26 June 2005

all grows up and grows up.

am seated outside in the chilly air, here at the coffeeshop, trying to sketch out a savings/budget plan -- trying to look sophisticated and unflappable. and failing; i just caught my reflection in the window and saw that my face resembles that of a sexually confused gerbil. my 30th birthday is tomorrow. it looms -- not the i-will-now-weave-you-a-fabulous-hemp-blanket kind of loom, but more the abstract-yet-ominous signifier type. on this last day of 20somethingness i am struggling in my search for a bit of peace; for a bit of confidence, a bit of resoluteness in the face of the sizeable solitude that sits before me. as well as to find a way or a mode by which i can do a good job of loving the ones i love. ..and the task feels wantonly tall, today, shit. why is that? shit. i don't know.

so here i am on this gray windy sunday. i try to sit still while i fight the inertia, while i struggle against an all-at-once need for a comprehensive mission statement**. and i do eventually succeed: my body manages, for just a moment, to pass from idleness into stillness, and, then, the furthest-back place in my head clears its throat and ever-so-calmly reminds that the only needed means of strengthening myself lies in remembering my loves. just stating them to myself. then stating them to the ones i love. then demonstrating it where i can; even if, today, that is just the saying of it, there is something very nearly big in the small number of words it takes to do so. then: i love you, my peops, my bruddahs and sistahs who have been and will be there for me; you know who you are; i love you. you have kept your hands on me, have offered me your arm even at times when it has been damnably inconvenient and downright hard. i love you. am so grateful.


** thus far, rejected candidates include:
"I understand perfectly, but that doesn't mean you have to get all emotional."
"Is that really necessary?"
"Mark's Eightfold Abs - The way to the end of suffering that will help you grasp the impermanent and imperfect nature of worldly ideas and make your tummy the envy of everyone if properly developed"

21 June 2005

Happy SKULSTICE 2005 Everybody!

hurray for the longest day of the year. hurray for my Still Being Here to enjoy it.

Things That Have Happened To Make Us Want To Make Nice With God; A List

1. have begun reading the bible again; the first time in a while i have read it for reasons not in the let's-read-Job-and-dissect-it-with-absurdist-sartorialness vein. granted, it's a gradual process: we have read the first three chapters of the book of mark. over a three-week period. but,

1a) mark gets straight to the good shit. matthew nimbly-pimblys around with his who-begat-who-firsts and his page-long accounts of pregnant women riding donkeys; mark doesn't mess. by the end of chapter 1 jesus has already performed like 4 miracles.

1b) when asked in front of crowds just What In The F he thinks he's doing (healing people all the time & casually mentioning the fact that he can forgive sin), jesus refers to himself as the Son of Man. i love this, the way it plays down his messiahness--it's more open to interpretation than Son of God. turns out he borrowed it from daniel--when gabriel appears to him in a vision, gabes calls out, Hey, You, Son of Man: What Is Happening [sic]. i love that jesus was read enough to know this, to know that people who know daniel would know there was a precedent and not condemn him. just as much for me, though, the Son of Man factor is about the kind of presence he is -- not like i typically think of omnipresence, which has a quality of over and above-ness to it. this is down here, standing across the room, eye to eye. which leads me to,

2) being at st james, singing in latin at the friday night service, enjoying the little latinish spiritual vibe; when i remember to raise my chin so the words don't get formed in my throat -- then i am looking up at the evening light pouring in through the glass dome atop the altar space, and inscribed around the rim in thick letters are the simple words I AM IN YOUR MIDST. and i start bawling. singing loudly and bawling and the louder i sing the lighter i feel and my toes are tingly and eventually i get ahold of myself but, after it's over, i cross the sanctuary to look at the statue of peter and when i look up at the dome again i see that the other side says only, AS ONE WHO SERVES. my eyes begin to stream again. and i am so happy as i leave.

3) while it is too-often and rather glibly remarked that God Has A Sense Of Humor, such a statement is not far from the truth in our experience, which is that God Has A Borderline Absurdist Appreciation Of Juxtaposition. for, when we have collected ourselves and cruised around the sanctuary lighting the occasional candle, we exit the cathedral's side door. as we round the building's corner onto 8th ave (our toes tingly, our spirits bubbly, our mind serene), we fairly bump into 2 bedraggled and dirty hobos, one of who jumps back, sizes me up quickly and asks with a gruff earnestness, "Do you know anyone who needs some CornNuts and some ID?" not cornnuts or ID, you understand -- cornnuts AND ID. we smile. look at him with eyes that are bleary with appreciation. and move on.

