That didn't want to be . . .

IN BRIEF / GEORGIA
Bondage Is Prelude to a Heist at Sex ShopFrom Times Wire ReportsSeptember 28, 2006Three masked men robbed a Stone Mountain sex shop after tying up employees with black fur handcuffs and silver leg irons taken from the store shelves, police said. Authorities said the men stole $230 from the cash register. No one was hurt.

Beautiful Hate

A winsome demon approached me and told me that she had a bargain I’d be interested in. She said that I could have anything I wanted in the world as long as my anger never superseded her own. Now that sounded like a pretty good deal. If you had seen her you would have taken less time than I did to say yes. Did I tell you that she lived in this world?

Years later and I’m still keeping up my end of the bargain. But don’t think that it’s easy, letting a vision have its way with you. Sometimes, a lot of times, more frequently it would seem, I’d like to have the most beautiful hate. I know that sounds selfish. Every time I get pissed off and start stomping around the demon will remind me with a quick wolfish gesture that I’d better not go to that place where I believe I’ve got a handle on the order of things. Be patient. Good things come to those that wait. Now I know who said that and it ain’t helping. I wonder what all of us who are holding our hate back are waiting for. Shoes are dropping everywhere folks and we are just waiting.

76 Ball

A friend wrote me an email asking for a story. I tell stories sometimes rather that just ranting like a pathetic fuck. So here's the story I sent her, minus most of the incriminating details, like real names. And the comic I stole from Zippy the Pinhead, which made me think about the story in the first place. I hope Bill Griffith doesn't sue me.

When I was in high school, and the drugs started to take ahold of each nights proceedings, interesting things used to happen. We always partied at my friend Neil's house (cause he was an orphan) and after getting properly lit up, we'd try to figure out something destructive to do. Neil was a pretty good golfer, and he lived off an alley that was just off State Street, which was the main artery thru Santa Barbara. Across State Street across from where he lived (like a nine iron we figured) was a Union 76 Station with one of those giant 76 balls, looming like a big target that we could see from his backyard on the alley. Well, you can imagine that as soon as we were properly ffffed up, it was time to take a couple of shots at that sucker. We sent our Canadian diabetic alcoholic friend Random Soucey (we just called him Soucey) over there (he became a lawyer . . . hmmm) to spot where the balls were landing. Neil would then launch a salvo of 3 or 4 balls and then we'd hide as eventually we did attact some police attention. The thought of those balls landing and then bouncing thirty feet in the air as they bounced off the concrete was further heightened when Soucey reported that he watched one guy filling up, hand on the nozzle, watch one and then another ball careen through the parking lot maybe ten yards away each time. The guy didn't move, just kept filling up as golf balls leapt and pinballed around him. Neil did manage to hit the ball but it never broke, as we all secretly hoped for.

Ah, the good old days when wanton destruction could trigger hours of hilarity. We made our own fun, damnit, none of this relying on the fucking internet to provide us with some sort of vicarious destructive thrill. (Although the stuff I've seen with Mentos and Diet Coke looks like it could be fun. Especially if you did it in a Walmart. )

Call the Police

I remember one time driving down the hill from Valley Center to Escondido, I ended up behind one very drunk asshole who managed to bang up against the J-wall as we came down Bear Valley Parkway and then, on the streets of Escondido, he almost ran over a woman pushing her laundry across the street. With my wife and kids in the car, I followed him and when he stopped in the middle of the freaking street near his house, I knocked on the door and talked some homeowner into letting me use their phone to call the police. They showed quickly and I pointed out the drunken dope that was still in his car. They arrested him, thanked me and I figured that I had done the right thing.

A cop ended up shooting Charger linebacker Steve Foley the other night. And among the things he didn’t do was call for backup. That the cop was off-duty, in an unmarked car and not in uniform only add to the smell associated with this event. The local media, a bunch of pathetic whiteboy asskissers, can only say that Foley has a history of alcohol abuse and that the car he was in was weaving. He wasn’t the driver, rather it was a female passenger. The DA just dropped a case filed against him in April alleging public intoxication, resisting arrest and battery of a police officer. The team has suspended Foley without pay for the season, essentially saving 775,000 bucks and they could ask for an 875,000 dollar signing bonus to be returned. His teammates are pissed of course, and we are not going to know for a long time what really happened at 3:30 in the morning. Suffice is to say is that the cop, one Aaron Mansker, should be asked if he too was drinking.

Foley will be out for the season with three gunshot wounds. The Chargers have a bevy of linebackers, one of which they planned on dumping (Donnie Edwards) who they now will have to consider keeping. What pisses me off is the way the local press always likes to make sure the cop’s side of the story is what drives the narrative. What the Union-Tribune hasn’t noticed is that the cops have been running the show in this town and in this red country for far too long. How about hiring a black sportswriter or two?

No debate

I spent ten minutes watching the Jim Lehrer news report on the last day of August, and I almost gave myself an aneurysm doing so. Debating the Presidents shit talk of the same day, was a half-wit blond representative from Tennessee and a chokingly inarticulate democrat from Massachusetts. Lehrer looked almost stunned as he tried to pull something viable from two denizens of the spinning hell which is Washington. There is no real debate going on about what we are doing in Iraq, because what we are doing in Iraq amounts to nothing. Talk of terrorists has become so facile and reactionary that real questions about what behavior identifies one as a terrorist and what are the real legitimate aims of this great nation are buried like the bodies of 9/11 under a steaming mass of broken capitalism.

Given the way terrorists are defined these days I am sure that the Native American fighters of the 17th-19th centuries deserved their “savage” nomenclature. And if you do stop to think about it for a second you know that us Enlightenment following Europeans have systematically gone about making new batches of Indians to demonize in the process of populating the hell of our own creation which exists to justify our hateful religion of choice. Not to knock believers, but Christianity of the lower order runs on certainty and fear. Without hell I’m not sure it could even exist. And this is precisely the point our beloved W is making in idiot code. We must see the other as the evil enemy of the past. No debate is necessary. We are soldiers of Christ, not a bunch of damn hippies. Hoo rah!