Naval lint

The oceans are full of sailed ships.

You, 61° in Cleveland on January 30th, I hope you die of heat stroke.

Doing the right thing can be incredibly unfulfilling.

Each time I think I might want to make an actual friend, I thankfully remember that people are terribly overrated.

Responsibility [and X-Files reruns] keeps me from being a woodland hermit.

This post was paragraph after paragraph, surprisingly poetic -- not grandiloquent and moving, more easy flow rhyme-ish shit never there during actual tries.

Ergo, should turn discards into verse, or chuck this writing gig altogether.

Hey look, a shiny thing.

Suppose I should post something, or, it's a conspiracy, c-o-n-spiracy

Sure, spun an abundant howl of Alice, Soundgarden, Nirvana, occasionally peppered with Skin Yard, Gruntruck, but the lost 90s grooved much of these yokels as well. Most twentysomethings spend those 3650+ days entangled in some pointless gobbledygook such as "finding themselves" [ed. note: pretend the quotes are fingers accompanied by an unseen, Marty Feldman-esque bulge] but for us morans, 'twas the rusty car diaper shuffle, known in some circles as the magnet tar pit trap, & now that the first party crasher is a recent twentysomething, I feel old. But since I'm old & pop no temporary bliss, the sense of an ending quickly fades as I creak back & mellow to some tunes.

I can feel the wheel but I can't steer

The summer before the first video game war, yours truly was browsing at Peaches, later to become Coconuts then FYE then abandoned, ready to blow whatever hole-burning scratch my meager shit job threw in my pocket when the craziest, acid-fuck cover caught my four eyes & I was smitten before I heard a note. Filed in the metal section, so no Bell Biv DeVoe danger, Facelift lifted them; not tearing as thrash, but a creeping, painful rip. Pulling the Band-Aid slow always hurts more. Never getting as much love from the gatekeepers as other acts only added to the fuck you, plus it was & is good brooding & bike-riding music. Cue time travel: blind date success, the U of Akron, Clash of the Titans, far too early domesticity, & a sickly haunting curveball of solace in the form of Sap. 1992 was my K-T Boundary.

I want you to scrape me from the walls

North of the future Via Popearosa, I strolled to then fro from Disc Connection & its proprietor who bore an uncanny resemblance to a brutal Skynyrd or 38 Special roadie but was actually a swell guy beneath the perpetual shades. 55° that late September day the papers say, remember it being warm, was 82° as close as the 17th & hit the high 70s the following week. What's with the heat mapping of doddering memory? 'tis more than its cracked orange cover image. Heat births sweat which in turn births conscious acknowledgment of something awry, at least for me.

Here, i.e. then, I was 19 with no skills save a local Tecmo Bowl mastery & hashish-less heshering & I haven't expanded my repertoire much since, no loot past meager "work"-"study" [ed. note: verily, quote marks are apropos to both] scratch, & a new wife whose oven was bunn'd. Stupid adults aren't ready, so stupid kids sit behind the 8-, 9- & 10-balls. Despite having no first-, second- or third-hand experience with the ravaging stampede of white horses, Dirt became a security blanket.

To the non-idealist drowning in a sea of sorrow stupid with no island in sight though if there were it'd be populated by a cannibal holocaust, all is melodrama. Being predisposed to emotion over reason, like eating ten too many poem-stuffed pizza rolls with a cough syrup chaser & regretting the paralyzing numb when I should know better, Layne was singing my song. Now who's stupid, you query? Contraceptive failure rates exist as numbers on packaging & who hasn't always wanted to feel that special joy of existing as a statistic. What of Roe v. Wade, you inquire? A dozen nanoseconds, & nein. As with everything, until you're wearing the clogs, you ain't dancing. But this isn't about that divide & conquer bone so fuck off, but the whole I feel so alone/gonna end up a big ole pile of them. Like I said, melodrama, much preferable to the Sominex of coolly detached irony, & I haven't even hit on the still-omnipresent shadow: Brother, but not, from the aforementioned EP, chorus, first line.


