teh Mexigogue

I wrote a rap about how hard it is to work in a state office. Here it is.

Click for the A short documentary video clip.

Ok, watch the video clip, and THEN read my commentary at the bottom of this page. Remember, WATCH the clip first or the commentary will spoil the video. Ready? Go!

Ok, now for my commentary. After I made this video I showed it to someone. This person asked “So you find the assasination of JFK funny???” My answer: Yes. I don’t get emotionally invested in things that happened before my time. The bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Holocaust, and the JFK assasination are all things that are matters of historical record. They were set in stone before I was born, I therefore feel no compelling emotional tug one way or the other.

Scott Norwood missing the field goal for the Buffalo Bills at the end of Superbowl XXV, however, I was alive for that so that one still stings. I remember exactly where I was too. I was at Tripper’s Sports Bar in Frandor. The guy on my left had bet $5,000 on the over/under and he missed out on his money by virtue of that kick as well. I was eating nachos with sour cream and black olives. I could live til I’m 100 and that kick will never be funny to me.

So if you were alive and remember exactly what you were doing at the moment JFK was shot you have special dispensation to be pissed off at me and my video. To have known Mr. Kennedy to be a real live person and then to have witnessed his end must have been traumatic both for you and for the nation. But if you’re around my age or younger then the salient point is that the assasination is funny for reasons that are beyond my control. It’s not MY fault the guy happened to be the prototype for the bobblehead phenomenon. And I believe if JFK was right next to me watching this video he would be laughing what was left of his head off!

This year’s World Series is drawing record low television ratings. The problem, baseball afficianados say, is that this year’s matchup is boring. The thing that I’d like to point out, however, IS THAT BASEBALL HAS ALWAYS BEEN BORING!!! THAT’S WHY PETE ROSE PLACED ALL THOSE BETS SO HE WOULDN’T FALL A FUCKEN SLEEP! EVEN THE PLAYERS LOOK BORED WHEN THEY’RE PLAYING! THE ONLY THING THEY EVEN LOOK MILDLY INTERESTED IS ON THE OCCASIONAL DOUBLE PLAY! WHAT THE FUCK!!???

Ahem. So baseball fans, watch this boring ass World Series. You watched all the other ones and they were all boring too. As for me I didn’t care that yesterdays game got rained out because I was going to watch the Miami Heat preseason game anyway.

That is all for today. Tomorrow I think I’m going to post a link to a very short documentary I’m making about John F. Kennedy. It’s in the works even as we speak.

Most days I don’t smoke at all, just as most days I don’t drink, but I always have a pack of cigarettes with me just in case a game of pool breaks out. I’m not physically addicted to nicotine. Often days go by without pool and beer and I therefore have no desire to smoke, so I don’t. If I had the desire and was suppressing it I could chalk it up to willpower, but since the desire is not there in the first place, it’s something that just is. But just as soon as the quarters are put in and the table is being racked I fire up a Marlboro Light. The cause falls somewhere between Pavlov’s dogs and tradition.

There are people who think I should try to quit. If I didn’t want to smoke I wouldn’t. I like to smoke in moderation because it allows me some self indulgent pleasure after doing whatever it is I do during the workweek. When it’s Miller Time, it’s time for me to breathe fire and drink Budweiser (because FUCK Miller time). The funny thing is the people who see me only when I shoot pool probably think I smoke all the time, whereas the people who see me only when I’m NOT shooting pool probably think I don’t smoke at all. The true answer (as often does in real life) lies somewhere in between.

When I first met “Layla” in real life, who knew me first only from the blog, one of the first things she remarked was “I didn’t think you were the type who smokes”. My answer to that is that there’s a lot of things I do that I just don’t write about. Like I never write about donating canned goods to the poor but. . . . Ok I’ve never actually done that so that’s probably a bad example. But I stole some gloves and a hat from a poor person once so that’s kind of the same thing. Let us not get bogged down with semantics though, it’s time to move on.

Oh yeah. . . I always think it’s gross when I see somebody driving to work smoking in their car first thing in the morning. How can people do that? Whenever I see that I have to suppress a gag. The only time I’ve ever done that was back when I used to hang out with Monique, who had somewhere along the way become a pack a day smoker. Back in those days I smoked whenever she smoked (just because it seemed like the thing to do) and after a while my chest hurt. But once that era ended I went back to doing what I’ve always done and what I in fact do now which is only smoking when I’m drinking and/or playing pool (those two usually coincide).

