People who should (at least) be locked up for February

So it's an exciting time for me.  I'm going to be featuring at Bloombars (my first) at the end of March.  And the Semi-Finals for the Beltway poetry slam are coming up at the end of April.

Probably most important, though, I'm waiting on my Yelp Elite badge.  That's right.  Soon my opinion will matter.

But amidst all this excitement and restaurant-reviewing, you'd think I might pass over an opportunity to foam at the mouth about the idiot du jour of February.  Not so.  I give you, the man who should be at the very least locked up for February:

Governor Scott Walker.

Oh man.  Where to begin with this guy.  Let's do the usual Wikipedia him and find out exactly how pathetic his life is.  Governor Walker, a straight-C drop-out at a college ranked 75th in the country, has always been political.  Back when he was a sophomore, he ran for President of the Student Council.  Not only has Governor Walker always been political, he's always been a scumbag.  He was berated by the school newspaper for campaign violations and mud-slinging.  That's right.  Mud-slinging.  In a fucking student government campaign.

And now he's continuing the proud tradition of conservative politicians by proposing blatant attacks on workers' rights under the guise of the mythical "balancing of the budget".  Nevermind the fact that our debt is mostly due to the actions of Republican presidents.  Or that Republican-backed tax cuts contribute a great deal more to our debt than any of our economic woes.  Or that the Republicans can't even manage their Committee budget effectively.


No.  Republicans are the champions of fiscal responsibility.  Just like Rush Limbaugh is the champion of moderation.  And vodka is the champion of sobriety.


So anyway, Governor Walker's plan is to have teachers, who make around 50k average, take pay cuts and have their unions give up collective bargaining rights.  Meanwhile, he signed a tax cut bill of over $1 million for businesses in Wisconsin.  So that makes sense.


Of course, what's the point of attacking businesses? It's much better we attack the real criminals: Underpaid educators and those evil unions taking advantage of things like free speech and rights to equality.  Or, "wasteful" in the words of Gov. Walker.


But even though Gov. Walker thinks unions are wasteful and should be cut down, this is really all about the budget.  Yep.  Unless you happen to call Walker's office pretending to be Republican industrialist David Koch.  Then he's pretty open (and explicit) on his feelings towards unions.  


Now, Gov. Walker squeezing workers and feeding the pulp to businesses is nothing special.  The unions are in a revolt and in all likelihood, this will blow over, Walker will have lost all support of the people and he'll sit in office the rest of his days collecting on the deals he's made with other, real industrialists.


But THIS is scary.  That there are actually people who DEFEND what Walker is doing.  That people actually think that 50k is TOO MUCH to pay a teacher and that unions really are a bunch of fat cats.  This whole accusing the opposition of PRECISELY what you are doing is sickening.  And it seems like it's actually gaining traction by disguising itself as fiscal responsibility.  I'm sorry, a fiscal conservative is still a conservative and is still responsible for travesties like this.


So anyway.  It won't work and people like Gov. Walker, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Ohio Gov. John Kaisch are tempting fate by pulling this kind of bullshit in the time of Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions.  Just because we're an ocean away doesn't mean we don't hear the call.


So, Governor Walker, stand firm all you want.  It just means you'll be that far behind when we move on.  Maybe if you finished your degree, you'd know history better.  But for now, you should be (at least) locked up.

Writing Exercise: The Reluctant

So now I'm doing writing exercises.  I realized that a reason I might have a problem actually sitting down and getting writing done is because I get into this "YOU MUST DO IT IF YOU WANT TO BE A WRITER" mantra and it stops being fun.  So I figure I might as well play a little bit, rather than focus on getting anything productive done.

That'll probably work.

Anyway, here's the first.  The prompt is from The 3 AM Epiphany by Brian Kiteley.  It's an exercise in point-of-view where you have to write a story using the first person "I, me, my" only twice.  So it's a first-person story, but it's kind of surprising that it's first-person.  So here goes!

The way she eats pasta is all wrong.  That little trick people do where they wind their fork like a screwdriver, spiraling up enough pasta to choke themselves, it’s disgusting.  And they smile at their ingenuity like, “Oh, now this will make my meal go faster.  It’s an American thing and it’s grotesque in a place like this.  This is an Italian restaurant, not Pizza Hut, you cow.  Here you treasure each individual hand-crafted strand of a dish from here.  Each thread tells a story, maps the hands of the pastaia, a timeline of passed-down tradition.  And here you are shoveling it down with all the grace of a forklift.

“So, then,” She smiles like she’s proud of what she’s doing, “This is pretty good!”

Yeah, excellent, it’s a good place.