Got me wrong

This was the original pressing with the proper song order, i.e. Down in a Hole as penultimate track. Such scene cred was important, I imagined, for those carousing & chording in a scene. When Bowling Ball Keith (liked to & looked like) & Rabid Mike whose woman done him wrong like a country music song [ed. note: no joke, crazy attracts crazy I guess] refused the shape of things to come, the former high school scene shrinks to two though feeling more like one, oft darkthroning before I knew what the hell that was. Candles pissed upon, proof of who's a fake. Exaggeration? For a time, just a time, the river was dammed indeed, comfort found in claustrophobic spite spackled over with its sonic expression & a predominantly forest green flannel & USC sweat pants [ed. note: beats me, so don't ask; wish I still had that Marijuana Pickers t-shirt handed down from gramps], the ensemble a walking vomitorium that I of course wore on my first day of student employment inside the Towering Slab.

I wasn't high on that chilly October afternoon, merely gorging on inattention to surroundings & others, a theme recurring to this day. Selfishness or safety? As with all things, a bit of both, & part of the problem.

Shocks to the system make one feel like a fly trapped in a jar, & those ghostly tracks plus the slow-burn death spiral on the self-titled a few years later sealed the hermetic deal. Frogs still pierces without remorse.

So, ten years later give or take, today in fact & the reason for this post, Layne's a syringe masquerading as a corpse, & ten after that, I'm still here, the bun out of the oven & into the frying pan-on-low-heat of misleadingly-labeled higher ed, just like yours truly was when Dirt first spun, a timely coincidence of marking out invented miles along an artificial road.

Looking back on all that, the causes of antisocial behavior, characters tuning in, dropping out as a tree's April buds (some have stood out, still do, & will because they're the rarest of creatures), wondering whose fault(s) was/is this spooling aftermath lip to silent lip, a thousand words for every one, more than one supporting or no, I've my suspicions which are probably less fault & more it is what it is, what shall I do, rooster snuffed yet animate?


If I would, could you?

To mope, to mope, sawed-off shotgun riffs choking dead meadows, fetal in the curling smoke of primal brooding, necks arcing, whipping, bending in the wind of dissolution, never breaking in time, this kind of crumbling takes time, rebuilding even longer. I have never felt such frustration/Or lack of self control. Aural scrawlings on repeat about drug addiction & darkness & the attendant figurative holes left after each step on a mine still harrow twenty years on in their hallowed comfort. There are other kinds of addiction, of that I'm versed well. So, desert island gaming at gunpoint, the works of this band. There can be no other choice, because there's always something to rebuild, preserve, & put off till later both home & abroad & what better fuel for hopeful lungs than an air of destruction?

We humans are storytellers, sure, & most are boring, mine included. But it's the only one I know well. & Down in a Hole is still the most beautiful song ever. Thanks, Layne & Co. Could've done it without you, but it would've sucked a little bit more.

Hot for teacher

The SBH & I have had our disgruntled goat moments with educators &, mostly & unsurprisingly, bean-counting admin types whose time would be better spent counting actual beans, affiliated with the classrooms the lunatic offspring spend their days doodling in, but in the interest of fairness & in ending this run-on more awkward than my usual fare, must now offer great praise to a pro-Misery Chick teacher who shall remain nameless for reasons of national security.

Apparently, there's a running extra credit gig in Offspring the Younger's English class, but it's mainly used to encourage shorties to pen stuff 'cause not every parent(s) is as yay! literature! as yours truly. Long becoming short, our genetic offshoot turned in previously-written, as angsty black-clad teenage chicks are wont to do, angsty black-clad teenage chick verse that, instead of generating a phone call flush with Columbine-isms, instead proffered yay! literature! post-its & a suggestion to check out the yay! death! of Emily Dickinson.

Yay! (some) teachers!

Higher education

The burbs

Tears of a joyful, unexpected satisfaction cascaded down my corpsepainted cheekbones some yon eve when Lunatic Offspring the Younger queried, with the full force of a childlike sincerity usually dead after a few short weeks as an adult in the machine, as to the differences between death & black metal.

Hold on, I must compose myself. Sniff.

In case you were wondering, whether for the loss of a loved one, the championship victory of a local sports team, or when une enfant fascinated with the darker half of the human condition begins to explore that side, crying is very metal.

