Aliens Are Coming So Try And Act Cool

Through everything that happened this year, I survived it, and so did almost everyone else that I know.  Apparently we have that going for us.

Benazir Bhutto essentially committed suicide by returning to her home country back in October, so when the news that they had reached her, to quash the paradoxical dream of a democratic Pakistan, I wasn’t really surprised. Let me remind you that the killers ran up on her at the rally that had originally been postponed by her being placed under house arrest soon after her arrival.

Over the last couple of months she told everyone who would listen that if she were assassinated, that Musharraf was the one behind it. When the guy came out of the hospital to announce that she had died from her injuries he proclaimed, “she has been martyred”.

There is not much sympathy over here from me for her so called sacrifice. Her father and both of her brothers were all murdered by political rivals and she had been driven from office under dubious circumstances not once but twice before.

The writing was on the wall honey, those dudes were not down for you so why push it, which is funny because supremely educated women are usually such big sellers in the Muslim world. Go figure, just don’t try and go home again.

Despite the fact that I am limited to the network and local offerings plucked freely off of the airwaves, I still spend way too much time gaping vacantly at the machine an earlier generation called the idiot box. Old people are usually wrong about most things related to progress and in this case they could not be more so.

Advertising works and the fact that so many of us will sit for so many hours everyday, and allow images to be seared into our subconscious mind is nothing short of sheer genius. When the television writers walked out on November 1^st, there were over 60 shows in production and the television season was doing what it is supposed to do, exciting and enthralling viewers coast to coast while brainwashing us to buy fast food and shop at Wal-Mart.

At this point pretty much all of the shows have stopped production and the only new fare offered by the networks are mostly inane reality programs and always insipid game shows. Without question the writers are deserving of a greater share of the pie and I support their quest to achieve equitable compensation for their efforts, it is after all quite challenging to sit down and conjure something from nothing.

Keep The Car Running, the song by a real band from Montreal called, The Arcade Fire, reminds me of the song On The Darkside from the movie  Eddie and The Cruisers. In the 1983 movie, On the Darkside is performed by the fictional Eddie, but in real life the song cracked the top ten on the singles charts by reaching number seven.

Though merely a Springsteen sound alike, flash in the pan, John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band, were the actual band that got paid because of the songs success. They parlayed their noteriety by appearing on the sondtracks of two Stallone movies as well.

In Rocky IV, their song Hearts on Fire encourages Rocky to feel “no pain” during the memorable training sequence in the snow. Crime is the disease and Marion Cobretti is the cure, in  Cobra, another godawful Stallone effort from the eighties that also features the band from Rhode Island.

And finally, you have got to see this, from the American evangelist and televised maniac, Jack Van Impe. He warns us all how aliens, are “the rage of the age”, and how “soon a star wars battle will rage among the planets”. Remember that when the aliens take over, you were warned here first.

Wacky Jack might be right though, as we learned from a BBC News report, that details how we might be facing a real life threat from above and actually be in danger of immenant invasion. A former UFO expert with the British Government declares that British air defenses are regularly penetrated my unexplained aircraft. Who knew?

Happy New Year everyone.

Please try to not act stupid 2008.

Racism is lame.

H8 everyone with equal fury.

This Year I’m Giving You Genital Warts.

Watching the holiday cooking segment this morning with Regis, Kelly, and her kids as they were flinging sugar onto each other and making a big mess of the set, I couldn’t help but think that the scene would definitely not have played out in my own childhood. Of course they were playing things up for the cameras, but I could easily imagine holiday baking at Kelly’s house with those precocious kids being such a cavalier affair, she is rich after all, and can afford to be playful, and no doubt has the domestic staff to clean up after such carefree dalliances.  

My Mom was probably playful once but parenthood and life had changed that, and she was the one who would have been cleaning up the mess as she had been all along, so she wasn’t so inclined to goof around. Mom was the girl in a patriarchal household and she was the one who had the “responsibility” to maintain the house that was home to me, my brother, and my Dad. I cannot begrudge the woman for not tossing sugar all around the kitchen willy nil, because there was not a snowballs chance in hell that we boys would be around later to help make sense of the fray. 

My Dad doesn’t understand the concept of playfulness to this day and he is 66, but back then he was so tight that the man undoubtedly had to unlace his asshole to take a shit in the morning. I used to sneak out of the house as a teenager by going out of my bedroom window and my Dad would be more angry that I used the window instead of the door than he would that I snuck out in the first place because teenagers sneaking out is to be expected, but using the window showed a lack of respect for what he had worked so hard to achieve.             

