Another sign of the apocalypse (as opposed to sine of the apocalypse, which is the cornerstone of the creationists’ renewed assault against math as a tool of the devil): MTV renewed Wonder Showzen.
For those who haven’t seen this show, it is the closest I have ever, EVER gotten to being offended. It’s sesame street done by crack addicts. There’s an entire episode devoted to the alcoholic letter N falling in love with the sleazy letter S, and having a baby i. What does that spell, everyone?
Okay, so, I don’t usually write much on the particulars of the comings and goings of my life, because last time I started doing that, it turned into a total whine-o-thon perfectly fitting in with livejournal. But seeing as my memory sucks, and I won’t remember the following events a week from now, I figure it’s fitting to use this place as a secondary brain.
This week the youngest of my clan, The Jock, ended up coming out to California, mostly to visit the oldest of my brethren, The Felon. My family history is very, very convoluted, but as far as these two are concerned, the basic story goes like this. Their mother, The Troll (my stepdad’s ex), is crazy. She kept having kids, getting disappointed in them, giving up, and going to have another, until she settled on The Jock as the perfect one. Her blatant favoritism has left all of them with varying levels of angst and crazy. The Felon, for example, moved in with a stripper the day he turned 18.
Now, as as family, we’ve all tried to raise each other in a good manner befitting our geeky Kentuckian Wiccan Jewish sci-fi fantasy medieval recreationist Mensa member roots. Unfortunately, we’re up against pretty crazy odds, and I’d say that my brothers have around a 50% failure rate. Some of them have turned it around miraculously and are doing quite well for themselves, while some are sinking into the morass of their own obsessions. The Jock seems to be taking the same route as the Felon, that is, the one more traveled. He’s tragically normal.
The entire time I was showing him around Hollywood, the conversation was usually about:
I showed him Fight Club for the first time. He watched it like he would have watched a boxing match. “Oh man, that looks like it hurt!” “Man, did you see that guy’s face?” “They’re really going at it!” I had a long talk with him on why Fight Club can actually be a harmful entertainment. Unlike Grand Theft Auto or Doom, which are parodically violent, and clearly fantasy, Fight Club (like the news, or creationist textbooks, or pornography) subtly creates its own reality. It tries to show you that it’s right. That this is the way the world is. At the end, it refutes that, by showing Tyler is a dangerous anarchist, but the point is lost on a number of people who watch it.
I think the whole talk went in one ear and out the other.
The Jock has turned into one of those people who beats up people like me. He’s the bully that picks on nerds. This was, and continues to be, very deeply upsetting.
So I went out and got drunk. Last night, amid some amount of chaos, a bunch of people from work went out to see the 40-year-old Virgin (in honor of one of our ex-colleagues, a man whom we have all tried to help along the road to socially well-adjusted). We went to Lola’s, a fairly expensive pub near work, which served insanely delicious alcohol. I do not normally drink. At all. Alcohol is one of the vilest-tasting substances this side of coffee. But this place served -chocolate martinis-. They were tasty. I had two. It was enough to make me fairly toasted for the rest of the night, which was a fairly novel experience.
We then absconded to The Grove, to see the movie, but they had drastically oversold the show. There wasn’t an open seat in the entire theater, and we had pre-ordered tickets. So we got refunds and began to wander about The Grove for a bit, where I ran into an old teacher, two old friends, and one of my housemates. When we finally went to another bar near Fairfax and Santa Monica, I called one of my friends who lives near there. Since she was out of town, she let us use her apartment’s parking space, which was very near the bar. Everyone from work was flabbergasted that I knew that many people, considering I generally just sit quietly at my desk.
Overall things are going okay, just can’t shake this general feeling of malaise. The next Big Exciting Thing will be along afore much longer, I’m sure, but until then… things are fairly dull.
Teenage Mutant Pirate Turtles.
Alternate-dimension archenemies of those… other turtles.
This needs to happen. Get on it.
Two things I saw today that reaffirmed for me that, yes, I live in LA:
1) A young man sitting on the curb not half a block from my house, waiting for the bus, with full Maori face tattoos.
2) A man pushing around an ice cream cart… except he was selling powdered corn with ketchup on it… and the ice cream cart was a shopping cart… and the corn was kept in a big black trash bag… and the condiments were kept in a paper grocery bag. Despite this man’s dubious distinction of owning the most Ghetto Ice Cream Cart in all of Los Angeles, he was able to sell corn to every kid on my block.
So just now, on the way back from Subway, a short, muscular man put his arm around my shoulder and exclaimed, “How could a skinny thing like you eat all of that sandwich?”
I sort of stared at him, horrified, until he left.
…my co-worker Amy says that I should have replied, “I fuck like a rabbit.”
Now, granted, I think this short would be a lot truer to the comics if Batman had started making out with Robin at the end, but it’s still pretty good:
From the IMDB:
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