People Watching in Roland Park

So I usually do my grocery shopping in Roland Park. To make a long story short, Roland Park is where the rich people live. They live there because it’s really nice, and also apparently because they have a grocery store that people like me (not rich) want to shop at (rich people love feeling superior), even though if I were to be totally honest with you about it I’d be better off shopping at Super Fresh (where they serve up cold cuts with slices of dead insect body pressed into the mealy, insipid meat, which, did I mention, is past its expiration date?) or some other grocery store that doesn’t have a budget for such luxuriously unnecessary staff positions as: cart unloader, grocery bagger, and door opener (automatic doors are so low class). And do you know what? These people fucking smile, son. They almost like you.

I guess that’s what it means to be rich. You need someone to unload your cart for you because of what might happen if you had to bend over and pick up your own high-end foods and goods (we’re talking about such risks as: maybe your platinum-rimmed monocle falls out of your eye, breaking into a thousand, gloriously shimmering pieces; and, what if you hurt your back trying to pick up the half gallon of farm-fresh chocolate milk?). It’s a serious problem—one that you wouldn’t bother yourself with if you were rich. You’d just shop in Roland Park, like me (not rich).

A brief note of apology for myself. As a non-rich person, I have no business doing my regular shopping in such an exclusive establishment (THEY UNLOAD YOUR FUCKING CART FOR YOU). But what can I say? I like the thrill of feeling like I imagine the rich feel as part of their everyday experience. And so what if I bring a loaded gun with me to the store (just in case)? And so what if I’m crippled by the fear of discovery, the worry that they might test me by not immediately coming to assist me in unloading my cart (in which case I wouldn't reflexively display the proper sense of disgust at such an offensive slight, thus outing myself as a pleb)? Yes, I am a man—a man with weaknesses. Their lunch meat is so fresh. The milk, it comes in these authentic-seeming glass bottles. It’s like, why not me? Why not me, God?!

Ahem. I have something in my eye. One second. Just one second please.

Okay.

Do you like stories? Because I have this one story I could tell about shopping in Roland Park, if you want to hear it.

You do?

Let us go then, you and me. Let me take you on a journey of the mind.

So I was shopping for groceries in Roland Park the other day, waiting in line at the lunch meat counter, when I saw something that kind of blew my mind. It was this guy.

Seriously, look at this guy.

In case it’s not obvious, there are a few details here that normally you wouldn’t see together. Like, the fact that this dude is basically wearing a gym outfit (the tucked-in t-shirt is a nice touch) except for the ridiculous bling wrapped around his wrist.

The watch, it’s really nice.

Also, he's got an iPhone.

I guess it’s possible that he was also taking photos of me, or, in the words of Lord Nikon in Hackers (one the greatest movies of all time), he could have been “snooping onto them [me] as they snoop onto us [him].” Pardon the marginal glosses. I make no assumptions about the relative intelligence of my readership. Other than that I basically assume you are all illiterate mole people who accidentally figured out how to use the glow machine you stole from that poor man who had the misfortune of falling down one of your secret holes that one day when he got lost in the forest on the way to what he thought was going to be an important business meeting (Finally, my children will respect me, and I’ll be able to afford my AIDS medicines). But in all likelihood, this amazingly-dressed, conspicuously-consuming gentleman had no idea that I was performing a kind of anthropological field research, using my own iPhone camera to press these otherwise ephemeral images into analyzable permanence. For the sake of all mankind.

Nice one.

Apple Bobbin'

Spotted in the checkout line at the grocery store:

At first I thought: Maybe this lady (not pictured) just had a really nasty apple hunger AND had just about had it up to here with her old toilet brush AND by happenstance she was thinking about both of these things at the same time on her way home from work and thought, oh what the hey I’ll just make a quick stop in the neighborhood Super Fresh to pick up these few goods and then that will be two fewer things I have to worry about—OH and I need one SOUP. And shampoo.