Sonya invited me to go and spend Xmas with her and her parents this year and I can’t help but compare the idea to the most overplayed of all Xmas fables, Dickens’ holiday classic. We dated for over four years and spoke of the possibility of a marriage, but it was the same old story, woman wants more than the man is willing or able to give. Having her invite me to come and be with her and her family at this most familial of times is like being visited by the ghost of Christmas that never was. Of course being much less masochistic than I was as a younger man, I readily declined her invite preferring, this holiday season, to remain as I came into the world and as I will go out of this world, alone.  

You could call me a Grinch but that would be a misnomer because the green fiend is merely indicative of a particular season, (despite what the 1977 Emmy nominated Halloween television special on CBS would try and have us believe), I on the other hand am cynical, angry, bitter, and pissed off all year round. There are no dead trees in my home decorated with ornaments or anything else, and no one is going to show up in the middle of the night to give me anything other than some drunken kisses and an STD.  

My boss went to pick her girlfriend up at work the other day and while she was waiting in the lobby noticed there was a crèche on display. Upon closer inspection she noticed that the only men in the scene were Joseph an unwed father, and the shepherds, all of whom were decidedly unwise guys. The three who reportedly followed a star from lands far off had not gotten there yet it would seem. Upon inquiry the business owner who had assembled the incomplete nativity revealed that he had left them out on purpose, because they were astrologers.  

Holiday once meant Holy Day, nowadays it means spend and buy and then spend some more, and because I have no money the relevance of the whole occasion is lost to me. There is no “war on Christmas”, except for the actual war that is being waged somewhere far away on Christmas day and the other 364 non Christmas days of the year as well. The presumed holiness of the day is long gone much like the three missing men in the crèche, and we have instead allowed consumerism to become the reason for the season. Give til hurts this year people, and then take until it doesn’t hurt so much anymore.  

God Fuck America.

By the time I had lugged this machine up the hill from the ferry terminal, I was dripping sweat from my brow and my shirt was thoroughly drenched. I could not get connected to the web in my apartment by piggybacking because the signal was too weak, and Richard Merrill was my login name and  P.J. the terrier was looking up from my desktop, but I didn’t care. It is not every day that I am handed a laptop with no strings attached, but it is surely a pity that this coveted prize became mine as the result of  another man’s slow and  painful death. With this unassuming machine I might bring glory to an honorable man’s memory. On the flip side, the possibility exists that I could potentially bring ruin upon myself, an individual whose only accomplishment is the completeness of his failures.  Only time will tell.

When we met at the gazebo on the waterfront in faux Scandinavian Poulsbo, it was more for the benefit of the living who had gathered, than for the benefit a dead patriot who could never serve his country again. The allegiance to his country that he had sworn in earlier days had been betrayed and now his remains were merely ashes, to be spread about at the discretion of the living. Though it is said that a memorial serves to celebrate a life gone by, the mood at such affairs is seldom celebratory and people generally do not cry when they are at a party.

The fact of the matter is that our country had sold him out, and now we had gathered in his memory surrounded by balloons and flowers. Asbestos exposure is what gave the man the cancer that took his life and now we were left behind to write our memories of and tributes to the dead man, on little scraps of paper that we would release skyward tied to the balloons that surrounded us. On one of the slips I wrote that; In Heaven It’s Tacos 24/7! Actually, I just thought about writing that, but it would have been much cooler if I really had.

Everyone sitting on those rented, steel, folding chairs could see the smiling pictures of Rich that had been taken in earlier days when he was still alive. On the table before us was a flag that had been folded, neatly and officially, into a triangle and placed inside a glass paned, wooden display case. As I sat there that day I looked around at the wife and children and grandchildren and friends and family members that had survived the man, and I thought that this was not a fair trade. Here was a bunch of people who had given up something irreplaceably valuable and unique, and in return all that they got was a stupid flag, and a worthless atta boy from the country that had exposed their loved one to the mortal danger that would eventually claim his life.

As far as I am concerned, this American empire cannot collapse soon enough. Where others pray for God to bless America, my prayer is that God fucks America hard and without any lubrication. It was almost twenty years ago I had my first taste of the systemic callousness this nation has toward those who have voluntarily chosen to serve in the military. These days a young person who is sent into harms way can easily return a mere shell of their former self as the result of traumatic brain injury or otherwise, and there is no assurance that they will receive the treatment that they require. There is no foolishness is loving your country of origin, but Americans would do well to avoid serving in their military because those idiots will kill you with their carelessness. Enough said. Peace.