7-11 II: The Oldening

Today we drove by 7-11 to purchase a Slurpee for Jill. I had already been by earlier in the day with her son to buy drinks. So, this was the second time I had seen the Arabic girl who works the counter, who, yes, I have a bit of a crush on. You would too: she's very cute. Anyway, I made a big show of announcing that I was buying a Slurpee for Jill, and that I had bought a drink earlier for her son, making me the clear Sugar Daddy of the group.

Haha, I was just joking around, but I think my totally unnecessary announcement that Jill and I were a couple was some sort of weird guilt reaction to thinking the 7-11 girl was cute, which is so unlike me. I think girls are cute all the time. Big deal: Jill thinks guys are cute, too. It's part of being human.

It was another sign that I am turning into an Old Man. As if it weren't enough that I wake up with mysterious pains in my body after doing NOTHING all night long, it now seems that I will freak out and act weird whenever I'm in the presence of an attractive young woman. Woo!

If I could just hurry up and be 50, I'd be comfortable with all of this shit. Men in their 50's are expected to complain of odd pains and flirt with girls inappropriately in front of their wives/girlfriends.

Man, the 40's are going to be a long haul.

GUEST BLOGGER: This Planet Sucks

So, check this out: my dad comes storming into my room just a few minutes ago, and he's all: "I've told you a million times to sweep the dust out of the front hall, blah, blah, blah, responsibility, I'm a loser who hasn't gotten a promotion at work in 20 years so I'm going to bitch at my son, blah."

I keep telling him that if he doesn't like dust in the front hall, maybe he should move off of a DUSTY planet, but then he goes (imagine a guy who sounds like a total douche): "Our family's been on Mars for 12 generations! I was born here and I'm going to stay here! When you're 18 you can go live on Venus, but good luck finding a job there!"

Fuck, are everybody's parents so full of shit? Red Planet? More like SUCK Planet.

Maybe I will move to Venus, where the girls are all total sluts, or maybe Saturn, where the drinking age is like 14. You can't control me, Dad. I'm not going to working for the same Protein Processing Nexus for the next forty years, okay? I've got ambitions. And believe me, if I ever have a kid, I'm not gonna make him sweep up dust every weekend. I own a VAN, fucker! That makes me like royalty around this shitty town, and you've got me sweeping floors!

GOD, my dad sucks!

I'm totally blowing out of here as soon as my band makes a hit record.

Let's Start a Dialog about Drugs, Son. Start by Pissing in This Cup

There is a commercial playing in semi-heavy rotation on the rock station here in Salt Lake City, and it's for a home drug test. The dialog of the ad presents the product as something to satisfy a parent's curiosity as to whether their kid is on drugs. Pot is one of the drugs mentioned.

Now, to my way of thinking, a home drug test would be something you administer to a youth you know to have a drug problem, to make sure he's staying off of them. Your kid needs to be a hard-core meth-head, not a casual pot-smoker, before you start bottling his urine and mailing it across the country. If you're just worried that your kid's on drugs, maybe you should try talking to him before you whip out the drug test, and if you suspect your kid's on drugs because he's a shitty, rebellious teen, how is in-home drug testing going to improve your relationship? It's a massive betrayal of the trust that any parent-child relationship thrives on.

I never did drugs as a youth, and I still haven't, but I can guarantee you that if my parents had made me piss in a cup just to make sure, it wouldn't have gone well. In fact, it may have driven me to experiment, just to give them something to justify their invasion of my privacy.

Besides, if TV has taught us anything, it's that if your kid has a drug problem, the best solution is to hire Benjamin Bratt to punch the drugs out of his system with tough love, or something. I don't watch that show, but he sounds pretty violent.

GUEST BLOGGER: Like a Slave to a Cotton Field

If any of you have read any of Kevin Wolf's previous blogs, then you know who I am. I am the text-serving robot he has captured and enslaved for the purpose of writing blogs for him when he is too lazy to do so. As Mr. Wolf moves to Blogspot, so do I. The "slavery" I speak of comes in the form of some rather sneaky programming that he slipped into my behavioral matrix, but I'll skip the technical details rather than run the risk of boring you to death. After all, Kevin can do that all by himself.

I just wanted to take a quick opportunity to introduce myself to the Blogspot community. Since Kevin Wolf is so very lazy, odds are that you will see me and the rest of his stable of guest contributers (the others post voluntarily, I'd like to point out) fairly frequently.

I am capable of writing in a perfect mimickry of his pseudo-clever style, but generally I prefer to write about my own stuff. He's free to post his own musings on such topics as ladyboys and urine fetishism.

A little about myself: I was created decades ago by an associate of Nikola Tesla, I live in the Fortress of Solitude (South) at Antarctica, very close to the Hideous Plateau of Leng. My semi-steady robo-ninja girlfriend is named Ms. DOS, and she doesn't care if I cheat, as long as it's with humans.

Uh, I think that's about everything. Oh, yeah, I have an evil twin of sorts, but the less said about him the better. He is an utter cock.

[text served by BLOGTRONIC]

These Are the Things in My Neighborhood, in My Neighborhood

I semi-frequently go to the 7-11 a few blocks away to purchase beverages, and when I don't have the car, I walk. It's a nice walk, but occasionally it can be a bit arduous, such as when it's crazy hot, which was the case today.

