The Beating Heart of Doom: or, the horrible slime monster from hell

Ohhhhhhmyyyyyyyygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod!!!

I was all set to write something intelligent today for the blog, because I've been neglecting it terribly and I feel badly about it. Truth is, I've been sprinting just to stay in the same place with all my projects lately and I haven't been devoting enough time to weird news reading, people watching, or paranoid musing to really hold up much of the deadly serious content you've all come to expect from me, so I've been steering clear.

Well, today I thought, screw it, I'll write about the discrimination that I and my friends faced at a club over the weekend when we tried to show porn at a porn-themed party we were holding at an East Village bar (the owner turned off our projector and would not allow us to plug it back in, or show any kind of graphic sexual content--at a PORN-THEMED PARTY, and that is bullshit on a whole cadre of different levels). Or the racist comment I heard from a guy crossing the street yesterday ("God bless you, whitey," he said as I passed by; I should have replied, "God bless you, racist" but I didn't because I'm POLITE). Or the totally insane breakdown I saw a totally insane guy having on the subway the other day (there was screaming, kicking, cursing, and, at one point, singing: "Beverly, Peverly, Rise and shine, If you don't get up, Your ass is mine"; actually, now that I'm thinking of it, that might have been a straight-up demon possession). Or something.

But then.

Through the wonders of facebook, I came across this little piece of vomit-inducing horror. It's a... I don't know. Oh, GOD, I just looked at it again! That thing is horrendous. Apparently it's a large group of tubifex worms living in a sewer and responding as a single organism to the lights cast on it by the sewer robot, which is filming it.

Let me reiterate. Many small, primitive life forms with little in the way of intelligence, living unbeknownst to the people above in the shopping center until this video broke, coming into contact with... a robot. Sound familiar? And pee-your-pants terrifying?

It does to me.

My advice to the city of Raleigh: if you don't want to see footage coming back from the next "sewer robot" featuring a face-off between technology and primordial-ooze-cum-intelligent-being that results in the two becoming fast friends, the ooze attaching itself to the robot and then riding it back out of the sewers and into your offices to visit bloody acts of doom upon you, then please, please, for the sake of all humanity, pour some goddamn Clorox down those pipes, followed by Draino, followed by every other imaginable micro-organism-killing chemical known to man (but be careful to avoid doing so in a science lab with a crazy American scientist, a la "The Host," lest ye end up with this monster loose in your streets). KEEP THE ROBOTS OUT OF THERE for at least a few days, and when you DO send them back down, keep them on a friggin leash so you can yank them out if any sad, lonely, survivor worms try to make friends with it.

That is all.

I've Changed: or, the slow slide into degeneracy

This afternoon I was at work, sitting here typing away, when two of my coworkers came in from outside, flushed and breathless and giggling. "They're filming Sex and the City outside!" they grinned. "Kim Catrall was like 2 feet away! Up on 58th Street! So cool!" I smiled. "Oh, that's what all that equipment I saw them setting up was for. I thought they were done filming in this part of town," I said in response. "Well you should go check it out!" they cried, and went back to their offices to tell their other colleagues about their great fortune.
I shrugged and considered asking Kate to come watch the desk while I went and gawked. But then I just went back to work.
Yesterday afternoon, I got a call on the gallery phone from a familiarly deep voice asking for one of the directors. As is my custom, I asked who was calling. "Sylvester Stallone," he replied. "Ok, just a moment, sir," I said, and put the call through.
And then went back to work.
A year ago, I'd have been shitting myself over these stars. I'm still pretty impressed that over the course of two days I've had the chance to interact with at least two very major celebrities. But the thing is, I'm not dying over it this time. I've got other stuff to worry about.
And yet. And yet... last night I went to see the cast of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia live on stage, performing "The Nightman Cometh." I paid an obscene amount of money to get tickets after they'd sold out in minutes. I laughed and grinned until my face hurt during the show. And afterward, I went and stood in a huge crowd, getting yelled at by security people and shoved into from behind, to see the stars come out of the theater entrance and go to their bus.
Granted, I actually had a purpose for this (I wanted to give one of them my card because I really think they'd like the webisode I'm working on, and getting an endorsement from Charlie Day, who took the card and flyer I thrust at him, would be pretty much UH-MAZE-ING), so I wasn't just being a crazed fan. But still, looking back at the past two days, I realized that I've gone from a reverence for slightly edgy feminine banter about relationships and big burly men in action movies... to practically worshiping a group of people who got famous by screaming about poop at the top of their lungs on TV.
I'm not sure how I feel about this.
But then, I look at the artistic and intellectual achievements of Sex and the City and, say, Rambo, and I don't think I'm far off in saying that It's Always Sunny probably has a lot more artistic integrity than either of them. I can't really put my finger on why exactly, but I think I'm right. Maybe it's because the writing and performing in Sunny is so utterly brilliant and smooth, and that the actors are also the writers and producers of the show. I have a huge amount of respect for people with that kind of talent and dedication and willpower (the amoutn of willpower, that is, required to turn your show about booze, rivalry, poop, and creepy sex into a runaway hit and be involved in it on every creative level). I think Charlie Day, Rob McElhenney, Glenn Howard, Kaitlin Olson, and Danny DeVito are true artists with a vision so far off the beaten track that it can't be anything but brilliant. And I guess I feel good about them taking precedence over Sly in my life.