12 June 2005

The Sub-Cum-Con Project.

Some of you have written to express concerns that we appear to have slowed in our ongoing endeavor to prolong obscurity. Not to worry! We are back, this time with the first of what promises to be a needlessly drawn out series entitled Sub-Cum-Context: Behind the Mask of Today’s Pop Lyrics. An expository spin on the tired trend of musical biographies, the Sub-cum-Con project will uncover exciting new ground by biographializing not the songwriter but the lyrics themselves.

The concept arose out of a mescaline-enhanced late-night conversation we had with a potted houseplant in front of our apartment building. We had been enjoying a delicious menthol cigarette and contentedly humming “Back On The Chain Gang” when the houseplant remarked that he knew the tune from somewhere but couldn’t quite place it. Soon enough, conversation had eased into the manner in which a song possessES a life of its own – one that exists quite outside of the artist who performed it. If, we posited, a specific song is able to contain a certain sense of life, then it must also possess life history, and, even more interestingly, life issues. With this hypothesis in hand, we eagerly donned the analytical lens and went in search of life-containing lyrics. What we found there, between these well-loved lines, is breathless and revealing. The first example is below. [note: a bold typeface signifies original lyrics; emergent subtext is in regular font]


from Lean On Me orig. composed & performed by Bill Withers

Sometimes in our lives / We get sores that look like hives / We all have pain / We all have sorrow / And it hurts like a mo’foh / But, if we are wise / We don’t go for our gun because / We know that there’s always tomorrow / So just call on me brother, when you need a hand / Then we can bring up the topic, of painful pustule glands / We all need somebody to lean on / We both remember that night, when “Lean on” was code for “Rub against nude” / And now / I just might have a problem that you’d understand / We were trashed but did not think, we’d end up on the motel room floor / And now it hurts like me johnson, got slammed in a door / We all need somebody to lean on / Like we are trying in vain, to pee out a mel-on / We all need somebody to lean on

11 June 2005

(woof?)

:guest blogger : robert daltoid:

i am a lap dog
by mark :ten-gallon: huntsman

chapter 1: i like to stroll while i masturbate
chapter 2: it wasn't my allen wrench
chapter 3: that's my beautiful wife giving that hand job
chapter 4: where to hide broken porch swings
chapter 5: first the elbow, then the song
chapter 6: really now. can't you just lie still?
chapter 7: life was funny. like zebras are funny.
chapter 8: looking forward to my next hard-on

appendix:
linear history of prostate effectiveness

tits and/or ass.

:
Opportunity! You Could Become A Published Author!

The editors at Turgid Matters Books are in the solicitation phase of an essay compilation that aims to lend insight to a matter of particular cultural revealingness. By amassing the grammatically-suited introspections of a variety of entrants we judiciously deem to comprise a representative sample, we will shed light on a carefully re-worded age-old question: Tits and/or Ass (Body part preference and what it reveals about the self). Oh, yes – light will be shed. Dating standards will be scaled back. Nocturnal emissions will be exculpated.

Interested parties should adhere to the requirements outlined below. In the interest of helping you achieve the level of voyeuristic reflection we seek, the following is an example of the kind of submission that will be skimmed, squinted at, and subsequently folded up and stapled into an ass-shaped hat for our pet rabbit to wear:


“When I go out to the club with my bros, I usually have a few drinks, lean back against the bar, and survey the room and then I decide if I want to score some box. First I check out the blondes. If the hair is long then my eyes will follow it down to her ass, and stay there until she turns around. But only until she turns around because it’s the tits that really churn my buttah. Some dudes pretend like they don’t like fake tits. But those dudes are fags, it doesn’t matter. The best titty job I ever had was this night just after high school. Me and my bandmates were at this party (what happened was that we all realized we were tired of the boring hard-core stuff, and so one night decided that we should make power-riff music dedicated to the themes of hardcore porn. So we did. We decided our new genre was called Core-core, and our band was called Scratchshot! Which was wicked.) Anyway this big old chick who had done some internet stuff was there at this party and we convinced her to take us each in the upstairs bedroom by turn – later we found out that she had titty-jobbed every one of us and we were like “Yes that Rocks!” And so we were all so amped and totally felt like brothers in a way we hadn’t before, you know? We went in the practice space and pounded out this anthem to her, which rocked, it was called “Thanks for the Mammaries,” and it was our most popular ever, it got played almost every week on the local college radio station…”


By contrast, here is an excerpt taken from a more substantial entry:


“…Personally, my jaw goes slack when I am confronted with the either/or attitude with which males persistently state the question: ‘Are you a tits man or an ass man?’ Yea, it is not terribly uncommon for females to use similar phraseology, though one suspects that, most often, this results from the linguistical tyranny of society’s change-resistant, rayon-like fabric. But let us momentarily accept the hypothetical premise of forcing a choice between the primary protrudinal parts of female body. What are men really choosing?