It doesn’t matter, it’s not worth dwelling on.  It’s not really about the pasta.  It’s more the way she dips her head to catch whatever lump of foodstuffs she’s dug up.  Bobbing like a drunken seal dipping to catch a fish, it’s disgusting.  Her neck is much too saggy for it to be making acrobatics like that.  Whenever she lowers that massive hulk she calls a head, her neck crumples up.  Good lord, I can see her veins through that cheesecloth she calls skin.

“You’re so quiet.” She says, bits of sauce like sores on her lips.

Yes, sorry about that.

Oh, and that voice.  It deserved a double-take every time she spoke.  It sounded like she was a 40-year-old man with a drug problem.  Too deep and too hoarse.  Women are supposed to have voices soft like their bodies, delicate and low like some secret clasped close to her bosom.  But some cosmic joke left her with this horrible pastiche of an alto. 

“Ah, cool.” She hesitates like just saying that took all her mental faculty.  Probably did.  “So, is that what you do, like, for a living?”

No, it’s just a hobby.

Boring.  Monotonous.  Tiresome.  There’s not enough adjectives in the dictionary for this girl.  She really is the antithesis of the feminist movement.  She has a job, sure, doing some accounting work like every other dolt in this despicable city.  But she’s probably just waiting for the right man to come along so she can chain herself to some stove and live out her 1950s wife-slave fantasy.  It’ll probably happen, too.  There’s enough colorless people in this world that living a black-and-white life wouldn’t be too hard.  She’ll find the man with his 401k salary shackles and they’ll live happily ever after.

“Oh.” She smiles, toothy crooked smile, “Does that pay well?”

Yes.  There’s a lot of future.  Promotions and such.  It’s temporary.

“Great.” And then she turns back to herself.

That’s right, the whole world’s about you.  Your job.  Your hobbies.  Your friends.  Oh, you do yoga! How novel!  You probably clasp your hands and say Namaste after that and feel all in tune with this and that magical Eastern culture.  And all your friends are right there with you, right?  And afterwards you sip overpriced mojitos and talk about how cute the yogi’s ass is while your eyes scan the bar for potential suitors.  How cultured.  Though, with thighs like that, I’m thinking you might want to be working a little harder in class.

The check comes.  I pay, because that’s how these things go.  The gears of courtship lubricated with a men’s blood.

“Well, it was very nice meeting you.” She extends her hand.  Of course, why would you kiss the guy who just bought you eighteen dollars worth of linguine. 

Yes, we should get together again sometime.

“Oh, sure, yeah.” She waves, that hairy paw of a hand, “Bye!”

And she’s gone, her ass bobbing behind her like a parade float.  Good riddance, now that horrible chemical perfume smell is gone.

I’ll probably call in a few days.  It’s a social necessity after all.  It’s so hard meeting people.

New hope for vegetarians

So this has been in the news.

Apparently Taco Bell does not serve high-quality locally-farmed organic sirloin steak with every kid's meal.  What a fucking travesty.

Louis Black says it better.  Plus, if you watch that, you don't have to read stuff.  Who wants to read stuff, amirite?

So anyway, the summary is that Taco Bell says their food is 88% beef (which, I guess is why they emblazon packages of it with the words "taco meat filling" instead of "BEEF").  The lawyers say, however, it's more like 36% beef.  So really arguing over nothing, right? The lawyers insist Taco Bell call it "taco meat filling" rather than beef.  Which you could totally see being good for business.

Then again, it's taco bell:

Source

So the question came to me as I was making my way through three of seven layers of my burrito filling:

Does this mean vegetarians can eat at Taco Bell?

I mean, technically it's not meat.  And vegetarians should be used to the taste of the filling, since they eat mostly processed food filler anyway, so it wouldn't be much of a change.  I feel like this opens new doors to vegetarians.  For the longest time they've been deprived of having high cholesterol, diabetes and heart failure.  Now even the greenest of the green can make themselves sick.  It truly is a brave new world.

Thank you, Taco Bell, for making the world a more unhealthy place.

P.S: In order to make up for my hardcore bashing of vegetarians, here's a tofu recipe:

Sauteed tofu:

Cut tofu into slices and press out some of the water in each slice with a paper towel.  In a separate container, put soy sauce, sesame oil and pretty much anything else (sriracha, salt and pepper, hell, you can even get wild and put some hot+sour sauce up in there).  Put the slices into the container with this mixture and shake it like a polaroid picture until the slices are nicely coated.

Put some oil (Olive oil and maybe a little sesame oil) in a pan and heat it.  Then throw some chopped garlic in there and cook until delicious.  Once that’s done, take each slice and sautee them until…well, whenever, really, you can make them really cooked or leave them a little squishy.  After they’re all cooked, you can take some of that leftover sauce and sautee some chives or whatever else you want to eat with your delicious tofu creations.