...Sorry, Sly. You know I love you. But what have you done for me lately? Next time you call, ask me out for drinks.

Magazine is Up!

I have been trying to blog every day for the past several but have had zero time, and now that I DO have time, I want to save this post to shamelessly self promote! Whack! Magazine is finally up and running, folks! My friends and I have been working on it for a while and have finally gotten a workable web design layout going... we'll switch to a nicer format after a while but for the time being, this will have to do.

But it's content, friends. It's the content that makes this a great publication. If you have a good sense of humor and a willingness to read some really dirty jokes along with interesting interviews and imaginative takes on astrology... well... this mag is for you.

Give it a peek and please comment on the segments so we know they're being read!

Holy Levitating Mice, Batman!: or, this is weird but cool

So NASA has levitated some mice using magnetic fields. That's. I dunno. I mean. It's pretty f-ing cool, really. I wanted to rant about how unecessary it is, but really, I find the idea of someone possibly levitating ME someday, and that's oretty awesome. So. Anyway, yeah, just read about it.

Awkward moments in NYC: or, the Blue Guy

Ok. It's lunch time, kind of, and it just took me 45 minutes to eat a salad because the phone would not stop ringing, people's ordered lunches would not stop arriving at my desk, and other random people kept showing up and asking dumb questions... You'd think on a 65 degree, windy, rainy, Friday, maybe people would want to lay low and chill out, but apparently they prefer bugging me when I'm trying to eat.

And don't give me any of that "They're not really out to bug YOU" crap, because I know they are. Everyone is out to get me, people, and if that means calling and bothering me to such a degree that my brains actually explode out of my ears from the pressure, they'll do it. They're out to GET me. Remember that. Especially the slime molds.

Anyway, so I'm in the midst of my frantic running about/answering phones/signing for packages/smiling at whoever comes in/arranging messenger packages/blah blah blah, when in comes The Blue Guy. He's been in here a bunch of times, and I think I've even blogged about him before. Now, when I'm in the midst of my frantic trying-to-stuff-my-face-between-calls mode, it's easier to take things in stride because I already look frazzled and a moment of blank "Oh my god" staring might not be taken as rude. But, it's really hard not to stare at this guy. He's bluish grey ALL over. He's like the color of "steel blue" crayons. It's weird to see someone who looks like that. It makes you step back for a second and stare, then pretend not to stare.

I find myself doing that a lot in the city, where strange looking people abound. Sometimes staring is kind of warranted, like when you see a girl dressed in an insanely slutty outfit at ten on a Tuesday morning for no apparent reason, or a hardcore punked out kid on the Upper East side or something--people like that obviously WANT to be stared at in some way or another. But then there are people you're not supposed to really stare at, ever, but who it's hard NOT to want to examine. Especially "little people" or those in wheelchairs, disabled people who are making a fine display of themselves as they go down the sidewalk, flamboyant people (there are LOTS of ways of being flamboyant), and even really ugly people sometimes. And Blue Guy, of course. You want to stare, but you can't. So you look away and walk on by.

