That’s what they’re doing. They’re going to repeal Obamacare. They’re going to repeal the ACA. Contrary to popular opinion, those aren’t two things. They are two different names for the same set of laws. They’re going to mess up Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and anything else they can get their grubby paws on. They need to make sure that the filthy rich barely pay any taxes while keeping the military funded. So the average American is just going to have to buck up.
That’s how it is, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can cry, you can whine, you can scream and shout and protest. It won’t do you any good. They don’t care. The people they need still haven’t figured it out yet. The people they need won’t figure it out until it’s too late. You can try to educate those people. You can try to change their minds. You can try to make them see what is happening. You may get a few. Most of them are too damn stubborn. They like lying to themselves. They get something out of it, I’m not sure what. I have difficulty understanding them.
Hell, I have trouble believing we are the same species. We all know what it feels like to meet someone you just instantly click with. Well, I hope we all do. But the opposite of that exists, as well. Sometimes you meet someone and after talking to them for a while you realize that you disagree with every single thing that comes out of their mouth. Like their brain is the universal counter-balance for your brain and if one of you were to perish while the other still lived, it would throw off the balance of all existence. But I digress.
My point is this: The people about to be in power know how to manipulate their crowd. If you didn’t vote for them in 2016, they don’t need you to vote for them in 2020. They don’t want you; they don’t need you; they don’t care what you think. They care what their voters think, those loyal patriots, and they know how to keep their voters. They know what to say and how to say it. So, do what you can, sure. But, buckle-up, things are going to get bad. We’re going to get beaten up. Some people aren’t going to make it through, and that’s the saddest part.
Hey, look on the bright side, though. If they fuck it all up bad enough, yet don’t kill us all, maybe that’ll stir up enough previous non-voters to fix it next time. Well, you know — don’t hold your breath or anything. But feel free to hope.
I finally decided to sit down and create decent headers and avatars for Dicks’ Hard Blog and Dicks’ Hard Blog Facebook page. This was the original vision I had for how I wanted the site to look. The new images were created in Blender 2.77a and GIMP 2.8.14. I used JFRockSolid font, extruded to .06, and applied a seamless limestone texture. I placed a single spotlight just above the camera, cranked it up to 10, and placed a white plane at a 22º angle beneath the text.
I’ll stop boring you with technical details now.
Now that I’ve got the place polished up and the generic placeholders I made in frustration after I’d tried and failed to create these images the first time have been
banished to the recycle bin, perhaps I will feel more inclined to put more words here more often — perhaps even finish one of the twenty or so blogs I have half-written in OneNote. Some of them are over a year old.
So, It would appear that, although I always wanna be startin’ something, got to be startin’ something, I have a completion problem. The closer I get to the end of a thing, the slower I work on it, the less frequently I revisit it. This is something I must remain mindful of and overcome.
Perhaps 2017 will be the year that I pull away from wasting hours staring at various social media feeds and revisit my unfinished blogs and finish them. And maybe I’ll revisit my unfinished stories and finish them. Perhaps I’ll drag out my unfinished novels and finish them.
Perhaps.
I’m 42. This may sound silly, and that’s because it totally is, but I kind of have myself convinced that this is the year I’m going to figure out how to life, how to universe, and how to everything, the year that I finally nail down — what exactly the fuck?
Yeah, yeah. Shaddup. I know, I don’t really believe it. But if I can use it as motivation to force myself to fulfill the prophecy in whatever small way, then I’m going to count that as a win.
Most people my age are trying to figure out how to trick their kids into doing what they need to be doing. I spend my time trying to figure out how to trick myself into doing what I want to be doing, how to thwart my own constant self-sabotage. As those famously cunning linguists, the Beastie Boys, sang, “Listen, all of yall, it’s a sabotage!”
Wish me luck!
Stay Tuned!
And what do you think of the new design? Good? Blah? Suggestions?
Can I get odds on how many days until the first impeachable offense? On how many offenses before even the Republican congress starts talking about the Articles of Impeachment?
How about odds on whether or not Trump goes to prison on rape charges before January 20th and we swear in President Pence, instead?
Of course, there’s always the possibility that he’ll get sworn in, behave like a completely different person than we’ve seen so far, break all his promises to the far-right wackos, and govern like a Democrat. There’s video of him in the past stating he is more of a Democrat than a Republican. There’s video of him supporting things he’s been publicly denouncing in this election. Which is the real Trump? Was he lying then or is he lying now? What are his real positions? Well, it doesn’t bode well that he’s appointing some real right-wing wackos to cabinet positions. However, he has quickly made public reversals on some key issues.