But then I thought: Boy them sure are a lot of apples for just one lady (she was on the small side for a lady). You’d almost think that she needed that many apples for a specific purpose, a purpose, moreover, whose deeper logic is detectable from the other items displayed thither on the checkout-line conveyor belt.

And then it hit me: Bobbin’ for apples in the (cleaned) toilet.

A few questions: Would the participants of this activity be volunteers and, in the immortal words of The Sandlot, would they like it? Or, is this some sort of punishment for crimes committed in connection with Halloween? Like, maybe this lady received a painful shock to her conscience after walking in on her children bobbing for apples in alcoholic cider after leading them in a wholesome Bible study but a few hours earlier. (You’ll recall that Halloween fell on the Lord’s Day this year.) Maybe she wanted them to associate apple bobbin’ of any sort (and underage consumption of alcohol, if you follow the logic here) with being forced to put yer face into a shitty toilet, but then, on account of her unfortunate “episode” in the bathroom this morning--the result of a large meal of questionable Indian leftovers the night before--decided that she’d give the toilet a quick scrub before doling out the punishment. And maybe she wanted to eat soup while watching her children act out their penance.

In short: I guess you could say I’m the type of guy who takes pictures of other people’s stuff at the super market.

God's Transcendent Dong: A Twitter Poem with Images

14:05:12: The greatest challenge for Western Man is not to establish the undeniable—that everyone is a motherfucker—but to explain why this is so.

14:13:33: To unfold the deeply engroined layers of this mystery,

14:14:55: To gaze into its ur-pubic regions and smile limply,

14:15:11: Is to reach out and touch God on His transcendent dong.

Songs I Hate: "Last Resort"

Papa Roach (pronounced Row-Atch) can sniff my shit. It’s rare for me any more to hate a song that’s catchy as all hell, but the Roach’s song “Last Resort” (2000) manages to do just the trick. I mean, I really hated this song when it first came out during my sophomore year of high school. At that time, though, I was a devout musical ideologue, dismissing songs, groups, and even entire genres not because I didn’t have a viscerally pleasurable reaction to the sounds they created, but because they didn’t seem “real” enough to me. This was just one part of a rigorously consistent fabrication of my identity, which, for a few years leading up to high school but especially during that specific year of my life, was oppositional in the vaguest, shallowest sense possible. But since I didn’t know any better at the time, it provided an all-encompassing world view, and a relatively simple moral calculus that could be applied to all things, especially things that had captured the popular imagination. So, for example, the conspicuous economic motive that underwrote every aspect of the boy-band N’Sync’s existence—from their focus-grouped distribution of personas (bad boy, vaguely-gay sweetheart, unsettling-old-looking dude with bad facial hair, &c) to the quality of the production that backed their hip, harmonized, lyrical platitudes—caused me to brand their fans as “followers,” a distinction that my enlightened tower of awesomeness could not brook, and I therefore dismissed what years later seems to me to be actually pretty okay music that makes me feel good when I listen to it.

About a minute after I moved on from the Purgatory-like nothingness of South Jersey high-school life, however, and began to take in the richly textured On-the-Road-tinted perceptions of my first year of college—which were accompanied by and in no small part the result of just an absurd amount of drugs and surely the world’s greatest and most interesting dorm ever (a topic for another post)—I experienced what is best described as musical puberty, which, in its awkward phases featured ecstatically arranged mix CDs that brought together elements as disparate as IDM, Summer-of-Love protest rock, and gangsta rap (come to think of it, I never really grew out of this phase), and long, vexed conversations with my best friend and room mate about why he should like as much new music as I did.