But then, when I'm walking by, I always think, "What if that person is offended that I DIDN'T look? What if he thinks I'm ignoring him and thus his condition, which he represents to the world?" So I try to look for a second, maybe do a short nod of acknowledgment, and move on. But then I feel really awkard cause I hate making eye contact with ANYONE on the street...

Ah, whatever. Blue Guy just left and I'm already bored with this topic.

Anyway, I'm off to PA for a day and a half, then back to the city to grind out a few more days. SO busy at the moment - deadlines looming, casting to be done, promos to put together for our promo PARTY next weekend, columns to write, agent queries to work on, books to read, homework to do, and general madness to try to kepe at bay.

Till next time.

The kind of morning I have to write about: or, surreal as all hell...

I won't pretend to pass this off as a post that has anything to do with any kind of blog theme. Truth is, I haven't had much time for those lately, and even when I do I've been so brain dead from all my other projects that I can't come up with anything, and I've been so wrapped up in my work and thoughts that I haven't been paying much attention to what's going on around me. So the blog has been dry.

But then, this morning, some cosmic ray or something showed up in my life. When I woke up I was in the midst of a dream involving me, my older sister, my father, and some other random people being stranded on a tropical island of some sort and seeking shelter as a storm approached. We had to wade through a swamp, past a calmly dozing row of gigantic crocodiles, and when we hit land I turned around to realize that my father had been eaten by one of them while pushing my sister out of the way. The rest of us sat to discuss what to do from there, the storm suddenly hit and we all had to run for cover to avoid being hit by lightning. There was some sort of massive half-built structure that we aimed for until we realized that it had no roof, so we had to alter our course for the trees ahead as the wind whipped up around us and the rain started pelting down. Just then I woke up, but wanted desperately to go back to sleep so I could see what would happen next. It was like a movie.

I got up and ran around crazily to get ready for work, somehow not having time for breakfast, but packing a huge lunch/dinner since I have my first session of a proofreading and copy editing class tonight at City College - my first in a series leading up to a Certificate in Publishing - and I won't have any time for dinner. So anyway, I started walking to the train very fast and heard a honk from a nearby car as it goes through an intersection. I assumed the driver was warning whoever might be at the stop sign going the other way that he was coming, but as he got up closer to me he slowed down and honked again. Ugh. Annoying. Eventually he took off again and I kept walking, only to catch up to him again as he was stopped further up the street at a red light. At which point he started shouting at me out of the window. What a nice guy. My name, however, is not "Mami."

So I got to the station right on time, only to find that my train had already passed. Way to go, MTA. Early trains are just as bad for most of us as late trains, you know. Running ahead of schedule will NOT make us like you more.

Anyway, I finally boarded a 2 train and found a spot next to an old, very angry looking Spanish woman who smelled like she was wearing an adult diaper, and that diaper was probably about due for a change. At Grand Concourse/149th I switched to the 4 train, which took its sweet time coming. In the meantime, I found a spot to stand right under the broken pipe that leaks water down into the train station all day every day, and wondered how long it would be before the ceiling caved in. I glanced down the platform to see a man with a big belly standing on the wrong side of the platform, shirtless, and talking to himself.

When the train finally came, I found a spot to stand right where a guy got on at the next stop, mumbling to himself. Great. Just what I needed. Turned out, this guy was a poet who had self-published 3 books and was selling them for $5 a piece on the subway. He spouted off some of his poetry, and it was GOOD. Not Pullitzer prize winning material, but good. I'd have bought a book if I'd had a $5 bill on me, but alas. One poem I remember is:

"The Quickest Way to Get to Riker's Island:
Take the D express train
Down to 34th Street,
And throw a brick,
Through the Macy's plate glass window."