After seeing the data from a controlled study conducted in a heterosexual bar in the greater Duluth area, I was intrigued: Men who have an answer at the ready – this answer is almost always “tits” – are not really interested in which one they would like to have; rather, they would prefer to opine on the matter of which they would prefer to stare at. When asked to consider and actual choice – you get to have one but not the other - the response of one unbendingly pro-tit subject named Tad was to take a long, slow sip of his beer; his his face grew visibly somber; and I could literally see him saying wistful goodbyes to a variety of perfect handfuls, sand-dollar areolas; the waitress with the D-cups and the biker chick who liked to bite her own nipples. I asked if he had indeed changed his mind; he nodded. And before I could ask why, he offered, “Yup. I’ll have to hold on to the ass. Gotta have butt. It’s practically attached to the part that you nail.”

(Please keep in mind that the above are just examples of suitable and not-; we seek to attract a variety of experiences, including those of women. We are having a hard time with the women.)

Do you have an answer to the question of Tits and/or Ass? Send it to us! If your writing has a certain sexiness to it, we may very well read what you have to say. Please clearly delineate a thesis, and make sure your submission is five medium-sized paragraphs in length: attention-grabbing introduction; wholly redundant conclusion; and three lithe, taut body paragraphs in between. If your nipples are attractive when erect, include a series of decreasingly-tasteful pictures so that we may confirm your qualifications. If your ass passes the pencil test,** send verifiable photographic evidence. Best of luck.




**Developed in 1953 by the mildly greasy, sexually ambiguous nephew of Alfred Kinsey, the Pencil Test is widely considered the apex of the Teacher Says It’s Part of Class Period, which in itself is looked upon by scholars as the first sign of postmodernist acquiescence among our nation’s youths. Though it is pre-dated by the True-or-Falsies Quiz, the Pencil Test was the clear inspiration for the Protractor Opinion and, later, the notorious Spit-or-Swallowball Fight. The Pencil Test refers to the practice of removing pants and under-things, then taking a standard #2 pencil and placing it lengthwise along the crease where the heel of the buttock meets the thigh. If, when the hand is removed, the pencil stays in place, you have failed and deserve a spanking. If the pencil falls to the ground, you have passed. And deserve a spanking.

10 June 2005

paralleliality.

so yesterday a couple of my (god how i hate that i am about to write the following 2 words) online friends were bantering about relationships and the guy was complaining about how he has been prematurely and premeditatively burned by girls and how he will never trust again. and moss (who is a girl herself) said that he needed to ease the f off with the desperation and relax; to not expect anything; to enjoy his chance to find "a string of awesome girls to play with serially or parallelly." i smiled at that, then immediately wrote a personal message to moss:

the updated version of the OED gives the following definition:

Parallelilialism - the grammatically gentiled -ism state wherein one is continually in search of another person who possesses a similar fondness for linguistical plasticity; (eg, with regard to the bendiness of words "Thank the Lord, at last i find someone who has a sophisticated sense of parallellial inventionalness" P.Laureal, Notes and Other Blunders Vol 4, 1957)

then i paused, lit a smoke. and realized that, for me, her use of that word encapsulizes both the dilemna (of doubting your ability to trust a girl again ever) and the solution: i now have a crush on moss. simply for the cadence of the way she chose to phrase her reply. "parallelly" is a fun and make-believe word; it has a delighful odor. it is the kind of word that is invented when 2 kids are up in the tree fort discussing schematics for the most efficient way to assail the obnoxiously needy neighbor boy with water balloons. and that is so fun. moss is so fun.

everyone, even ferris, wants to treat -isms like cold product -- let's put your fascism side by side with my nihilism and take turns moaning about humanity. but i think -isms are also much tinier and more important than that; i truly actually believe that your very first thin-sliced impression of someone can give you an accurate and true sense of their particular energy and mode of operation on this wobbly spinning circle. meanwhile, though, you have all sorts of outside influences and inner daemon-like-figures that do their subtle damndest to sway and distract and ultimately damn you to pursue those who move away from you. so we must take care. ..i say that as someone who is days removed from having his heart as badly bruised as it has been since i was taking english classes that taught the inflexible merits of the 5-paragraph essay [Bing. Bang. Bongo] and meanwhile i walk around, functioning and sharply sentient while simultaneously aware that my spirit has had its ballast cut and is drafting ever-further away from me. we must take care, but ultimately we must re-learn to trust that which every one of my 6-yr-old sunday school students has in spades: the ability to look a person in the shins-and-then-the-waist-and-then-the-tits-and-then-the-eyes and know, with instant and honest surety, whether she can be trusted.