But, let me warn you: this is not a story of the Utopian acceptance of things as they are, or of becoming a member of the human race by appreciating the good in its various popular tastes without reservation or shame. No, this is a story of the value of hatred, and possibly of ideologically-motivated disgust. Because, even after my Great Awakening, I still think fucking Papa Roach are a bunch of shit-eating bottom feeders, and I want the mindless mass of popular-culture-consuming zombies to feel shame for continuing to tolerate this transhistorical low point of human cultural production (undeniable catchiness notwithstanding). I say that we continue to tolerate this music because, much to my surprise, while scanning the radio waves in my car on a three-hour road trip to Philly last week, I discovered that this fucking song—yes, motherfucking “Last Resort”—is still somehow being allowed to poison the brains of everyday radio listeners. Well, after I survived a conniption fit in the middle of rush hour traffic while pushing upwards of 80 mph or more, I decided to roll up my damn sleeves and do some hardcore Wikipedia research, and what do you know—this fucking motherfucking song is featured all over the ass-shitting world of contemporary popular media, from the Box-Office travesty of G. I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, to the ubiquitous music video-game series Rock Band. How, God, can you expect me to believe in you, when you permit this kind of evil infestation to survive like a roach colony in our collective cultural home? God dammit, I said how? I’m frothing at the mouth here and I can’t even get a simple amen? Enough is enough. It’s time to pull a Bruce Willy Will and take matters into my own hands. I got this badass can of Raid, and a brown paper bag filled with rat-strength bromethalin, and I’m ready to turn the page on this shameful chapter of human history.

There’s so much to hate about this song, I don’t even know where to begin. The video insightfully emphasizes all of the things I hate about it though, which makes me think that the root of my response is intrinsic in the song itself. The first frame says it all.

Fuckin’ white ass white dude decked out in all black, grimacing at the camera with equal portions of (content-less) angst and (unprovoked) rage; his hair is (obviously dyed) black, and gelled into solid spikes (probably with the help of my old standby L. A. Looks extreme hold hair gel); he’s wearing a brown choker and a foppishly glistening eyebrow piercing. Now, I know what you’re all thinking: this is like an exact description of how I looked in high school, circa 2000. In fact, it wouldn’t be going too far to say that this song, objectively speaking, was tailor-made specifically for the type of little shit that I was at the time it was released. And yet, I hated this song then almost as much as I hate it now. I guess you could say that from the moment I realized I hated the Roach, I began a slow-motion transition away from the undesirable aspects of myself that I didn’t yet realize I was seeing reflected in this douche-Juan’s eminently punchable face.

When we listen to the sounds that the year 2000 gave us, they remind us of how excited we all were at the time for the possibility of a new generic unity between rap and rock. Papa Roach, no doubt considered pioneers of the unsettled form at the time, now come off as posers so sincerely committed to their counterfeit attempt to channel hip-hop’s legit street angst that—much in the same way you would imagine that, say, Jane Austen would lose her shit if you used your time-traveling Delorian to go back to the early-19^th century to show her some of Cinemax’s late-night, soft-core adult programming on your iPad—they would be completely dumbfounded by the mere suggestion that the only possible moral response to their art is severe, crippling shame. One thing that is obviously missing from this particular instance of rap-inflected rock is the lyrical inventiveness that is hip-hop’s trademark. Instead what we get is emo lyrics that have been awkwardly grafted onto a rapper’s punchy swagger, but completely divorced from anything that you’d want to swagger about. Check it:

Cut my life into pieces

This is my last resort

Suffocation

No breathing

Don’t give a fuck if I cut my arm bleeding

Let’s just get this one out of the way: the notion of cutting one’s arm bleeding is fucking stupid. Grammatically, it reads—and when sung, it sounds—the same way as I cut my dick (while) shaving (my balls), where the verbs shaving and cut are the actions responsible for the bloody junk. I’d rather accuse whoever wrote this masterfully-wrought line of wordsmithery of being a borderline illiterate, but unfortunately I think the real explanation is much less dignified than that: he just couldn’t think of a way to get the images being “cut” and “bleeding” into a line that would rhyme with “breathing” without making a little sacrifice to coherence. This problem, however, is self-induced. Go with me, if you will, on a journey of speculative historical recreation: the writer (in my mind he’s a 23-year old community-college dropout) is sitting on his bed in his parent’s house, brooding about his mom’s not-so-subtle suggestion that maybe he ought to try and get a job instead of hanging out with his new underage friends he met while smoking cigarettes under the bleachers during the most recent high school football game. He’s also pissed because his mom tried to make him buy what she called “big boy clothes” at the mall the other day even though he told her like a thousand times that he doesn’t want to wear that follower shit. So yeah, you could say he’s kind of pissed. And, in a moment of inspired angst, he pulls out his sticker-covered notebook and scrawls down the first thing that comes to his mind: “Cut my life into pieces / This is my last resort.” Yeah man, that’ll show them all when they find this note next to my dead body, as he emphatically underlines each individual word in the second line. He would commit suicide right then and there if only he wasn’t so locked into what might very well be the beginnings of some grand artistic achievement. But fuck, what comes next? Suffocation? Yeah. Good one, dude. Uhhh…suffocation du-duh….suffocation da-dang…OH I KNOW, suffocation NO BREATHING! It’s like, deepening the effect! Not only am I suffocating, but I’m ALSO NOT BREATHING! FUCKING PERFECT MOM AND DAD ARE GONNA BE SO SAD WHEN THEY READ THIS!!!! Tell me to buy a fucking polo shirt, fuck you.

Well, let’s take a step back. Granting, for the moment, that being cut apart (metaphorically), not caring about being cut on the arm (literally), and being suffocated (resulting in no breathing) all, somehow, need to find expression in this confessional hymn to giving in to desperation, some questions still remain. For example, why should the word “suffocation” be immediately followed by the phrase “no breathing”? Above I speculated that it had to do with a deliberate, if amateurish, attempt to deepen the effect, but, as you can no doubt tell, this is the moment when inspiration (what little of it there was) has left the room. It’s not just that the redundancy suggests a dull mind dully trying to solve the puzzle of what comes next by doing the least helpful thing possible (repeating what you’ve already got and praying for something new to pop into consciousness—which in this case turns out to be the same thing clothed in different language), but it’s also the way the singer (I’m going to call him Preston, because that’s the name his essence has communicated to my sympathetic soul) pronounces the two lines differently: suffocation is articulated with a kind of visceral disgust in Preston’s voice, almost as if he was cursing it out—and the hard-picked, muted distorted guitar chords match the intensity and rhythm of the lyric, thus, in this instance, actually deepening the effect—whereas the easy bendiness of the phrase no breathing feels rhythmically off, as if it’s just there to fill space (to make way for the sublime arm-cutting line), and the way it’s sung suggests a complete lack certainty and conviction. Once again, the video confirms my impression on this latter point.

As Preston says “no breathing” his body language says, “I don’t know?”

But, alas, once Preston wrote the uninspired line “no breathing” he felt a fresh surge of creative excitement, seeing immediately that he now had an opportunity to rhyme the word “bleeding” with what he’d already written—and thus the suffocation / no breathing combo was forever and mystically bound, like a hand accidentally super-glued to a bald cat.

The biggest mystery, I think, about this opening chorus (it’s also, happily, repeated in the first verse!) is how exactly we got the line: “Don’t give a fuck if I cut my arm bleeding.” Because, even if bleeding had to be a part of it, why on earth is the image of a cut arm? Why not a cut wrist, which has the same number of syllables as arm, and, um totally makes more suicide-y sense? The only thing a cut arm is going to do is give you a sweet, manly scar. And besides, any fool who’s been through the rigors of Emo101 (classes meet in front of the Hot Topic at your local mall) would know that the first lesson after “How to wear baggy black clothes” is “In what manner you ought to consider slicing your own, delicate wrists.” I recently got my black belt in crime-scene reconstruction, so I’m pretty sure I know how we ended up with Preston telling us that he doesn’t care if he cuts his arm (bleeding?). You see, as soon as he realized that his muse was telling him to rhyme “bleeding” with “breathing,” his mother called up to his room to come downstairs for dinner, and I mean this minute Mister Mopey-Pants! He was already dangerously close to having his allowance withheld for the second week in a row for not taking out the garbage again, so Preston wasn’t willing to try his mother’s patience too much. But he also couldn’t turn his back on the spirit of Beauty, who visits “This various world with as inconstant wing / As summer winds that creep from flower to flower,” but which was just then fully present in his bepostered bedroom!!