Despite my love of language -- baroque & clear hues cleansing or a proxy thumb through the DSM-IV -- that for music goes deeper, so in lieu of prog-length treatises on styles of vocal chord destruction, tremolo picking, blast beats, the fine art of downtuning, the production aesthetic spectrum, I decided to present her with sonic samples at no cost.

"Does this dropped D have zero calories?"



Always good to first kick it old school.



The big city

Hi-ho the derry-o a-darkthroning we went, but don't let the picture-postcard, gently floral glass facade above fool ye. Being a righteous man of Cthulhu, 'tis a pain in my breast to bear witness to such a base Kingdom of Filth, such a Wretched Machine rabid with Despair & In Flagrante Delicto & -- no, I cannot go on, but the Duchess can. Caution: no, we didn't snapshot any hookers.

Simmer down.

Another stupid summer

Summer begins in earnest today, not seasonally, but scholarly, all compressed heat & sweat & stench in the collective tower of ivory head, a hydra of students, staff, fire-breathing faculty (not entirely true, some are cool) & hangers-on various & annoying & that's all before the weather's mentioned.

Such humidity, such bright blight turning salt back on its excretory beast, the creature a walking tequila, just add lime, or the lemon of the inexorable, monolithic, omnipresent four/four drone with no backbeat, spirit beat back into unlife. Brains! Have one, wish had one from the great & powerful lion.
 

Melodramatic, a bit, bien sûr, for less is indeed more, less bodies means less headaches tonight until flesh & bone unfold twisting tongues, while I cool in a stupor of synapses swimming the jolly seas of crazy descendants, Kynge's Brewe, daguerreotyping, awful versifying & heaping bowls of Englished snark.

One way or the other, I hope my heart doesn't stop because, since ghosts don't exist, I wouldn't get to poltergeist anyone's house & how cool would that be.

Inside joke theatre

Losing drawing winning game no. 3745 of computer chess last evening to a chorus of ever-evaporating mid-priced vino slosh & the above sludge aficionados hazily summoned lazy summers that were still desperate to be youthful, the last time(!) I played the kynge's pastyme (not lawn darts, as I later discovered much to my chagrin) till the shiny new adding machine chez Randal & being a pop to a two-year old Doodily, standardized college testing as I type. If she bombs, I blame myself for not having her replicate my test eve experience of a Sammy Hagar Weekend inhaling doobie aroma* at a rock and/or roll show.

*recall, the definition's been recently updated, phone home

A hoop jump to be sure & she knows it, such realism offsetting my dismal failure to inculcate the cold, calculating murderessness of loud, sweaty, life-affirming power chords. SLAYER! SLAYER! just doesn't fire the synapses of either lunatic offspring, but as long as the system is used to bump up bill-paying skills -- folks gotta not desiccate -- in her career (nein!) field (non!) personal interest (oui!) of choice, I'm proud papa. Try & find a happy gig, kids, unless you get tingly designing weapons-grade pieces-parts, then may an industrial accident befall you in the nether regions.

Since I'm a selfish bastard, am I happy at my gig? What is my gig? This?



I remember those idealistic days. I also remember not lying. This?

Not mine, don't sue, thanks. I'm so old school I rhyme.
Anyway, in lieu of a frank & not that fascinating discussion of how our already subsumed if not outright ax-murdered-by-our-own-idle-hand-under-orders (ten bucks says the Germans already have a word for this) self-definition wicked witches when in direct contact with a vengeance neither swift nor entertaining, meted out over decades, so that we will wonder if the misery in our life is manifest, the machinations of Leonardo Leonardo, or... some third thing, tonight's program sublime. Told you. Would I lie? Cheers.

A Cold War bunker just outside of Tirana, Albania.

Between the Rossoneri losing to fucking third-rate limeys, a hound dog press and having run through every underage hooker in Italy --

Weelax. I find good place for party down. Eets new country, neer bluebeery heel.

Here?? Stronzo!

You whet see. We good time. Medvedev know nuthing.










The world leaders descend a dust-strewn, crumbling staircase.

Boot...










...you're dead!

 

Bunga bunga!











Fin.