Yes, there’s a slight health risk to smoking in moderation but that’s an informed choice on my part so I’m willing to take it. After all, beer, pool, and banging the occasional woman of questionable humanity are not the only things in life, but it wouldn’t be much of a life if those things didn’t exist now would it? If I can be so bold as to answer my own rhetorical question, no it would not, so I’m going to deal with that value judgement and act accordingly. Put THAT in your pipe and smoke it!

* This message brought to you by the American Lungs are Vastly Overrated Organization

For Halloween I’m gonna be Some Puerto Rican Guy. The only thing I have to do differently is learn to dance when I fight. This will come into play in the event of a bar brawl, I just hope I can snap and sing in time with my opponent.

Things I have learned this week: If you take a coffee filter and turn it upside down, a cat won‘t want to wear it as a hat. As a rule cats don’t like very much that’s new and innovative. I am unfazed, however, and my work on the cat-parachute will continue.

“Layla” tried to alert me to the breast exams on TV yesterday. Unfortunately I was somewhere else shooting pool at the time. This brings me to my other point: women don’t like it when you hit their boobs in rhythm like a boxing speedbag. I’ve never understood why.

I’m hungry. I’m gonna order a pizza sub from Cottage Inn Pizza. My two items will be mushrooms and ground beef. I’ll let you all know how it turns out.

Thanks to People magazine, I can now track the whereabouts and activities of Lindsay Lohan so I’ll always have up-to-the-minute updates on where she is, who she’s with, and who she is presumably letting into her clam.  Thank God for this magazine, according to its unstated premises I must care about this stuff very much.

On another note, you would think MSU should be glad to have the record for biggest comeback victory in NCAA history but the big thing people are going to remember with that stat is that we were actually down by 35 points to Northwestern on Saturday. Good thing I was born in Texas and therefore have Longhorn DNA (this probably won’t hold up in court but it’s worth a shot anyway).

The John Cena movie I saw with my kids:  There were so many explosions in this movie at some point it began to insult the intelligence of even the WWE fans who still insist that the wrestling matches are not staged.  There was one car chase that lasted longer than all of the previews put together.  AND this car chase routed about five minutes through an area of highway that was under construction.  After about the fiftieth construction worker jumped out of the way of the vehicles you began to get the sense that none of them was really going to get run over.  A billion rounds were discharged from various firearms throughout the movie and nobody ever reloaded.  And the acting was even worse than O.J. showing the jury that the glove didn’t fit. 

There was a crockodiles in Carolina punchline setup that I saw coming a mile away.  The bad guys were going into a swamp and the black guy says “Watch out for crockodiles” and the white guy says “There’s no crockodiles in South Carolina” and then I tell my son watch an alligator is gonna come out and the black guy is gonna say “I thought you said there’s no crockodiles in Carolina” and the white guy is gonna say “That’s not a crockodile that’s an alligater”, and then it all came to pass just like I said.  The movie was mindless and predictable as a “Q” on Wheel of Fortune when the subject is ghetto baby names.  To top it all off the popcorn was exquisite.  I recommend this movie to friends and enemies alike!

That’s about all for now.  I guess I’ll get back to tracking people-who-are-famous-for-no-particular-reason.  Maybe People will soon track them by tagging them with locating devices behind their ears like they do on Wild Kingdom.  Or how they used to do it anyway, I think I’m behind the times.

I didn’t cry on 9/11. Hurricaine Katrina didn’t move me. So why is it that I’m streaming tears by the climactic scene of Revenge of the Sith? What the fuck is THAT about????

In other news my 11 year old son wants to see The Marine so we’re going to that today. Something about movie popcorn is just different from the stuff you get at home. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m picking it up off the floor.

Drink up!!!

This week I saw a news article that questions if marriage is becoming passe in American society. Studies show that married households have now become the minority, partly because some couples never opt to get married in the first place and then there is the fact that divorce rates are still lingering around an all-time high. From whence comes this phenomenon? On one level you can blame social programs like government housing, foodstamps, and Medicaid which actually reward single-parenthood in the qualification criteria. On another level there is the fact that social taboos like raising bastard children and whoremongering are quickly turning into national pastimes (yay whoremongering!). On a macro level I say the lower levels of married households are a result of changing social mores.

On a micro level, however, I examine my own experiences, and the fact that I have been divorced thrice. How can this be with an eminently huggable character like me? I was once told by my ex-wife’s cousin “You don’t love me. You’ve never loved anyone but yourself.” I declined to point out that if she had any love for her cousin she wouldn’t be kicking it with me because I thought that would be gauche. Instead I pondered the implications of what she had said.