He couldn’t, and he wouldn’t, by God. And so, in an excited panic indistinguishable from the experience of divine inspiration, Preston just fuckin’ wrote—he wrote with such urgency and purity that he was unable to comprehend the words on the page even as he was writing them, and by the time he sulked downstairs to join his fake family for their fake dinner (it was tuna helper night, Preston’s least favorite night of the week), he had already forgotten what he had written. If the verse would stand, it would stand on the strength of its divine construction…as written. So sayeth the shepherd, so sayeth the flock. Like the fuckin’ Bible and shit. “Don’t give a fuck if I cut my arm bleeding” is the decidedly bizarre outcome of this poetic episode.

Although, now that I think about it, that line is almost so bad that it somehow becomes good, as if it missed the target of “good” so severely that it actually just hit it anyway. Because you could repeat that line, as I did to my girlfriend a few weeks ago without any introduction or context, and get a for real laugh out of it. In other words, “Don’t give a fuck if I cut my arm bleeding” reads most naturally as a pleasurably ironic send-up of the kind of tone and style that is on sincere display in the rest of the song.

The lion’s share of my animus, though, is reserved for the real first verse of the song. That’s where Preston really just shows us how fucking stupid he actually is:

Cut my life into pieces

I've reached my last resort

Suffocation

No breathing

Don't give a fuck if I cut my arm bleeding

Do you even care if I die bleeding

Would it be wrong, would it be right

If I took my life tonight

Chances are that I might

Mutilation outta sight

And I'm contemplating suicide

Well, if there was any doubt about how Preston felt about the quality of his chorus, I believe he’s answered that question for us. He FUCKING LOVED IT! Unfortunately for him, unlike the weirdly repetitive and disruptive lyrics of Paul Wall and Mike Jones, Preston’s finest moments make us wish that he’d not treated his opening free-writing salvoes the way Bible-Belt zealots treat the literal, precise word of the King James Bible (good enough for Jesus, good enough for me). But even worse than repeating an already repetitious chorus is that Preston is downright obsessed with making sure that we know—by repeating it again and again—that he’s talking about suicide. (Maybe this is his way of acknowledging the insufficiency of the image of a cut arm to convey that message?) So, he asks “would it be wrong, would it be right / If I took my life tonight?” But really he just wants to make clear: suicide. SUICIDE! It’s obvious that Preston doesn’t really care about the ethical dimension of taking your own life—what he really wants is for you to feel badly, as if it’s all your fault [Mom and Dad]—as evidenced by the question “Do you even care if I die bleeding?” Oh, and just in case you were wondering, he’s not talking about taking his life…out to dinner, or taking his life…on a cruise. Here, you’re confused: “And I’m contemplating suicide!” You are?! Whoah, this conversation just took a turn for the dark here, Presty. I honestly thought we were talking about something nicer!

The song gets even more muddled from there. In the next verse he castigates himself in the past tense for the “sin” he was living in (so, uh, I guess we’re not talking about actually wanting to kill ourselves anymore? No, wait, the emphatically suicidal chorus repeats itself again…so…), and then he blames it on when he lost his mother (wasn’t she just calling you to dinner?) which causes him to “search for a love up on a higher level.” So, God, right? We’re talking about how your mother’s death led you to find God and repent for your sins, right? No, because all he found was “questions and devils.” And then, back in the present: “Nothing is right. Nothing is fine.” At this point I honestly just want to know how he actually feels right now, in the real present. Is this a past trauma that you’ve since overcome, or are you still wallowing in your own insignificant little red-faced little baby’s cries? Are you talking about a psychological episode, a belief that there is no God (but demons!), or the intersection of both? And so on. But, rather than resolving these temporal, psychological, and religious tensions, the song just goes on to repeat the opening chorus several more times (clearly the compositional high point, in Preston’s mind), and then, when he completely runs out of anything to say, just kind of whines impotently:

I’m running and I’m crying

I’m crying

I’m crying

I’m crying

I’m crying

Well, if you’re gonna do that, be a man about it and hide it away in shame. Hide your weepy angry face under a blanket and cry, cry, cry all you want. Don’t mind me, I’m just going to spray a little…uh…a little air freshener—shh…it’s good for you.