The Importance of Being Awful

I had to go commit certain deeds

No, I was no gulpy or flat nibbed by some miltonian. A dab of the holywater sprinkler ye deserve, for I was with me lackin suffering a Cleveland particular.* Puckering, this shirkster is? Cost ye a sprat to find out.

*how we received a calamity day (a truly beautiful phrase that conjures up so much more than the sober 'snow day') & the lunatic offspring didn't is one of the Eight Wonders of the Postmodern World. Perhaps I need to rethink the err-on-the-side-of-worthless of the pretzeldent. What, three of a kind already? He's the most whimsical gent of the season.

Calamitious addendum: stuff like this

Ross Local Schools Superintendent Greg Young said that while he’ll be glad to have the calamity days restored, in the long term he believes that American school years need to add more days in order for the U.S. to be globally competitive [ed. note: Winning the Future™] and more in line with the educational systems in other industrial nations.

& this

Part of the impetus behind reducing the number of calamity days, he said, was because each day is important to a child’s education.

always chuckles my gullet unless my electric eye biology somehow missed the memo about papers meaning jack sprat when the jobs shuffle midst where low, low salaries & non-copping benny hills are tolerated you fuckin' kids better be readin', ritin', rithmetickin' & not teaching yourselves Japanese what nerds I raised sob video gamin' (oh crap, I do too, bad example, bad, oh crap, let's go kill some zombies) each day is real important to your indoctrination education but once you're in it's not 'cause funny how six (gasp!) schoolhouse rock sick days (quelle horreur!) gets a sternly worded letter flush with such bunk (importance!) sloughed off by yours truly & the peonage also yours truly gets told to stay cough home cough wheez a sick worker's not a productive worker here drink this hand sanitizer but watch your allotment, we're watching you squeeze squeeze, it does tricks.


A kick in the pants, only a 7.0 on the dive

Speaking of turning doing tricks, even with an expanded playoff format**, can any non-inebriated observer Nostradamus my adopted footie squad DC United -- "even with Branko! & fredsux redux?***" -- getting a participatory gold star? Oh, regressive, you're so mean, having all that talent go west, young man.

**Dear MLS, there's no non-fiduciary need to imitate the basketball or the hockey & their Everyone Gets A Trophy raison d'moolah, but, there it is. A cynic can only hope Real Salt Lake happens ad infinitum.

***now there's a t-shirt idea if ever I get shitcanned. Hope I won't owe royalties.

Oh, who's gonna drink from Lord Anschutz's cup? Don't know, but I'd lay a few bucks down that it won't be the best XI.


Time to kick back, drinks some beers & smoke some weed

 

Not that I've ever increased the increasingly private reserve eww gross American product, a city & two state universities being my last three employers, but now I'm really not going to unless you count chowing down on heavily-salted crap I bought at the grocery store whilst glued to Fux Soccer & the pages of tomes bought in another enterprise of the non-nourriture variety, wow, I really do want to win the future, unlike you Thursday drunkards rerouting precious public transportationistas though you do buy copious amounts of booze I retract the hate you're the real heroes you baseball-capped bros future boardroom & cabinet masterminds. It's too late for this greybeard, if only I hadn't kept my kids home from school when they were vomiting. I'm the worst parent ever & you can rest assured that's exactly what I'll be working on while away from la bibliothèque, swear.

The family that watches Turkish Superman together stays together at least until the end of the movie

Very true, as they then had to drop hilarity like a hot anthracite & finish their homework including the old school social studies packet of Offspring the Younger that included a map containing both Gaul & Yugoslavia who isn't a fan of dystopian ancient Cold War civiliziations & who printed that shit a psilocybin junkie with cataracts that's who oh, don't forget the dead & bloated Austria cowgirled by Poland all while mom & pop donned the XL cloak of invisibility for some Valentine's Day non-sex. At least the Cadavaliers didn't lose their 47th though even more disturbing was the only-partially-in-jest coworker suggestion this morning that yours truly start charging since said me is the visible bibliothèque opener.

Would you take my advice? Me neither, at least not while sober.

March of the Cheap Tin Soldiers

Commiserating with the beautiful brutality of suburban backyard nature, I was struck down by serendipity, soon reborn from the sarcophagi of doubt, a blood-stained soul toting an idealistic totem & off I marched to spread the word.