Cute, right? So anyway, I was watching him walk down the car, selling his books and spitting poetry, and noticed as he passed a gentleman sitting, fast asleep, on one of the bench seats. He had that skin condition, the name of which always eludes me, in which his pigmentation varies in big blotches all over from black to pink. His mouth and chin and the tip of his nose were pinkish white, as was the skin around one eye, while the rest of his head was deep chocolate brown. The patterns gave him the appearance of having a muzzle, or a snout. But he looked peaceful. I noticed other people on the train looking at him, and I couldn't blame them--he was asleep after all, so he had no idea we were staring, and he was a singularly interesting looking person. I wondered if he was only pretending to be asleep to avoid the stares. Or if he was so used to them that he could relax enough on the train enough to pass out.

I got to work early, somehow, after being convinced I was late the whole way from the train. When I got in, the phone immediately started ringing and it's hardly stopped since, but I was told first thing by the guy who brings the newspapers to us on the second floor that our front desk man for the building, Steve, who has been a fixture of my mornings for 2 years now, died of a heart attack when coming up out of the subway on his way home last night. He was 54.

It struck me. Wow. No retirement party. No easy golden years. This guy who kept the building running, honestly, just stopped.

For some reason, every one of the weird events of this morning has just struck me as something significant. It's made me think about all the remarkable and weird things I've seen and done in my life. How everyone has these stories. How any moment, those stories could be silenced. It makes me want to call my parents and every person I love.

And of course it makes me want to blog.

The weirdness of my life escalates: or, it's been a while...

Well, my lovelies, it's been a while. And I don't think I've sat down for more than a few minutes of it. Well, aside from seeing "Inglourious Basterds" the other night, which I feel compelled to see again on the basis that it f-ing ROCKED. Although I have no time in which to do so. We'll see how it goes.

But, the weirdness of my life is escalating like a kid with no respect or fear for the escalator. I'm reaching dizzying heights of insanity here. I just got a TWITTER account for my new persona as a correspondent for Whack! Magazine, have been in touch with numerous folks in the adult industry about interviews over the past few weeks, have done more 'research' for my book in a very unexpected place, may have begun to be stalked by someone I met on a research outing (that has yet to be proved, though), and haven't really relaxed at all. I'm trying to figure out ways in which to get myself fired on good enough terms that I could collect unemployment, but haven't come up with anything yet. All my friends who are on unemployment seem to be living the good life, and having just spent the past two days being wildly productive at writing while at home, I think I may want to try their lifestyle. Only problem is, the gallery won't fire me unless I crap in the middle of their floor. They may be jerks about it, but they love me. It's an abusive relationship, but they do give me a kickin' health insurance plan, and if that ain't worth a little backhanded slapping from time to time, I don't know what is.

But anyway, I've been thinking a lot about porn lately, since I've been writing about it and planning to go to a convention next month (that's a whole other story). Last night I watched a documentary about John Holmes that featured a lot of footage from his films in the 70's and early 80's, and it really drove home to me the differences in the aesthetics of porn performers then and now. Back in the day you had lots of body hair, somewhat saggy boobs from time to time, flabby butts, and more or less real sex going on in skin flicks. These days it's often fake tans, fake dyed hair, fake nails, fake eyelashes, fake boobs, hairless genitals, and sex that, while real, isn't very often the kind of sex normal people are having. It's like a mechanical depiction of an act that carries in it nothing sensual, only sexual. It's like watching robots go at it.

No, seriously. I've been thinking a lot about the fake aesthetic of porn, and I've been wondering if the increasingly Barbie Doll appearance of mainstream porn stars is a result of the adult industry's typical tendency to take a good thing and go way overboard with it. Men like big boobs, in general, so porn takes the big boob ideal and turns it into a charicaturized monster-mammary fetish. Everybody likes looking tan and healthy, so porn gives us oompa-loompa orange stars. And so on. And the public watches it, maybe because we have to watch what we're presented with, or maybe--and here's where the robots come in--because we don't really like to think that these piston-like penises and hairless vaginas are really human. We don't like to think that the hardcore sex acts we're watching and getting off to are taking place between real people, because that implicates us in some kind of gross moral degeneracy, throws our own less-stunning sexual prowess into a very dim light indeed, and most of all, puts us and the people boning on camera on the same basic level as human beings.

