enough is enough

now may we please have a dialogue on gun violence in this country?

This post is a political tirade.

George Washington

happy belated bday, mr. president

holy shit, is all i have to say.











This post is fuckin' awesome.

dogs rule, and cats drool

i KNEW it!

motley urban ephemera

there's something charming about honesty. really, there is.















Susan B knows where the money's at.














aren't we a tad desperate? (and no, i didn't take a number).












this post is the sad truth

consider a payphone

consider a payphone
device once imperative,
relegated to communicative
impotence.

in my neighborhood there is a man who talks always on the payphone outside my house for hours in putrid summerevening heat
and in the bitterest of colds
he remains
and prattles on in Spanish
recounts the doings of his days
to lost friends in daydream places
and family members, long departed.
maybe him they can hear, but i know
that phone hasn’t worked in years.
yet he endures in his soliloquy
in tears, at times
to whatever passing ghost will listen-

i saw a woman

who passed a payphone dangling
from its medieval, spindly appendage

she

stopped
though engaged in citylikethings

and replaced it with the utmost of care
as if
restoring to life
an artifact, of some former, lesser
wellconnectedage.

just as everyman, richorpoor
fondles irresistibly its convivial trap door
hoping to find
the remains of some
previously forgotten treasure,
no matter

how small

the words left behind,
undialed.

This post is a poem.

let's go easy on the eagles

Cheer up, kid, it's not your fault. They were supposed to go for it.

Yeah, okay, they punted, and they shouldn't have. but let's face it: the Eagles had a tough season. The schedule was rough, they lost their fearless leader early on, and face other significant injuries throughout. Jeff Garcia and the vets on offense and defense (read: Westbrook, Dawkins) combined with newfound talent (Baskett, Buckhalter) to string together a team that rallied back late in the season and got further than anyone in Week Six would have imagined. And yeah, in the end, in true Eagles fashion, they defeated themselves. But the Saints were a team that more or less had it together all season and should be a strong contender next season as well.

So, come on, Philly, go easy on the birds... they have proven themselves capable of at least self-regeneration. I resolve - and you should with me - to become a "good Philly fan," one who refuses to fluster at the flippant lack of any significant championship in my lifetime, and one who, despite the irascible, acidic pinching of my stomach, says with starry-eyed hope:

There's always next season.

Go Phillies.




This post is introspective, at least by Philly standars.

my predictions for the future

Well it is that time of year... the beginning... of the year. still, kind of. so i think i will roll my eyes back in my head and preminisce my fantubulous visions for the 22nd century. after a harrowing and daunting vision initiated by uncontrollable substances, such as johnson and johnson baby shampoo (oooh, but it doesn't tear, darling) and tea tree oil, i am ready to divulge what the future brings, IMNSHO, in the form of a top ten list. just kidding, it's only a top six list. my creativity stops at six today. that's when i start drinking, too, incidentally. sorry.

1. Technology will continue to improve exponentially, and it will continue to be fueled by batteries. Batteries will continue to suck, and will continue to die only at crucial and embarassing moments.
   
2. Houses will be greener and more energy efficient and therefore even less affordable.
   
3. Pluto will not be the only outcast planet as we discover that even Neptune is simply a moon of Uranus, which is fucking huge (ha, ha).
   
4. Google will acquire all its competitor search engines, including Yahoo!, Altavista, and Ask Jeeves, to become Ask JeGooHoo!
   
5. Wikipedia will expand its user-defined encyclopedia to include the full volume of Encyclopedia Brittanica, as edited by unemployed English majors working insipid office jobs (hmm...)
   
6. Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan will become America's goodwill ambassadors to the newly-formed Islamist Republic of Iraq, attempting to spread the finest American contributions to music, acting, and whatever the hell it is Paris Hilton does. They will be stoned after their arrival for not wearing underwear in public.

Don't worry, buddy, I can do your job better than you can.

This post is stupid. Sorry, I'm at work.

how about we DON'T send more troops to Iraq?

it's fallacious to think that after being smoked out in midterm elections the Bush administration has suddenly gotten smart about how to fix a war that they started. and instead of heeding any of the advice of a nonpartisan, unbinding "study group" they threw together, the neocons have again decided to "go it alone" and propose their own solution, utilizing the very limited brain power of the West Wing and shunning newly elected democratic leadership.

i'm sick and tired of this nonsense. there is no more debate. whether you were "for the war" or "against the war" has become moot, since the war has already happened. it is happening. for almost four years. and it is getting severely out of hand.

i like how Bush has continually decided to completely ignore public opinion in his unilateral, partisan decisions to augment fighting worldwide. that's very totalitarian chic. i like that kind o boldness. and you thought we lived in a democracy. wrong, buddy, it's a republic. that means democratic when convenient.

so just this one time it would've been nice to have been consulted. four years on and you're sending my friends back there. four years on and my pregnant friends will lose their fathers for another year and perhaps forever.