The offspring scoffed, Doodily especially, when I revealed the divine suggestion of a metalized Partridge Family to help cope with slo-burn economic apocalypse even though none of us are quite tall thus us future coffin stuffers & yet-to-be-pilfered equipment (past the dust-in-the-basement Strat copy) can easily squeeze in the ever-rusting jeep; my sometimes-better-half merely scowled. Microcosmic & quite metal, 'twas. Now we just need matching corpsepaint, & though sad, at least I'm not as sad as Li'l Edgar, set adrift on the river Styx.

Ars (basketballque; no I don't remember Latin grammer, it's been forever, fuck off) mortis, vita brevis

Offspring the Sequel returned to the homestead with her 8th grade class selection parchment & lo, behold & hark, as expected, fiduciary excision has come to pass & the corpse is alive of course of course unless the corpse is of course the famous Mr. Art. Thanke the Kynge, hys Sheriffs & the plebians who run the local abattoir for, in their own special way, buying snicker into Austerity™ & lopping off the useless-to-corporate, though, & please don't put me in the stockade, French & Spanish shalt remain? Verily, foreign languages are so foreign & when do you think you'll ever be using them whilst jockeying cubicles, connecting to our counterpart minions who already sprechen ye olde Anglo-Saxon?

One step at a time, Randal, one step at a time.

  


Speaking of the dreary, sweet merciful crap, the Cavs are bloody fucking grotesque, a veritable gaggle (flock? mass? troop? herd? horde?) of undead.

Anger management, or, the semester's over, now I can waste even more time shaking my fist at the clouds

People get ready, there's a train a comin'
You don't need no baggage, you just get in line
All you need is somethin' to block the diesels hummin'
Don't need no ticket, 'cause we're outta time

Sorry Curtis, I like my version better.











"This is how it all will end, not with floods, earthquakes, falling comets, or gigantic crabs roaming the earth. No, doomsday will start simply out of indifference."

Seems that everyone's zeitgeist is riled up these days about various & sundry: angry loners; comrades in bookmanship; the unemployable; my sometimes-better-half, shockingly not at yours truly for once even though it's her fault 98.6% of the time. Is it navel gazing if I'm gazing at everyone's else navel gazing at everyone else's navel? Is it navel gazing at all if it's some form of political? Being stupid & lazy, questions way above my pay grade. Serendipitous in some respects, as said spousely anger spontaneously discharged in a conversation last night between noodles, the finer points of porn, a one-man rant on the awfulness of the non-Boobie Cavs gleefully ignored by the rest of any nuclears within earshot & the offspring's progress reports. Quite odd given that we usually spend our dinners alternating scowls & uncomfortable silence. Bet our kids spiked the teapot.

Anyway, I wouldn't say I suffer from indifference, merely that I just don't care. I kid, I kid. Sort of. Now, I can't say I've witnessed grocery cart chicken in the local feedbag -- though I once did get coins thrown at me whilst on library duty, true story -- but I'm on board with sporting the toga! toga! of anger, though chez Randal's brain, is it directed specifically towards our beloved generation of three-piece action figures with the kung-fu grip or at said plastics as merely the latest in a long, inexorable line of institutionalized assholery? Or is it rooted in something more selfish, since I honestly do prefer a minimum of face-to-face interaction, these monsters merely the most grotesque, thus convenient, visage placed on this quirk of my personality, a surfeit of righteous indignation soon discarded with the greatest of ease as I trapeze back into the Bat Cave?

Sure as hell ain't SAD as, contrary to certain cheese-eating surrender Californistanianites, I love me some cold, blustery weather. Misery loves my hospitality. The omnipresent, if sleeping, burnout ready to awaken & crawl up from Tartarus? Phlegm better kept under wraps? Who knows. What I do know is that I'm a firm believer that the extent of my, or anyone's, ability to permanently influence others rapidly (read: rapidly) shrinky dinks the further out from the inner circle we go, thus the best I can hope for is to teach my children well like a good non-hippie -- something gaining more & more TV time as one's about to sayonara high school & the other's nearly to join, Christ I'm old -- to 1)not be a motherfucker; 2)assume the worst of everyone & everything until proven otherwise & 3)distrust authority, the unholy headwaters, wellspring, font & source of motherfuckery. So unless 6 billion non-motherfucker motherfuckers flip the metaphorical, literal & extra-literal (conspiratorial hack 'em ups & assorted other extra-legal shenanigans) bird, good luck solutioning, suckers. Shrug, additional shrugging & tunes.

