

Tell me something…why are the qualities of a woman so defined by her name? Why are Bertha, Stella, and Marge always hideously fat and why is an Alexis or a Marissa always blisteringly hot? I can’t figure it out, but there seems to be a connection between hot, average, and unattractive girls and their names.

An Alexis, Ally, a Brooke, a Britney, a Courtney, a Mona, a Monique, a Cammie, a Candy, a Carmen, or a Krystal are almost always thin and fine and tan, causing men everywhere who see them to get hot under the collar. I’ve never seen an exception. Berthas, Marges (with the exception of the lovely Marge Simpson), and Biancas tend to be hideous-looking and fat as fucking hell. The Opals and Nancys and Agnes’ tend to fit into this category too, along with the Nadines.

And then there are names that go either way, like a Jennifer or Kathryn or Lisa or Trisha. Gwen is usually a better-than-average-looking woman, but can go either way, the same with Carrie. Michelle is another such name, with a leaning towards average or better, as is Christy, Kristen, Melissa, and Monica, and even the old-fashioned Mabel. Alice is also an either-way name. Add Debra and Dianne to this list as well. And there is Elizabeth. There are Charlottes and Valaries who tend to be uglies, nearly on level with those repugnant, tongue-ringed "butch" lesbians that so proudly court their decently pretty partners around in public.

Now a Vicki...a Vicki can be hot, but more often than not, is only slutty, with average or less looks. This is also true of a Jessica or a Celeste. Amanda, Kara, and Kelly are in this category too, but they tend to be good-lookers more often than not. And then there is a Mary. But Marys or MaryAnns are average at best, and are either fat or have some hideous feature/features that offset a strikingly good feature, like a catcher's mit face or un-womanly body fat distribution, or possibly sopaipilla-looking arms that ruin everything.

And then there is the smell factor. Smoking hot women almost always either chew cinnamon gum or work/play around scented cinnamon candles, at home and/or at work. Better-than-average and merely average-looking women are drenched in lotions, like cocoa butter and other highly scented Gergen’s crap. Not that looks-challenged women don’t cover themselves in lotion. They do, but the hotties love to sulk in them like some fountain of youth, just as they read books in hot baths with only candle light.

Hot women pick their food apart, are more likely to send food back if it’s not made right while out dining, and they never fart. Less than average women will fart around their boyfriends, but will only sometimes pick their food apart and sometimes send food back. Hot women play with their hair more, average women do some, but the uglies do rarely.

This can’t all be a coincidence. What could be the reasons behind this? I don’t know, but this has always puzzled me.

(JH)