The Liberal Media and other Fairytales: The Liberal Media has reared its ugly head since the disasters in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. It pulled a sneak attack by playing opossum since the election of 2000 and thereby convincing everyone that it had indeed died a lonely death. The Liberal Media apparently died shortly after George W. Bush stole/bought the 2000 election and proclaimed himself the legitimate leader of the Free World. How do you come to such conclusions you might wonder? Reason and some logical thought may lead to such decrees. Situation: The World trade Center gets attacked on Sept 11th and what does our esteemed leader do? He sits in front of a class of school children for SEVEN MINUTES!! and appears not to have a clue as to what comes next? Shouldn't the Liberal Media have jumped on him and screamed "Do Something! Act like a leader!" No criticism from anyone (except Michael Moore and look how far out of the mainstream he is!) Situation: After the invasion of Iraq no Weapons of Mass Destruction were found. Further the Downing Street Memos indicate that there never were WMDs in Iraq. Even further, the alleged uranium Saddam was trying to buy from Africa turned out not to be true. So we have a sitting Republican President who has at least is in an embarrassing position and where is the Liberal Media? If they are indeed the enemy of the Republican State then they should have been jumping on this like white on rice. . Situation: The Tsunami hits Christmas 2004 and about a half a gajillion people in Asia die. Bush is on vacation and it takes about four days for him to dig himself outta of the snowbanks at Crawford TX and get some aid to those folks. Where's the outrage? Where was the Liberal Media? Situation: Too many soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq to support policies that vague and always changing. We got Saddam and we didn't get the WMDs let's go home. Maybe the real war in is Afghanistan or maybe North Korea? No Liberal Media here either! All of a sudden after Katrina, the Liberal Media is back with its nasty leftist agenda to smear the good names of Mike Brown and George Bush. I hear this bullshit from people who can't accept that their esteemed leader is not well versed in leadership. He chose poorly when he promoted Mr. Brown from the President of the Arabian Horse Club to the head of FEMA. I hear Brown is a swell guy, a great trial lawyer and he knows boccoos about Arabian horses. He didn't know how to respond to a disaster like Katrina and people died. It also appears to some that Mr. Bush may be a racist! I don't buy that argument. He's not a racist because a racist sees only the color of a person's skin. The only color that Bush and his kind are predisposed to favor is the color of money! If your bank account hasn't got enough zeros then you don't count in their book! So maybe there is no such thing as the Liberal Media. If there were ,do you think they would have had a field day since 2000? No Virginia, the bad old Liberal Media is a myth that is as old as the country. One of the chief proponents of the Modern Myth, Reed Irvine, died not too long ago. You think maybe the myth follows the man.

I got to wondering if anybody has addressed the issue of the "Lyndon Johnson" in cell phone etiquette. I think nobody has addressed it in these terms because I hope I am the first person to bring this up.
You are probably what wondering "what is a Lyndon Johnson?" and what does it have to do with my cell phone? I got this from a friend of mine who swears it was true of our former President. It seems that when LBJ ( that stands for Lyndon Baines Johnson for you young folks and trivia buffs) was President and he took a dislike to someone, he would meet with them when he was on the commode. He'd call them in right about time for a Presidential sit down, prop the door slightly ajar and conduct his meeting while doing number 2.
I got to studying about the "Lyndon Johnson" and how it pertains to cell phones. There are two kinds of "Lyndon Johnson's" for our discussion. First is the "unintentional" Lyndon Johnson. You are caught in the moment while doing your thing and the damn cell phone rings. You are struggling whether you should possibly breach etiquette and answer the damn thing (thus creating the unintentional LJ) or should you let it ring and go to the voice mail? If you like the person on the other end you might just let it ring. But if the caller has juicy gossip, the location of the WMDs or other pertinent info you may want to risk the breach of etiquette. However, if the person on the other end is Brutus to your Caesar then by all means give'em an unintentional LJ.

How about the intentional LJ? This is a special form of passive aggressive behavior and should be used in moderation. Let's say last week somebody ( not you!) totally fucked up some big case at work and you got the blame for it. You got reamed but good by your boss. You know he/she is mental midget with the cranial capacity of walnut and he/ she believes anybody but your sorry ass.
This week you know you have important info that the boss needs. When do ya give it to him? What do ya do? You get your cell phone and call him right in the middle of a good dump. Make it as noisy as you want. He may not ever catch on but you got the last laugh by giving him a Lyndon Johnson!

"Let's go home and have sex- my coochie's clean and it smells GOOD!"- Peaches.