As much as I’d love to see Trump impeached, I don’t want to see how bad he fucks everything up before it gets to that point. If I got to pick which of these things is going to happen, I would go all in on the last one. That’s what I’d love to see. What I want more than anything is for me to be more wrong than I’ve ever been before. Not only would it be the best thing for the country, but I think that, out of any other scenario, would piss off the worst of his supporters the most.
But I’m not counting on that. I don’t think he’s going to be a good President. My one hope is this: I hope his narcissism can be utilized as a tool to make him adhere to the will of the people. Trump loves ratings. He’s going to want good approval ratings. I hope he figures out what it takes to get them.
Disclaimer: This blog deals with sexual
desire, sexual fantasy, and uncomfortable situations. If you would feel
uncomfortable knowing too many intimate details about me, you might want to
skip this one. If it doesn’t bother you, read on.
My first sexual relationship outside of the
one I maintain with myself was with an openly bisexual woman five years my
senior. I’d like to tell you she was 18 at the time, but, sadly, I was.
Complete truth be told, I was a few short weeks from turning 19. She smelled of
clove cigarettes and strong opinions. She was everything and I wanted to
keep her forever. She just wanted to show a naïve, hot, young kid a good time.
And I was hot, back then. I didn’t think so
at the time, but now I can see that I was. But hell, I deserved to be. Two
years before that I had looked like a fat lesbian. Which is fine, if you ’re an
overweight woman attracted to other women. But I was not.
I was a late bloomer. I was sixteen, going on
seventeen, and not a pubic hair to be found. My body was smooth as a baby’s. I
was five feet three inches tall, two-hundred thirty pounds, and, for some
reason, I felt like a mullet was a solid fashion choice. This is how I looked
when my senior pictures were taken. I had also developed a weird nervous rash
on the skin around my left eye. My senior pictures are a pretty funny punchline
to the joke that was my high school life.
A few short months after the pictures were
taken, my growth spurt hit. I shot up to 5’11, my weight balanced out. I still
couldn’t get anything more than peach fuzz on my face, but at least I had
managed to develop hairy man parts where it counted before I turned eighteen. It had
been a concern of mine: “What if puberty never comes? What if I’m some
freak of nature and I have to live my life as some hairless, undeveloped
child-creature for the rest of my life?”
Hitting puberty late for a guy like me was a
cruel joke. I knew what it was and had been eagerly awaiting it since I was
twelve. By that time I was already masturbating daily, but at that age, orgasms
were dry and not very intense. They were pretty damned good at the time because
I didn’t know there was anything better. I was very eager to start growing hair
in funny places and observe the weird bodily changes that seemed to freak out
so many ill-informed adolescents. But, as they say, a watched pot never boils.
And so I watched. I watched all the boys in my class become men before me. And
I began to grow concerned.
In the locker room I was terrified of two
things: that I would become aroused looking at the naked, hairy,
fully-developed genitalia of my classmates, and that someone would notice I was
the only boy in a room full of men. Nobody ever said anything, surprisingly. As
mercilessly as I was picked on for what seems like everything else, I
never got teased for developing late. Either I was truly a deft master of the
bath towel, as I liked to imagine, or even those cruel bastards were decent
enough not to tease a kid about that.
My desire to see my male classmates naked
disturbed me. Why did I want to see their dicks? Why did I like looking? I told
myself it was because, tired of being a sapling surrounded by trees, I was
anxious to grow one of my own. That was true, but I couldn’t admit to myself,
or I couldn’t accept, that I also wanted to play with theirs. But at night,
when the door was closed and the lights were out, and I was touching myself
under the covers, the theater of my imagination was showing porn scenes set in
that locker room.
FADE IN
INT. LOCKER ROOM – DAY
Shy boy, KEVIN, 16, clutches his towel, which is
wrapped around his waist, clamped shut by his fist, clutching for dear
life. He walks guardedly from the
showers to his locker. Suddenly, the towel is yanked away, and laughter erupts
as he stands, the only pre-pubescent boy surrounded by ten hairy teenagers.
BULLY
(holding
towel, laughing)
Holy
shit! DICKS doesn’t have a dick!
BULLY 2
Hey, you’re right. And he’s smooth as a
girl.
And then I get forcibly penetrated in every
way possible in the theater of my mind. In real life I would be lying in my bed
with my eyes clinched tight, doing the two-finger salute until my tiny little
pecker coughed out it’s dry little orgasm and I was instantly overcome with
that wave of shame that came crashing down, enveloping me, and making me
embarrassed to be in the same room with myself.