Size to cutness ratio

So I went to a middle school to a poetry contest.  I totally mopped the floor with them.

Just kidding.  They were really good.

But anyway, so there were all these little kids all dressed up and doing their poetry.  And half of them were in full-fledged suits.  And it occurred to me that there is absolutely nothing cuter than a small child in a suit.  I think the relationship looks kind of like this:

It's just the truth.  When I have children, they will be wearing suits always.  If they ever question it, it'll go like this:
Kid: Dad, why do I have to wear a suit all the time?
Me: Because if you're not cute, I'm not your father.
Kid: So, if I take off the suit-
Me: You're not my child.  Now fix that tie.  You call that a Windsor knot?!

Mmm...parenting.

Valentines: Why happiness is like being depressed and Hallmark sucks

So it's Valentine's Day.

Fuck Valentine's Day.

If you need Hallmark to tell you when it's okay to give your one-in-a-million a once-in-a-lifetime night:

YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.

I was very happy yesterday, so much so that I wondered what the hell was wrong with me.  I took my temperature, nope, normal.  I checked my eyesight, nope, I wasn't going blind.  I pinched myself, nope, I wasn't dreaming.  I pinched someone else and they punched me, so yes, I'm still living in the real world.

But yes, I was happy.  This kind of happy:

It was just a bit like being on drugs.

It's also a bit like being depressed.

Sometimes you get sad, it's a natural consequence of being alive.

And maybe happiness is just like that sometimes.  The confluence of starlight, the alignment of Mercury in rising and Libra in your pocket, your blood sugar up and your electric potentials evoked.

Sometimes you just feel good.  It's as reliable as death and taxes.  As inexplicable as...death and taxes.  But unlike death and taxes, it happens more than people realize.  Drugs operate in the bizarre landscape that is our mind and play by the rules of our biology.  Anything they can do, we can do.  And better.

So do drugs.  I mean.  Be happy.  And when you are, it's not worth questioning it, honestly.  It won't answer.

Memorization

Memorization is hard.

That's right, little bits of insight like that are why you come to this blog.

I always think of memory as kind of like a cup.  You can only fill it with so much before it starts to spill over.  So you have to pour a little out to fit anything else in there.  For example:

Now that's science.

So anyway, I'm trying to memorize a poem and I'm wondering what piece of information (read: porn website) I'll be forgetting.  It's good to think of things this way.  Because you figure that if you pour out enough, eventually it'll be something you have no business remembering anyway.  Like the names people called you in high school.  Or how you were the one that recommended everyone drink bourbon straight that night.

That's why I'm in favor of learning.

A breakup letter to Arianna Huffington

Hey, Arianna.  We need to talk.

We've been through a lot together.  Remember when you hired that insane holistic nightmare douchebag to run your "Living" section? Or when you insisted that the GOP thinks Obama is a Muslim bent on Muslim takeover of our good Christian world based on a poll that didn't say anything like that.  Or this:

Oh man, covering a story about saving two women from prison in Korea in a way that makes it sound like all that coverage of Kim Kardashian's nipple, that was something else.

We've had our times together, haven't we?

But this time, Arianna, you've gone too far.  Don't try and play coy, you know what I'm talking about.  I saw you yesterday with him, that slickster Tim Armstrong.  That's right.  I know what's going on here.  You're thinking of...god, I can't even say it...MERGING with AOL.

I don't understand how you could do this to us! And with AOL! AOL's a playa, you know that.  It's been skipping off to India and outsourcing every chance it gets! And it's sneaky.  Remember when it released almost a million users' data to the public? Not to mention it's a gold digger.  It tried to start an email service that would make senders pay for the right to get a message to your inbox! And fail, fail, fail.

And it's AOL! The only thing I remember AOL doing for anyone is providing a venue for middle-aged men to anonymously stalk teenagers! Besides that, it's slow connections, slingo and a messaging service NO ONE USES ANYMORE!

But if that's who you want to be with, Arianna, I won't stop you.  I'll miss your Democratic niceties and your adorable accent of indeterminate origin.  But there's plenty of other news aggregators in the sea.  Go ahead, have your "merging of visions".  I've already moved on.

I hope you get Herpes.

Journalists in favor of child obesity

You know, the world is funny sometimes.  There'll be an issue that pops up every once and a while that you cannot even CONCEIVE of someone being against and then all of a sudden a piece of legislation asserting the rights of those non-existent resisters will pop up.  For example, a bill giving money to people who put themselves in mortal danger on 9/11.  Then the bill preventing the government from shielding contractors who endorse rape.