What is the value of a clean house? Well, not owning one limits my knowledge of the subject. I have visited several in the course of 46 years and as a frequent visitor, I can say "Please clean the foyer on a regular basis!" Poor Vickie from Ponderosa was lax in that department and she (we) missed out on some great sex when we were 16. Vickie was everything any 16 year old boy could want -she had a pulse and she wanted to get it on! She really was sweet and she thought I hung the moon ( I still don't know who told her that!). Her foyer was not prepped and the ambiance was unpleasant. It reminded me of Venice, Italy (the old city by the sea) with the canals and the sea water and the eels. Did you know Venice had eels? I found this out when I walked through the ancient streets and saw the fishmongers with their wares for sale. The eels still had the heads on and one stood up and " Do I look familiar?"He sounded just like Big Pussy Bompensaro from The Sopranos.
Actually, I copped that last gag from the episode of The Sopranos after Pussy got whacked. Tony, Paulie Walnuts and Sal took Big Pussy on fishing trip and now Pussy sleeps with the fishes. Tony has a dream where he walking by a fishmongers cart and one of the big fish starts talking to him. It is the voice of Big Pussy. Actually, it's Tony feeling guilty for whacking his best friend but that's business.
We had a great discussion the other day about The Sopranos- Church Lady , Hermes and I. CL watched 10 minutes of an episode at a friend's house and decided the whole lot of 'em were going to Hell in a Handbasket in the Express Lane. I'm not sure who's going to Hell and who's not- it's not my job to decide that. It would appear that anyone who could kill another for money or to keep from going to jail must be a heartless sociopath. But that's what The Sopranos is about-the moral struggles of someone who kills, steals, and brutalizes people in the course of their business dealings. It like Tony Soprano said "You're born into this shit!"
In my humble opinion, lots of people get screwed in business deals every day- it's the American Way. Look at the Enron scandal, the Tyco rip off and Haliburton. At Enron and Tyco, the leaders ripped off the shareholders and made off with lots and lots of bucks. In an incident like that, there almost surely was bribery and lots of lying going on. Maybe nobody got whacked but still the wolves raided the henhouse.
Bob Dylan once said "To live outside the law you must be honest". Tony Soprano, even though he exists only on a soundstage in Burbank, is more honest to me than the pirates of Tyco and Enron. With Tony, what you see is what you get, and with these other thieves, you never know.

In the pre dawn rain as I struggled awake today, I dreamed Paul Lynde was yukking it up on my own version of Hollywood Squares. Before that I was riding in a school bus driven by my daughter. She asked me later today if that was the short bus. There is theme here and I am going to find it. Seems to be retards and fairies or retards and midgets.

"If there's two things I can't stand in the world. It's retards and midgets."- Doyle from Sling Blade. I love that movie. I quote it all the time. I like to go McDonald's and ask for "some of them french fried potaters". I try to do my best impersonation of Carl but it is difficult. It is difficult to do things like that right. I guess that's why we live in a PC world.

George C. Wolfe said in his book Spunk Three Tales by Zora Neale Hurston "It is suggested that the rhythms of the dialect be played instead of the dialect itself. A subtle but important distinction. The former will give you Zora. The latter Amos and Andy." Of course, Zora Hurston was a Harlem Renaissance writer and a contemporary of Langston Hughes. She wrote many important books on African American culture and documented Negro folk tales. She wrote a book called Mules and Men in 1935 which documented Southern beliefs in roots and root doctors. Spunk is one of her plays and Mr. Wolfe gives his thoughts on how to make the acting work instead doing caricature.
Zora Hurston died broke, employed as a maid in a hotel in 1960. Up until a few years ago, she was buried in a pauper's field in Florida. Alice Walker worked real hard to get her back in the limelight.

Where is all this going? Damned if I know-but enjoy the ride!

I bought a book at the flea market last week called Four Yoruba Rituals for the New World by James Mason. It set me back $5.50 and it was worth it. I got this as my companion to American Voodoo by Brad Davis. The book on Yoruba rituals documents four types of voodoo rituals practiced in America by the Yoruba practitioners. The Yoruba were one of the largest tribes in Africa and descendants are scattered across the Southern US, the Carribbean, and into Brazil. They were originally from Nigeria and carried their religious beliefs throughout the New World. It's difficult to make people give up their spiritual beliefs even if you kidnap, chain and beat 'em regularly. Slaves didn't give up much in the way of their beliefs-they just hid them and took them out when Whitey was asleep. Sure, alot of slaves "converted" to Christianity- I would have what with all the chains and ass whuppins. Somehow certain fundamental things survive calculated awfulness and these things still peer out at us on a good day. Keep looking!