Pimpin' cynicism ain't easy. But it is comfortable. 

Whether that's a fault is a line for another day.

Cult indoctrination

Hier, our youngest had to turn in her social studies essay USA A-OK Cesspool on the Potomac Why I'm Proud To Be An American. After initially chuckling at the very existence of the premise & checking the calendar to make sure it wasn't 1961 & that Alan Shepard wasn't bopping below the constellations take that you filthy reds, I chortled something about the pen being mightier than the sword but I say fuck the pen because you can die by the sword!

When I recognized that she didn't get the live Slayer reference, I cried at my failure as a parent. Sob. Anyway, though not chock full of the polysyllabic words I enjoy tossing out on occasion to strengthen the occasionally-useful illusion that I'm smarter than I actually am (boobies! burgers! Browns bad! bleorg!), my gasted would be flabbered if the teacher didn't call and/or write demanding our presence at one of those conference gigs.

A Vapid Poetics of Votology & Other Stories

Monstrosities like this rear their collective uglies on this campus as well, every two years, like diabolical stop-motion clockwork.
















American foreign policy?

The ballot box crap, not the photo. That ugly gets a pretty smile.

Speaking of pretty, Jennifer Hetrick in an episode of TNG. WMDest MacGuffin ever aside -- that's no Star Destroyer, that's a STAR DESTROYER -- am I, as I seem to be going by conversations over the years, in the minority in digging Captain's Holiday a lot? Man, that was two decades ago. I'm old.















Speaking of old, I feel extra today on the account of Doodily, Unplanned Offspring #1, achieving the age where she is legally permitted to write in Snoopy or Woodstock or Dick Nixon or Dead Gus Hall on said ballot box crap. A cynical chip off the decrepit block. I'm so proud of her, sniff.

War for territory

Acquisition & tactical surrender, usage & manipulation of space.

Since I trotted out the beyond-weathered mélange of sporting, war & religious terminology, am I going to be dour, as usual? Of course not, look out below!













Betcha you don't have your own cult, Dunga.

Se o Brasil has cut her futbol fibre antediluvian --
does she now fight & tackle Dungian
& should we ask a licensed Jungian
or is such a task much too Brobdingnagian?

& while we're at it perhaps we can pester Carl for the reasons why Mr. Terry & Co. refused to attempt a defensive state that wouldn't even pass muster in a grade school intramural. Must be that long, long EPL season, laughed Carlos Tevez all the way to the quarters.

Speaking of the quarters, how 'bout some hot predictioneering? Why not, as I've been *cough* stellar so far -- alright, a youthful, energetic Deutschland upending the Three-Legged Lions wasn't a tectonic result, but as fucking poor as the American D was, at least they ran back:

Uruguay, the greatest footballing nation on earth, over the Rebel Alliance. Why? Read the first sentence, chump. En plus, they have The Other Diego. Oh, how the Dungians versus the Dearly, Nearly Dysfunctional Dutch should be a semifinal at worst. But, a gentleman never switches transport midstream, so the Netherlands it is. Let's hope we get something as thrilling as this artifact.

As for the second bracket, especially with the way these two have mastered the pitch (and the refs), we have another potential stunner in Argentina and Germany, but do you seriously think I'm going to turn away from Atomic Zen Diego and His Merry Band of Dribblers now? Spain ain't so plain, but lest we forget, the Paraguayans have a secret weapon:














Don't get me wrong, as a certified pig, I enjoy the boobies, but I'm also a big sap and the single greatest joy that I've derived so far from this World Cup is something else off the pitch. Thanks to the Blue Samurai, Doodily, my usually sports-averse & Japanese-obsessed oldest, has paid rapt attention to each and every round of 16 tie, a turn as unpredictable as England's crash n' burn was its polar opposite. I may be a simpleton for having a smidgen of faith in those overhyped fucks but this can be rectified: please please please, FA, can Capello, nab Redknapp & watch hilarity ensue. If this shall not come to pass, at least I've finally convinced someone else in my household that the beautiful game is indeed that.