And now.  This moron.  A journalist (I guess you can call her that, she works for Time) who actually is trying to make the point that making school lunches healthier is a bad idea.  Are.  You.  Kidding.  Me.

Let's start with facts.  And by facts, I mean mspaint pictures:

As you can see, you put greasy shit into children and they become fat children.  Now I know your journalism school probably told you that math wasn't relevant to the real world, but the transitive property would indicate that:

If you take AWAY the shitty double-down fatmobile, you go back to a regular kid.

That's the logic behind the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010.  Stop giving kids shitty food, and they'll stop being unhealthy.  I'll also note that the site above gives quotes from just about everyone who's anyone in pediatrics and medicine saying that this is an excellent idea.  But a Times journalist says otherwise.

She begins her article talking about a school in Tulsa that has an excellent football team, presumably because they all weigh 250 pounds and cram down pizza every day.  Because eating junk food is definitely the healthiest way to gain weight.

Then she goes on to describe how "...the ice cream bars and Fruit Roll-Ups...make 7th grade tolerable for middle schoolers nationwide." I actually had a small aneurysm when I read that.  If the only thing that makes school tolerable for you is candy and ice cream, then there's more wrong with your education than your diet.

Then she goes on to make points.  Not good ones and not ones based in any real fact, but points.  Her first point is described in her title "Parents and Principals not pleased about coming school lunch guidelines".  Because there are no parents or principals who are in favor of these measures.

No, instead she quotes some random schmuck from the 8th most obese state in the US:

But the yummy stuff makes more money — and that's a big deal in an era of tight school budgets. "We had a Chick-fil-A night and made $800," says Emily Burns, a mother of three who sits on a PTA board at a Tulsa elementary school. "People feel bad" about the fried food, she admits a bit sheepishly, "but it's $800, and that can buy a piece of equipment for our school."

$800 dollars to sabotage your child's health? What a bargain!

The other issue is money.  Which isn't an issue.  And, furthermore, the costs of obesity and having children living unhealthy lives is kind of worth the few extra million.

In the end, the act is a step in the right direction.  And Ms. Ball's article is a step in the wrong direction.

I should note, also, that if you look up Karen Ball on Google Image, you get this:

Looks like someone never grew out of fruit roll-ups and ice cream.

Being kid-friendly

Let's talk more about poetry and not about this:

Or the whole blacking out Al-Jazeera in the US so people watching the news can focus on something trashy.

America: Making the world safe for Democracy, unless that democracy might lead to decisions that we don't like.  Then we're totally behind ruthless dictators.

But who needs politics! I'm a writer! I'm supposed to remove myself entirely from the petty squabbles of everyday life and produce high prose about pastoral settings where everyone's happy, even the slaves.

In that vein, I've decided to participate as a performer here.  It's a poetry contest for kids where they write about love and get judged by jaded yuppies.  That was sarcastic, but it does sound really cool.  And literacy is important, blah blah blah.

So I need to take the curse words out of my poems.  But there's a problem with that:

 In order to make a poignant, lasting statement, one needs liberal use of the words "fuck", "shit" and, in gender-conscious poetry, "bitch".  This is the case with my poetry and, I dare say, all poetry.

So, as such, I decided to start writing a more kid-friendly poem.  Behold:

Sometimes…

Sometimes I am Superman

Taking on problems bigger than me

And with a quick one-two

Show them why they don’t make comics about bad guys.

I can span wide frowns with these arms

And X-ray vision?

Pssh

These eyes uncover lies

And surprise

I see right through you.

But sometimes I’m a supervillain.

Hatching master schemes

And working on my evil laugh-

(Try a few laughs)

Just give me a Sharpie and a sleeping face

A shoelace worth tying together

Or a salt shaker to unscrew

And I am an evil mastermind.

Sometimes, I’m a lover.

Telling the girl I love her

Steal stars from the sky for her

Lasso the moon for her

Tell her she’s brighter than gold

And sweeter than sugar.

But sometimes.  I’m a playa.

Letting the phone ring when they call

Seeing Monica on Mondays

And Tonia on Tuesdays,

Girl, the week is only so long.

Then, sometimes, I’m a beggar

Saying “Wait, wait, don’t leave me”

“The week’s so long

And I need you with me!”

Sometimes I’m a master of deception

(Hoarse) Making my voice hoarse

Because I’m much too sick for work today.

Insisting I never got that email

And what five-page essay?

Not only did my dog eat my homework

A crocodile ate my dog!

Fortunately, sometimes I’m the crocodile hunter

And I wrestled that monster to the ground.

So really, I should get an A for effort.

It's a work in progress, i.e., the contest was postponed so I'm going to wait until last minute to get it done.