Hunter S. Thompson is dead.

Those are four words I didn't want to hear for awhile. I feel shocked and ripped off because the way he went is the out the back door. Suicide is not heroic nor does it automatically elevate one's life above the rest. It's dastardly and wicked. I have survived three people committing suicide in my life and that is enough. I had a friend do it when we were barely out of high school. He was the kind of kid that was sensitive anyway and he tried real hard to fit in with a bunch of redneck hooligans. He failed at that and I guess he couldn't take it. The last time he I saw him he showed up at my door with a busted lip and a broken nose. This was courtesy of some long forgotten Neanderthals that lived on the periphery of our existence. A few days later he checked out. As for the Neanderthals they're probably driving around in their SUVs right now.

My uncle did it in 1995. He had a recurrence of colon cancer and just didn't want to go through it again. I guess rather than face a slow death in wheelchair and pissing in bag, he found the express exit. Suicide leaves a whole in the family fabric (if such a thing exists) and the edges never do meet up right again. I guess you can get used to most anything but it takes a long time and the going is slow.

My friend did about six months ago. She didn't go quietly either. She went out courtesy of the Columbia County Sheriff's Department. Kim holed herself up in her apartment with a loaded gun and some pills. She endangered the lives of a lot of police officers who were there trying to help her. She didn't take the help and should have. That's all I have to say about that.

There are certain stories that bear repeating and probably more than once. This one of those-the true kind that you just couldn't make up if you had to. The kind that still get a laugh on Thanksgiving or Christmas. This happened a long time ago in place that is not so far away but it existed in a time that is far off. I could take you to the gas station where this happened-it's just up the road where Highway 150 and the Stagecoach Rd (?) split off near Thomson, GA. Back in the day, there was no cable TV, no cell phones, or computers. This place was way out beyond the lights of town and there was no cultural sensitivity or anything like that.
I was about 9 years old and my family was out for a drive in the country. We had miniature poodle named Pierre that my grandmother had given us. Pierre had a dental problem with his lower jaw that caused his bottom row of teeth to stick out and he looked goofy enough as it was. That year we hadn't given Pierre his trimming yet so he looked like a giant cottonball with a huge underbite!
We stopped in this country store for gas and Pierre was sitting between me and my brother in the back seat. There was a young black kid about twelve years old pumping our gas and he looked in through the back window at the dog. He looked off puzzled and continued his work. He kept looking at the dog as he washed the windshields and he just had a puzzled look on his face. He finally came around to collect the money and when my father rolled down the window the kid said "Mister, that's pretty little sheep you got there! But he's got eyes just like a dog!"
We all were laughing so hard that the kid just looked at us like we were crazy! No one in the car was in control enough to tell the kid that Pierre was a dog and we drove away.

Pierre was a source of amusement for all the kids at my bus stop. He used to wander the streets(everybody's dog did it then) and he try to mate with every female he saw. I think he even tried the neighbor's cat a time or two. We used to call him Dirty Pierre and sang a song in his honor. It was set to the Frito Bandito tune and went something like "Aye ,Yay ,Yay, Yay, I am Dirty Pierre. I love to fuck bitches oh yes I do. If you don't watch out I will fuck you!" Of course to sing it right you have to haf an accent lika de Speedy Gonzalez!

I replaced "you yelled so loud..You scared my mule" with a new blog script. I got tired of the old one and after I heard this new one the other night. Well, it just made sense.

This past week people in our town have been playing golf in shirt sleeves and avoiding yellow green clouds of chlorine gas. That's how fucked up Karma can be sometimes. On one side of the world, 150,000 human beings lost their lives in the greatest natural disaster in our times. This shit is like the destruction of Pompeii or the sacking of Rome. The Tsunami is a major bigtime tragedy with implications that we won't even be able to understand. It makes the Titanic and even 911 seem a little smaller by comparison.
Closer to home- just over the river at least nine people died in that train wreck and subsequent aforementioned cloud of chlorine. No telling what the long term effects of that will be. It 'll be awhile before we venture over to the Blue Top Grill to eat. I look forward to that day. Graniteville will make a comeback but how will it change that beautiful village in the Valley? People will never see the Norfolk and Southern railroad the same again.

I have a theory that God must be like Mr. Magoo and he is armed with a giant rocket launcher. He knows all of us are fucking up one way or another but some like Ben Ladin, Saddam and the boys from Halliburton are doing things that effect everybody. 150,000 people in one of the poorest regions in the world did not need to die! God must be myopic or his aim is off! Think about it- a cosmic Mr. Magoo with a rocket launcher! Comforting!
Karma's funny that way.