In some wars, everybody wins.

















Piston Honda!

It's the Great Pumpkin, Randal Graves

Not you, you're the best. And not me, either, shut your piehole, peanut gallery. While my nukyular family and I -- since it's implied that I'm part of said communal unit, did I just square myself and if so, does this mean I now have super powers or at least put an end to the receding of my hairline? -- were watching the stupendously wonderful It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown the other day (don't look so surprised, any show that praises that darkest and most pagan of our festival days is very metal), Doodily asked me what the origin of the slang term 'blockhead' was. Since you're no doubt curious, too, here you go, courtesy of the OED:

1. A wooden head, a wooden block for hats or wigs; hence, a head with no more intelligence in it than one of these, a blockish head. Obs. (This would now be written block head or block-head.)

2. Hence, One whose head is blockish or ‘wooden’; an utterly stupid fellow.

1549 COVERDALE Erasm. Par. 1 Cor. xi. 14 A blockheade that hathe loste the judgemente of nature. 1593 NASHE Christs T. 69b, Bee he the veriest block-head vnder heauen. 1668 CULPEPPER & COLE Barthol. Anat. I. xxiv. 59 Block-heads and dull-pated Asses. 1712 BUDGELL Spect. No. 307 {page}12 Being dismissed as an hopeless Block-head. 1875 JOWETT Plato (ed. 2) I. 222 He might think me a blockhead, and refuse to take me.

Thus, I asketh of thee this All Hallows E'en, that verily thou beest not a blockheade that hathe loste the judgement of nature & thus trusteth in the Lorde & limite thy partakynge of sugare lest ye vomitt up thy innardes for if thou durst, thou canst slawter thy ennemies in colde bludd.

Dancing with an invisible dame whose heels keep on smashing my toes, I'm not wearing combat boots, babe.

It was so windy yesterday...

"How windy was it?"

It was so windy yesterday, it was as if all the pantheons of all the peoples of the world, and Spinal Tap, had just eaten a meal of __________.














Gosh darnit, I just never get tired of that Chimpy. Nor Charles, but each is comical in their own unique way. I do get tired of other stuff, but compiling that list would require years of detailed planning and decades of implementation, time that simply cannot be wasted on anything but delusions of grandeur, and would eventually fill the equivalent of all the scrolls housed in the library at Alexandria pre-fire and if you think I'm inclined to subject myself to the literary equivalent -- I forgot my thesaurus at home, the equivalent of leaving the house without pants, that's a funny story I'll never tell because then I'd have to make one up, the equivalent of being a politician -- of cracking my skull open with a hammer sans anesthesia and somehow managing to remain conscious enough to scoop my brain back inside my cranial cavity, you're sadly mistaken though that would be a pretty cool trick, no? Maybe they could film it and use the best handful of stills for the cover and booklet of the next Cannibal Corpse album. Evisceration plague! Gurgle, growl, etc.!



The original spawn of my sometimes-better-half and yours truly turns 17 today, so thanks, condom manufacturer, for ruining the prime of my life, rot in hell, motherfuckers. I kid, but only 83% worth. Luckily, she's easy to buy for, a case of booze and the keys to a stolen car. Crime does indeed pay, says so all the way up there. Luckily-er still, one area of parenting that I've made great strides in compared to my ancestral folks is successfully instilling in our offspring a healthy disdain for other humans which I feel will serve her well in the aeons to come before the glorious return of Cthulhu, Ia! Ia!

She is, however, fairly indifferent to music -- I know, I know, blasphemy! burn the witch! -- which has always made me wonder if she isn't actually the product of the union of my apparently-worse-half and the UPS guy. What can Brown do to you, I guess. Thus, instead of whiskey and wheels, I think I'll buy her one of those K-Tel classic rock sets the old Brady dude and the chick young enough to be his trophy wife hawk at 3am. Sniff, we all miss you, Billy.