My initial reaction was that she was wrong. Of course I had loved many women before. I wanted them, I desired to be with them, when they left I felt as if I would die. But the more I thought about it I couldn’t square the fact that these same chicks I would play to the left if the situation presented itself. “Why are you always LYING to me?” My usual response “Because you keep asking QUESTIONS!” now rang a bit hollow. What I have discovered in retrospect is that if love means regarding someone with as much value as you do yourself then I have never loved anyone on this planet except my children. I would step in harm’s way to push my kids out of the path of an arrow. My wives I would use as a shield. If love is to be regarded as an objective standard by which we judge our actions in our relationships with others then I fail. I do not, however, accept that “if”.

I will step back even further and say that love is only a chemical process of the brain geared to trigger actions that will maximize the chances of successful propogation of genes and raising your children to adulthood. In this view “love” is a Darwinian trick the human body developed in order to manipulate us into doing things which place us at a natural selection advantage. Adopting non blood related children is then a misappropriation of these processes (biologically speaking) and, while society largely regards Brad Pitt and Angelina as “good people” for adopting third world babies, their actions do not in any way help to further their genes. It is a case of people intentionally ignoring biological imperatives but do we regard this as blameworthy? Similarly if I don’t want to be in a relationship because I know I won’t “love” anyone as much as I love myself is that any more a disregard of these brain chemical functions as Brangelina raising someone else’s biological kids?

Back to marriage: The fact that it used to be the norm is no more an argument for it being “right” than the fact that now is not. The “usual” has never necessarily meant that something was objectively good. All I can say in this matter is that marriage is kind of like when you rescue that captured ship in Galaga and then suddenly you have two ships shooting up at the bad guys. On one level it’s cool that you have doubled your firepower. On another level, however, it’s kind of awkward because you now have twice as much space you’re taking up which makes it harder to dodge between the bullets that are raining down. In a perfect world you keep dodging and shooting together as a team. If the bullets come down too thick though and one of you has to be sacrified I think everybody should know how this plays out. And THAT is the state of marriage in American society today. Relationships are like a video game!

Winter of ‘86/’87

I’m in Mrs. Monk’s history class in San Angelo Central High School. I’m finally settling down to actually living in West Texas, having found a fellow northern classmate named Cheri to spend time with after school hours. During school Mrs. Monk’s class is one of my favorites as the people here are kind of cool. There is some guy named Brian who kind of reminds me of Foghorn Leghorn’s cousin who did everything better than him. Then there’s this insane red haired dude who reminds me of Bunny from the movie Platoon. These people are really funny and by the end of the semester everybody knows me well enough to where almost the entire left side of the class copies off my paper for the final exam. My half passes with flying colors but that’s not the issue on the day in question. Today I’m trying to figure out what to do about all this melted chocolate on my fingers.

It seems that my Hershey bar was halfway melted by the time I opened it up when I got to class. Being the hardheaded kind of person I am I ate it anyway, hence the fingers of chocolate. What to do what to do. . . I look on Mrs. Monk’s desk and I see a roll of toilet paper she has sitting there for the many students who have come down with colds and need to blow their nose. Mrs. Monk is out of the classroom at this point so I get a diabolical plan: I go and wipe my chocolatey-fingers on the roll of toilet paper and I announce to the class that the sustance is benign. I ask them to pretend not to notice and we’ll see how long Mrs. Monk takes to notice the sullied TP. Everyone agrees and I’m dying to see her reaction.

Mrs. Monk comes back in the classroom and commences to teaching us something to do with medeival times. People are biting their lips to stifle laughter and the teacher goes on for about ten minutes, oblivious to the situation. Finally her eyes fall upon the suspect matter and she stops her speech mid-sentence. The brown smears on the toilet paper sit defiantly on her desk.

“I hope that’s not” she says “what I think it is.”

Laughing, dying, living, and crying I approach the teacher and tells her it’s Hershey’s chocolate. The class bursts into applause and all the b7tches throw their panties onto the stage! A ray of sunlight shines on my face and the angels sing. The end!

I got punched by a drunken Indian chick this weekend. I was shooting pool with this girl who was Native American. At first it was cool, she even let me drink some of her firewater. Then I made a vague reference to alcoholism among Indians and she took exception to it. To smooth things over, I said:

“No, what I’m saying is. . . without getting mad. . . as a matter of fact isn’t it true that there is a high incidence of alcoholism among Native Americans?”

She was like “Yes” and I was like

“That’s all I was saying. I wasn’t saying that YOU are necessarily an alcoholic and I wasn’t disparaging Native Americans. I like you people.”

“You LIKE us? Why???”

“You guys are cool.”

“What do you mean we’re cool?”

“Like every time I litter, that Indian guy cries.”

PUNCH!

Out of control drunken Indian people.  Need I say more?