When the going gets tough, just eat the moose

This post is a political tirade.

oh yeah, like new york is SO much better.

The talking heads on this infernal island are pointing their fingers again - but this time it hits a little close to home, the Garden State.


Yes, just as Mr. Bloomberg used his authority to deem the unseemly odour entirely safe, despite its unknown provenance, they have decided to assume innocence and indict their neighbor to the South (which, incidentally, keeps the lifeblood of energy flowing into a city that leaves the lights on in its office buildings all night).


It was a topic of intense family discussion:

• Tony (from Brooklyn): So, it appears NJ is performing terrorist acts against NYC too. Maybe NY should finally attack and take over Northern NJ.
  
  
• Greg: Oh, blame NJ now, but when the city smelled like nice maple syrup earlier in the year, did they give us credit? Noooooo.....
  I say that NJ pulls a Russia and shuts off the gas pipelines. We'll see how NY likes that!
  
  
• Tony: Even more reason to attack and take over.
  
  
• Ed: In lieu of the olefactory charges against our beloved NJ, I offer this interesting fact about the Pinelands, mainly because I like saying "contiguous deciduous forest":
  
  The New Jersey Pinelands is the largest area of contiguous, undeveloped forest and wetland on the Atlantic Coastal Plain of the Mid-Atlantic region. The New Jersey Pinelands is the largest pine barrens complex in the world, and the mosaic of globally rare upland and wetland communities and species found here is of national significance. The Pinelands supports a number of endemic plant and animal species, several glacial relict species, and a few northern and numerous southern species that reach their geographical Coastal Plain limits in the Pinelands. Also, 24 plant taxa (type localities) were described from specimens originally discovered growing in the New Jersey Pinelands. The Pinelands overlay one of the largest aquifers in the country, and the wetlands and pristine headwaters arising within the Pinelands support a unique assemblage of indigenous species and are critical for the water quality and productivity of the New Jersey backbarrier lagoon estuaries.
  
  
• Greg: I believe that it is also the largest nature preserve in the US, and NJ has set aside a larger % of itself off limits to development than any other state.
  
  
• Me: and we have a hideous, malformed, impish creature that preys on cattle and babies and overly curious rednecks, pokes out their eyes and eats their cerebellums, all the while screeching as it peels relentlessly through the putrid, humid air, cautiously purveying the fields of tree stumps and copper-colored streams in search of its next, unwitting victim. and no, it is not Christie Todd Whitman. she moved to Washington.
  

Anyway, we're talking about South Jersey. All the more reason for a nice, clean secession.

Go New Jersey. Go Eagles!

This post is a political tirade.

b-dawk photo of the day

Who says 200-pound black men wearing 50 lbs. of equipment can't fly?

This post is very philosophical.

systemic change.

so, due to assorted complaints about the sordid variety of posts all imbibed in the same blog cocktail on this site, i decided to do a little categorizationizing. so, say hello to hummingbird and helicopter.

This image is completely illogical, but appropriate, and so it has been iconized so as to differentiate the many disparate verbosities that inhabit these pages.

The different categories are:

Political tirade
Follow this little guy if you want to know what is really pissing me off these days.

something stinks

So, though I can't smell shit (even though I am part dog), apparently the city smells. Like shit. Or, maybe Mercaptan. Anyway, there is massive speculation as to why the city is permeating an odour of natural gas, and I have selected my favourite suggestions:

It could just be the scent of the Giants and Jets returning home.
— Posted by Tom

Wasn’t it Walt Whitman who wrote, “O Captain, Mercaptan”?

— Posted by bg

October 28th, 2005 there was a sweet smell permeating the city. It smelled like maple syrup. There was never a cause found there. Could the two city wide smells somehow be related? No news agency has mentioned any reference of this yet.
— Posted by Larry

I bet a big landfill had a bunch of gas develop in a pocket over time and it was finally released. In other words, New Jersey farted.
— Posted by Chad

Maybe too many New Yorkers exhaled simultaneously, and all that bad breath blew back in their faces at once. I live in Portland, Oregon. Nobody here has bad breath.
— Posted by J E

It started in NY and not in Jersey as some New Yorkers would want you to believe!
— Posted by Passion

Is Bush or Cheney in town?
— Posted by Morty

If Christy Whitman would just issue a statement,then I would be reassured
— Posted by rob

Anyway, one repeated assertion is that though we don't know what the smell is, we know it isn't dangerous. That's like a vegetarian saying something tastes like chicken. Let's be frank to those who deserve it, especially those of us that live within the blast radius.