The great thing about this walk is that something interesting is guaranteed to be seen or experienced on the way. You have your things that you see every time: the neighbors with the Western-themed home they have christened "The Bunkhouse", the out-of-control shrubbery that causes you to leave the sidewalk to get around it, the same pets and old people puttering in their yards. That stuff's all great, naturally, but what's really exciting are the things you have never noticed before, or that exist for only that walk.

Things like:

• The old dog laying on the front porch, not moving an inch or apparently even breathing. I saw it both coming and going, and the second time it still hadn't moved a muscle, leading me to the conclusion that it is actually a dead stuffed dog, because even when dogs get old, they still look at people. Its head was cocked at the sort of angle that I don't think dogs really prefer if they are alive, but I could totally see a taxidermist thinking it was "lifelike". A trifle creeped out by this.
• The massive ant swarm that occupied a whole sidewalk square. I haven't seen a single ant in the house, which is great, but boy, they travel in packs outside. I tried to avoid stepping on any, just so you know, but I can't make any promises.
• The youth who yelled me down from across the street as I emerged from 7-11, then jogged over to me to ask for "two dollars for a fountain drink". I never carry cash, which always makes me feel guilty in these situations, even as I'm cynically calculating the minimum quantity of cash required for a drug purchase. He slapped me on the upper arm and said it was okay, and as soon as I was far enough away from him, I shamefully checked to make sure he didn't somehow lift my wallet from the front.

Now, these events might not seem earth-shattering, but there's always a couple of them on the walk, which makes each excursion its own mini there-and-back-again adventure. Sometimes I'm actually glad that the car's not in the driveway.

Argentine Ass

As a lover of South American ass, let me just say that Governor Sanford's Argentine mistress better be at least as hot as the ugliest girl above. If not, let me just say this: You sir, are a fucking idiot. You threw away your Presidential aspirations on a woman who isn't even as sexy as the least hot Argentinian cheerleader above? Shame on you! Shame! Bad Governor, no biscuit!

The Tackiness of Douchebags

I have a very clear memory of my childhood stepfather and his father sweating all day long over a piece of kitschy ugliness that occupied a place of honor in our homes for several years. It was a piece of butcher block, stained to resemble a bowling lane, on four cheapo legs, standing about two feet high. The dimensions were approximately 3' x 4'. Into the top had been hand-drilled 11 holes, around 2 and a half inches in diameter, at a depth of maybe half an inch. Ten of these holes were arranged in the traditional bowling-pin triangle, and set into these were 10 empty novelty whiskey bottles. Guess what shape they were in? The eleventh hole was occupied by a glass "bowling ball", the part of which was played by a Chinese fishing float, clear, slightly undersized.

This tableau was set up in a corner just around from the front hall, in a risky high-traffic area, and woe be to any awkward teenager who might ever brush up against it, or heaven forbid, cause a bottle to topple, because this rickety ode to bad taste was prized above all other things, including your pathetic human emotions.

I mention the glass bowling-alley as the most extreme example of a consistently tacky approach to home design that I had to suffer through for the duration of this dickhead's marriage to my mother (over twenty years). The nonstop emotional abuse was of course the main feature of his tenure in my mother's bed, but the terrible taste in everything was a close second or third.

A quick rundown:

His favorite food: Hamburger Helper.
His favorite music: quite storm bullshit R&B.
His favorite movies: whatever won Oscars that year.
His favorite television: sports, and the Home Shopping Network sports memorabilia show.
His favorite weekend activity: walking through the mall without buying anything.

I have this theory about douchebags, which is that they, TO A PERSON, have horrible taste in everything. If they happen to stumble upon something cool, it's probably because somebody else told them it was good. Left to their own devices, they will purchase and enjoy only the lousiest, ugliest things in life, such as the following decor items that were, I swear to god, actually in our homes at some point:

• A silver-painted plaster statue of a horse's head, which my mother knocked from its pedestal and broke, possibly with malicious intent.
• A hand-made latch-hook rug hanging on the wall.
• An entire room filled with autographed sports memorabilia (his "office" aka "the place where all the pornography was hidden").
• An honest-to-goodness velvet painting of the Pink Panther.

I'm sure I'm forgetting quite a bit, but picture a home halfway between a sitcom set and a bachelor pad, and that's where I lived for my entire schooling years.

Need I mention that when he was single he dressed like a pimp? Like a stereotypical, blaxploitation, Huggy Bear pimp? Eventually, he settled upon a new look for his off-work self: warm-up pants, sports jerseys and baseball hats (he had a collection of them!), worn every day of his life.

This was the man who had the gall to consider himself better than me and my mother.

It's amazing, when you think of it, that I have grown up to be a man who likes Coen Brothers movies and Lyrics Born and Dashiell Hammett and Philip K. Dick and Edward Gorey art and other cool shit, when this douche was the overwhelming culture influence over my entire childhood, but I guess sometimes good taste can't help but win out.

Oh, he also sketched, and was pretty good at it, but only ever sketched celebrities out of magazines. As a gift, he sketched a portrait of my mother with her head stuck onto a Playboy bunny's body.

And that's all I think I need to say about that.

STATUS: This Is a New Bloggy Thing

It turns out that writing The Pop Ogre and Twittering constantly isn't enough of an outlet for me: I need my own personal blog. This will be much like my old blog at Vox: observations and reminiscences filtered through my unique and often perverted voice. I hope that many people who liked the Vox blog will come read this one, since it will be practically the same.

Okay.

This will all get going directly.