So we buy up porn featuring people who don't look like real people. We go to strip clubs expecting the performers to be surgically enhanced Femmbots from Austin Powers. We hold them at a distance from ourselves, as something vaguely like ourselves and yet safely different, like robots who can have sex but with whom we have no fundamental similarities. It feels safer that way.

But it's not, obviously. I watch some of the porn being made today, both in big studios and for low-budget online enterprises, and it's all featuring intensely fictionalized faces, oversized cocks, spitting, gagging, violent humping, weird fringe acts that have become mainstream. And I think, these people are doing this because they know people want to watch it. We want to watch it because it seems fake. But the overlap is inevitable and it's got to be going on in bedrooms everywhere, and in the computer-lit basements of teenage boys everywhere, who are growing up thinking that this kind of behavior is normal. That these bodies are standard. That this is what a man is supposed to do to a woman, and vice versa. And that scares me in the same way that the idea of intelligent or morally informed robots scares me. It says something really terrifying about our view of ourselves and the things we create. We want them to be bigger, better, smarter, faster, stronger than we are, more than we want to be ok with what we've got and use it. Of course robots started as time and labor saving devices equipped to help us, but many robotics experiments out there are taking some of our basic human roles away from us because they are NOT us, like mechanized soldiers and battle bots, even companion robots designed to give the appearance of feeling love, or just to have sex with (see that picture above? that's what that is. a sexbot). We watch robot movies because they feature super-intelligent and super-sophisticated bots that are so human we must anthropomorphize them in order to villainize them in order to watch them, and again, there's that creepy overlap. And sure, porn started as a sexy alternative to our imaginations when we masturbate, but it's turned into this multi-billion dollar monster industry that caters to our cruelest instincts by turning its stars into nonhuman objects who just fuck and fuck and fuck away.

I'm not sure how to end this, but there it is. Food for thought.

Quick update: or, kind of unimportant ramblings after vacation...

Well, it's my first day back to work in the Big Apple after almost a week at my parents' house in the country. I hesitate to call it an actual vacation, since I spent my time there alternately running around between friends' houses, doing research for my book, working on some copy due this week, corresponding with editors, trying to track down a certain adult performer who forgot about our scheduled interview, attending a 1 year birthday party, and planning, preparing for, and executing a gigantic surprise birthday party for my parents. It was, to put it mildly, not exactly relaxing.

But, you know, when I came back to the city yesterday afternoon and was immediately pissed off by a woman in the subway who barked at me to move into the car even though I had literally no room to do so, then returned to a laundry-ridden apartment and a noisy street outside that made it difficult to sleep, I realized that even when I'm busy and stressed at my parents' house, having those crickets chirping outside sure does get one relaxed at the end of a long day. I don't know if it's just because I grew up with cicadas, crickets, frogs, owls, and all other manner of night-time fauna singing me to sleep, or if there's something inherently soothing abou their song, but I slept like a ROCK every night I was there, and last night could hardly keep my eyes shut for more than an hour.

Maybe I'll get one of those noise machines I've always scoffed at people for having in the past. My block is really very quiet, comparative to some others I've walked down at night, but there are always cars going by with their music too loud, alarms going off somewhere, and the inevitable late night mron who thinks that doorbells and cell phones are too high-tech and that screaming somebody's name outside their building is the best way to get their attention. A nice white-noise machine with some crickets might help me keep my city tension under control...

But, in other news, I have a fun, kind-of-NYC story to relate. It's only fun now that it's over, but you might find it interesting. On my journey back to the big city yesterday, my train stopped for 35 minutes in Philadelphia while the engine was switched. Before we got going again, a friendly middle-aged guy came and sat down next to me. He was a bit fidgety, but was reading a book called "The Poet's Handbook" or somesuch, so I decided he was pretty cool, and drifted off to sleep for a bit. When I woke back up ten or fifteen minutes later, I heard the oddest sound. It sounded like a muffled, high-pitched, conversational murmur, and it seemed to be coming from the guy next to me. As if he were having a closed-mouth conversation with himself. I pretended to be asleep for a while, listening, then made a pretty big show of waking up, hoping that it would shush him, since the sound was decidedly creepy. It occurred to me that perhaps the murmuring was his poetic process; maybe he was reciting a developing poem in his head, or working through the cadence of a new piece. But to me, it sounded as if he was talking to someone with his mouth closed.