Sigh. I wish I was in Philly.

Go Eagles!

Welcome to retirement, Tiki... we've got a used car dealership just waiting for your endorsement. Oh wait, they want David Akers. Sorry.

this piece is a bitch du jour. Go Eagles!

Too many things at once make me an unhappy twilight campfighter.

Most people believe that, when we’re born, we’re a clean slate. A tabula rasa. Not to say that most people don’t believe – or like to believe – in predestination. Indeed, most people are comforted knowing that wherever they end up aligns exactly with where they’re supposed to be, at that precise moment. But this isn’t a story about being happy where you end up. It’s a story about forgetfulness and eternal despair.

Fosse che sopratutta la verità che mi ha raccontata era

E lei mi ha mandata una lettera in cui era scritto, <

Non era decisso avanti tutto quello che ha successo. Era solamente l’opportunità che c’avevo.

La decisione è arrivata à me così, era una cosa semplice. Una volta sola. Non era per

qualche motiva, una motiva al cassacio. Non è perche tu mi hai annoiata-quest'è vero si-ma

comunque-non era perchè mi stancavo di tuoi abbraci, i tuoi baci... questa non si puo succedere

mai. Forse per tutti venga un’altimo quando non si puo’ continuare. Ti devi rallentarsi prima di

perdere tutto>>.

Io l’ho letto e à me significava niente, proprio niente. Era come ha svegliata mentre

stava addormitanda. Non mi ha promessa niente. Non ero spoventato.

Without a doubt it was the most nervous moment of the year. There were no certain solitudes in the morning rush that day. It was as if no trace of any sort of strange being was blocked in the air current in the evening of the twenty-seventh. After which, nobody really made any promises.

Penetrate our silent lies.

Wasn’t there any satisfaction in knowing it was a salient plan to begin with?

“I wasn’t alone back there,” she said. “The conscience was tingling. It was a sensational moment. One of those…” Her voice trailed off, and everyone closed their eyes.

I put the recorder back in the middle of the room, and the wet sponge grabbed it.

I remembered instantaneously what species I had seen back on the traffic yacht. Sunlight reached the far recesses of my rare-tapped cerebellum. I hadn’t had any idea what that felt like. It actually hurt. A lot.

“What are you waiting for?” she snapped. “We haven’t got all fucking day. Just like you to wait around and squander a perfect opportunity.”

“That hurts,” I said, genuinely meaning nothing at all. Then I forgot what I was doing.


This piece is completely absurd.

the lumberjack returns

lumberjack guy who asked me for money on subway
which i didn't have any so i gave him my sandwich,
in exchange for this picture Originally uploaded by stardove07.

this time i saw the lumberjack on the subway in new york city. he looked healthier and actually smiled at me, after he asked me for money. i think he remembered that we shared a moment.

i asked him what he was doing in brooklyn since we don't have many trees here. he said я хочу съесть вашу головку, его смотрю как большая часть сыра. i smiled and nodded and then he started laughing, and then he started crying. but then he started laughing again.





This post is inane, absurdist nonsense.

we have a supersonic toilet.

really, it is. if our toilet magically levitated and oriented itself horizontally in the upper atmosphere, it could literally propel itself, when flushed, to at or above the speed of sound. how do i know this? because when any toilet in our building is flushed, all 6 floors vibrate for about 3 1/2 minutes. the ripples are felt beneath the earth to lord kimbo down in the seventh circle of hell, also known as its capital city, Pandemonium (or Dis), also known as Carteret, New Jersey.

we also have a toaster that beeps.

aside from this news, i am strongly considering quitting my job sooner rather than later. it has no means of vertical ascension and is really far removed from my interests of the moment. i would like to savor any or all time that i have before i go (?) back to school focusing on what creative instincts i have left behind. being that i have never felt comfortable enough here to play music, i hope that some peoples' new presence here will help change that, and i hope to find a space conducive to the exercise of that talent, which many people lately have helped me realise is important to pursue. i feel really unworthy of some of the tremendous compliments i have received and have decided it would be regrettable and malignant to those who lavished them if i didn't at least try to do them justice.

so i guess this is in line with new years' resolutions.

i will get back in shape so i can run another marathon in 2007, in whichever city i end up in this fall.

i hope to take advantage of the creative resources this city has to offer, such as darkrooms and whatnot. i want to consolidate my creative output into one central resource.

i need to get out and meet people. and be more social here.

and i need to take things a day at a time.

Dick says, you can do it. Thanks, Dick.

This post is all about me, me, me.




It is also about toilets.

time to write the first post of the new year.

first post of the new year! yay!

hoo-ray for profundity. goodnight.




This piece is inane.