KFC: Pervert Paradise

Don’t take this the wrong way, but if you eat KFC’s new Double Down chicken sandwich, you are a sexually violative pervert, and I hate you. It’s the ass-to-ass of fast-food dining fare. And, just to be clear—nobody has ever done ass-to-ass just because it seemed like a fun thing to do. (Not even your mom.)

You should take my word on this, too, since, having seen Darren Aronofsky’s film Requiem for a Dream (2000) at least a dozen times, I’m something of an expert on the categories of experience that lead one to say, “yeah, you know what, maybe this won’t be that bad.” Here’s how it goes: first, you’re all, yo heroin tastes pretty good let’s do this every day. Also get me a damn soda while you’re up because I’m kind of thirsty. No big deal, everything was casual like that back then. Next thing you know, POW!, you’re hooked on heroin, and, as a funny joke, Life decides to serve you up a steaming Pu Pu platter with nothing on it but a city-wide heroin drought and a drippy nose. FUCK.

It goes without saying that, under such conditions of scarcity, those few suppliers who still possess the sublime ambrosia known as heroin suddenly find themselves in a position to cater only to a very select clientele—specifically, those for whom no price is too extravagant to get their fix. One such addict might be a woman whose sense of personal integrity has been warped so badly by the depthless torture of unsatisfied addiction that, when approached by a man with a supply, she’s willing to consider performing in a sex show for a group of malevolent old dudes who can only get a hard-on from watching depraved acts of sexualized human misery, so long as the supplier’s willing to pay well (he is). I really can’t think of any other situation where one would hear “ASS TO ASS” barked at them (especially by this guy)

and they’d actually do it. That’s what I’m talking about with KFC.

Wait, I’m not done. Because, remember those old dudes I was just talking about? Yeah, well they’re not even the worst ones—they have to go through the supplier, too. The most evil player in this whole equation of suffering and exploitation, the criminal mastermind who brings everyone together, and also brings like 3 or 4 grease-drenched paper bags just filled all the way up with Double Downs (for ass-to-ass snack breaks), is the one, the only, Big Tim—that’s you, if you, you know, follow the strict logic of this analogy…you fucking…you fucking dick pickle. Why don’t you go ahead and put a big ol’ dick pickle on your artery-clogging fast food sex crime? Better yet, why don’t you squeeze one through that unsettling gap tooth of yours? I don’t need that shit in my life, seriously. Seriously.

Get it out of here!

Dude I’m creeping myself out, and you probably don’t even know what the chuck I’m talking about yet. Okay, for the uninitiated:

I can only assume that KFC knowingly cast a Big Tim lookalike to utter the most disturbing and sexually suggestive lines in the whole commercial. Here’s an experiment: Try maintaining unbroken eye contact with him as he speaks his lines.

Somehow it will make you bleed or cry or leak something slippery or viscous out of your body. Save this discharge in a Petri dish for me, because, using only the tools of science and the laws of deduction, I can prove that this sauce is the very same secret ingredient that KFC smears all over its breadless sexual trauma. But I don’t need no highfalutin lab test to prove what is already clear and distinct to the naked soul: encountering this man’s deep-voiced innuendo is both to feel that some soul-damning sexual fantasy has been inappropriately disclosed, and to know with certainty that you’ve witnessed the most honest assessment of KFC desire that you’ll ever see. Two pieces of chicken. Wink wink. I say it like this in my knowing Big Tim voice with my Big Tim eyebrows raised as if to say “come hither” in the way my man Big Tim taught me how to let you in on the secret—I’m not actually talking about chicken. I’m talking about ass to ass.

That’s the only thing the Colonel has ever been talking about.