07 June 2005

for a look inside the cover

..of the newest work by the internationally self-esteemed author RB Daltimeter, go here. courtesy of Words Are Born Publications.

05 June 2005

children, this week i will stand here while you teach me about love.

during 1st grade sunday school at UPC, which i’ve been helping lead for a couple of months now, after the lesson we have group discussion questions:

one that we asked this week is “what’s love – or, how do you know what love is?”

hannah, age 5, tentatively raised her hand. and suddenly i couldn’t breathe for my spirit shot up and got lodged firmly in my throat:

“when your name feels safe in someone else’s mouth – then you know you are loved.”

"everybody thinks lesbians are cool until his girlfriend turns into one."

just now outside it is sunny and lightly raining on me at the same time. which i like, always; is a rare kind of juxtapositional beauty via madame nature. also, because i am in a quasi-reflective sort of state -- the kind my writerly end is wont to make too much of -- nature's simultaneous beauty tells that now is the time to lay down a history of how i came to think of myself as a writer; to feel with certainty that writing was something i was called to do. (i haven't mapped it out in my head and so do not know if this will be long to the point of tedium. if so, please accept my apology in advance.)

January 1996
- mark decides not to pursue a minor after all. he realizes that "minor" is a word he is already adequately acquainted with; as such, he does not need an official transcript to remind him of this familiarity.
- so now he has a bunch of credits available; mark deems that he will take english classes that sound fun. one of these is Introduction to Creative Writing.

February 1996
- mark finds himself at hot spots coffee shop -- an all-night place where he often goes to study and flirt unsuccessfully. on this night, he is to write his first short story, due the following day.
- he has not the slightest idea how to begin and so just sits there, feeling increasingly useless and dirty. he decides to write this; hence, the opening lines are
- god i need a shave. a shower and a shave. a shave and a shower. whichever.
- the rest of the story -- about a dude who discovers, after the fact, that his girlfriend has broken up with him so she can date girls -- follows immediately and with ease.
- upon completion of the assignment, mark feels a tinge of self-satisfaction that his studies have never before granted him.
- mark sleeps only briefly but wakes up feeling fresh. sharp.

March 1996
- mark has his first office visit with dr randy, his creative writing professor.
- in that meeting, dr randy kicks his feet up on the desk, flips through the story, and sets it down with a smile on his face. he says that
- mark's writing reminds him so strongly of beck lyrics and asks if mark knows beck?
- beck's current album has not left mark's stereo in 9 weeks.
- mark decides to dedicate his life to writing, which right away he begins referring to as his craft.

..so, yeah: in all earnestness, that is how long it took. now i will go back inside so i can listen to beck's guero record some more.

02 June 2005

drop knowledge not the ball.

..A glimpse inside the newest hard-hitting work from MediumWell Books

Drop Knowledge Not The Ball : The sociological impact of the sports metaphor

by Dr Mark Huntsman, PhD, PdA, BdSM


This book is fondly dedicated to John Tesh


“If you fumble, if you fall
If you muff the pass
If you force us to punt
If, for any reason, you drop the ball
I personally will tear open your ass.
Now go out there and just have fun.”

- Coach Bear Bryant of the Texas A&M Crimson Tide


~ TABLE OF CONTENTS ~

Chapter 1. That Is Out of Bounds – The parameters of social acceptability
Chapter 2. The Mendoza Line – The benefits of a collective mediocrity
Chapter 3. Take a Timeout – Postponing the inevitable in a masculine way
Chapter 4. Buzzer-Beater – The superiority of last-second accomplishment
Chapter 5. And One! – How mild physical hardship reinforces entitlement
Chapter 6. Hit a Home Run – Understanding physical intimacy in 90-foot increments
Chapter 7. Take It To the Rack - Female perception of sex in sports imagery due to the predominance of sticks and balls and racks
Chapter 8. Changing Teams – Discussing homosexual impulse without removing your beer hat
Chapter 9. Dribble Penetration – The art of pulling out with mad style*
Chapter 10. 4th and Long – Disguising profound desperation as opportunity


*The inspiration for this chapter comes via the esteemed scholar RB Daltimeter III