Based on much anecdotal evidence, chiefly DVD reruns of Supernatural season finales, Lunatic Offspring #1 seems to really hate that song above all others. So I'm thinking about doing a download n' burn, hitting the repeat and blaring it for the next week chez moi, the perfect gift, no? Sure, even my wife would likely want to kill me but how that's different from any other day only the gods can answer and they're busy with the aftermath of their drive-through feast. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to sit down. The bloody Moirae did a number on my feet.

A Musical Journey, or, More Complaining Part MCMXVIII

An enchanting tale full of magic pixie dust and funny talking animals and strangely effervescent elixirs and pots bubbling over with gold and silver and platinum and six-ring circuses (don't forget the bread n' butter n' raspberry jam) and dreamy adventures in faraway drug-addled cosmoslocked dimensions and artfully conceived pickup lines of a sexfully erotic nature was what I had in store for you all today but I changed my mind for national security reasons so now I will tell you about the weirdness that is Windows Media Player.

Why have I reverted to using that MICROSOFT CAN HAZ SATAN! product instead of iTunes? Because Apple, who make the Hippest Commercials Around, also make a product that, in addition to other carefully documented problems, at least 15-20% of the time [ed. note: compared to a measly 5-10% of the time with WMP, all of this proving why I prefer physical CDs to this technocrap because unless they've been horribly axe-murdered, CDs never fucking skip] leaves the freshly ripped sound files with randomly placed scratchy noises and various other sonic fuckeries regardless of how pristine the disc is or isn't without rhyming reasons for I've had early generation, visibly gouged albums from 1985 be smooth as Smoove B and brand spanking fetish new stuff go rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat.

"That's what the shit you dig sounds like anyway."

So, after the work computer got infected with a virus originating from online porn sites the swine flu, I decided, in anticipation of The Great Re-Rip of 2009, to tell the Book of Jobs to go to hell so now I will tell you about the weirdness that is hell.

Dear Windows Media Player,

A CD that conjures up images of this


















really shouldn't be labeled 'World.'


















That's what happens when you outsource your programming to countries that don't even have rock and/or roll.

Love, Randal

The family that shreds together, stays together

If someone way back in 1986 would have told a morose, punk-ass, girlfriend-less teenage jerk that nearly a quarter of a century into the future he would be barking MASTER! MASTER! into the mic while his kids thrashed on faux guitars and his sometimes-better-half pounded the virtual, yet plastic, skins in that oh-so-sexy way only a chick drummer can, he would've barked MASTER! MASTER! in your face and gone back to hibernating in the basement with his endless supply of Vernors, metal faces and angst.

There was, however, one moment of seriousness amidst the surreal nuclear familyism: after successfully navigating Ace of Spades (not on Expert+ though, holy fuck, I'll stick with being the pseudo-frontman), the teevee proclaimed that we had unlocked Lemmy. Of course our youngest said the only thing that could have possibly destroyed the collective glee of my wife and I:

"Who's Lemmy?"


















The sting of parental neglect runs deep, but I resolve to be a better father. We'll start with the self-titled debut. No, no, forget about your math homework. This is far more important.

Ye Olde Clerkes

"Verily, our employ wuld be exceptionell if not fower these cusstomers of fuckerie."

Dearest jerkface patronnes, thou with thine face markede by vareed wrynkles, straines and scars of jerkerie, furtherest thou whine, bitche and moane as if a memberr of Parliament, lesse inclyned am I to helpeth thee. I say unto thee, rejoyce in the Ways of the Lord and shew unto Him thy gratitude, fower the King's Goode Lawe doth preventeth me from implementynge the racke, a garrotynge, impaylement on a pike, or strikynge thee with a cat o' nine tails in thy face of jerkerie itselfe.

"Sheesh. Should we send them to Guanatanamo?"

Why not. Like the video store, it'll be open for awhile.

Also open for business, Bolivia.

“We know that Bolivia can become the Saudi Arabia of lithium,” said Francisco Quisbert, 64, the leader of Frutcas, a group of salt gatherers and quinoa farmers on the edge of Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat. “We are poor, but we are not stupid peasants. The lithium may be Bolivia’s, but it is also our property.”

Yours?

Nobody puts America in the corner!



Gotta go, Michael Vincent just found me a new job!