My movement did shush him, but only for a few minutes. He fidgeted madly for a bit, half-standing and then sitting again, clutching his book against his chest, waving it in front of his face and thumbing the pages distractedly, before starting in on his murmuring. I ignored it, opened my own book, and tried to lose myself in its pages, but within a few minutes, his agitation had grown, and from the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of him slapping himself lightly on the cheek repeatedly, murmuring all the while.

This was getting a bit scary. The overall impression I was getting was that he was talking to a voice in his head, and was trying to slap it into submission, or to shut it up. Either way, I was not exactly comfortable sitting next to him. His fidgeting looked frantic, almost desperate, and the slapping was a bit over the line of what I'd like to call acceptable behavior on an Amtrak train. I briefly considered trying to talk to him, in hopes that it would distract him, but I was afraid that if I said the wrong thing or startled him too much, I'd send him right over the edge.

As it turned out, I just ignored him as well as I could for the hour and a half back to New York. It was not easy. When the train stopped, I waited until he'd already gotten in line to get off, placed a few people between him and myself, and waited until he'd already gotten to the escalator to get on it. All things considered, I suppose that if he
was hearing voices, he handled himself pretty darn well, but I was still just about as uncomfortable as I've ever been on a train. Poor guy. I hope he at least gets a poem out of it.

Musings: or, New York is a relaly weird place...

So today I was thinking about how I haven't seen that many interesting New York things lately. I like reporting on weird people and happenings, but nothing has stuck out in my memory lately as being particularly weird or funny. New York seems to have grown lethargic in the heat.

But then I realized I was just being stupid. It's New York. It's summer. Weird stuff is happening all over the place. I've just been so wrapped up in the craziness happening in my life that I wasn't paying enough attention to the following things I've seen over the past few weeks:

1) A man walking a miniature long-haired Dachsund and a Great Dane at the same time. This spectacle was so hilarious that I reached for my camera phone but didn't get it out in time to snap a picture. Trust me, it would have convinced you once and for all that if an alien landed somewhere and saw these two dogs sitting next to each other, it would have no idea they were of the same species.

2) A man in a wheelchair pulling himself along with his very-much-working feet, at 1:00 am in Harlem.

3) A man in a wheelchair with an American flag sticking up off of it and who was missing one leg, which was apparently being replaced by a traffic cone.

4) An old man passed out asleep on a bench in Astoria in 85 degree heat... first at 6:00 pm, when I walked by on my way to my friend's, and again at 7:30 pm, when I walked by again, on my way to the bus. How he could have stayed asleep in that position for that long, I have no idea.

5) Barbara Walters, who was crossing Madison Ave this morning as I was going the other way, on my way to work. Or, if it wasn't her, she could have been a body double.

6) A man dressed all in purple, with a purple wig, playing a purple saxophone in the subway.

7) A woman wearing spotless new dark blue jeans, a bright yellow and immaculately clean fleece shirt, and with a fresh French manicure, begging for change in the subway because she was reportedly "broke" and trying to get food for her family. Ain't nothing 'broke' about your manicure, honey.

I'm sure there are others, but they've slipped my mind at the moment. All told, though, I guess my past few weeks haven't been so ho-hum as I thought.

With that, I'm off to spend a week hiding out in Pennsyvlania and working my butt off on my new column, some interviews for a new publication I'm working on, and so on and so forth. I will also be feasting on fresh corn from the fields, whoopie pies, ham and bean soup, chicken corn soup, and tomatoes straight out of the garden. Home again, home again, jiggity jig!

Lazy Friday post: or, this is just fun to watch