Why would I be thinking about a thing like
that when I was masturbating? I should be thinking about girls, surely! I was
certainly attracted to girls. Why was I thinking about other guys? And being
treated like that! It didn’t make sense. I certainly didn’t want that to happen
to me. I didn’t want to be raped, certainly. And — of course I didn’t. But it
made the fantasy believable. Because, of course, I would never choose to
suck a dick. Right? Of course not. Absurd.
I managed to start puberty before I graduated
high school; I also managed to graduate high school a virgin. I graduated a few
weeks before I turned eighteen. So it was almost another year before I would
lose my virginity to an openly bisexual woman five years my senior. That was a
short relationship, but I learned a lot. I acted like a huge idiot in the
break-up, and I’ll save myself the embarrassment of recounting it here. Let’s
just say it was not my proudest moment. I mean, looking back, we weren’t even
exclusive.
But I’m not too embarrassed. It was the first
time I had to go through something like that. I didn’t get to learn the skill
of dissolving a romantic relationship before I was twelve years old, like some
other people. I didn’t get to learn it at sixteen years old. I got my first
taste when I was barely nineteen, so it should be expected I was, perhaps, a
tad, emotionally immature.
It would be almost two years before I had sex
again. I spent a long time chasing a girl I never got. Actually, several, if
I’m being honest. I was a serial unrequited lover. Which, looking back, was
really just obsession born out of the desire to ask out a girl coupled with the
crippling fear of doing so. When you calculate in the whole latent
homosexuality angle, it’s the perfect recipe for remaining single and sex-free.
I’ve been writing quite a bit for this blog. I’ve just not posted any of it yet. It’s stream of consciousness, as it stands, and I’m wanting to publish something more cohesive. There are many overlapping themes, repetitive segments needing to be combined and edited down. But I do have quite a bit of raw material to sort through.
This blog is inspired by the 1990 film, Pump Up The Volume, written and directed by Allan Moyle and starring Christian Slater and Samantha Mathis. If you’ve seen it, please bear with me a moment while I set the scene for those who haven’t.
In the film, Slater plays high school student Mark Hunter, a painfully shy, awkward, highly-intelligent kid who’s just moved to town. By day, he can barely squeak out a word to his classmates. By night, he’s a pirate-radio shock jock named Happy Harry Hard-On. In the privacy of his room, with a radio setup originally intended to communicate with his old friends back home, using a voice disguiser and assured of his relative anonymity, he felt free to say what he so desperately needed to get off his chest.
When I first saw this movie in the theater back in 1990, it became an instant favorite. I identified so completely with Mark, and with Harry, two very different people, as I am two very different people. Speaking was physically impossible at times. I would have to duck out with a nod and a scurry. Yet, at the same time, I had so very much to say.
I felt the ending of that movie. Spoiler alert, as the credits roll we’re treated to many different voices, speaking out, being heard, many for the first time. It produced in me that swell of emotion we humans experience when we know we’re in the presence of something great, something whole, something so much more powerful than ourselves alone.
And now, I think that movie was prophetic. I feel like the Internet is that swell of voices at the end of Pump Up The Volume, and this is my little station. This is the band I’m broadcasting on. And I’m just going to talk. I’m just going to be me. I’m rude, I’m crass, and I have a lot of issues. I hope to talk some of those issues out. There are things rattling around in here that I thought I buried a long time ago, but I haven’t, because, sometimes they come back (apologies to Stephen King).
It wasn’t that hard, comparatively. I had it pretty good for a while. It was the late 70’s into the early 80’s. Dad worked at Chrysler making plenty to keep a family of five comfortable. They were different times.
There were kids at school on the free lunch program. They were looked down on. Not by me, but by the school culture, the social hierarchy. We never had to count ourselves among them. Even when Dad got laid off and had to take a job paying less than half what he was making before, Mom started an in-home babysitting business to keep us afloat. She didn’t want her kids to know we were struggling financially. She’d grown up being told the family couldn’t afford anything, and she never wanted to say that to her children.
But I’ll get the that later. Right now I want to talk about what was hard for me as a child, what is still hard for me now: Social interaction, or simply existing in a public place. I went through a period of my life starting in my late teens where I was capable of social interaction, it didn’t make me uncomfortable, I was confident and charming. That all gradually left me, and now, about to turn 42, I find myself right back where I started.
I feel the judgement of others.
I don’t know that in most cases the judgement I feel radiating off of others is even present in reality. In fact, I’m fairly certain it’s all in my head. When I break it down logically, in all likeliness, most other people barely notice I’m even there, they’re so wrapped up in themselves and what’s going on in their own heads. And knowing that just feeds my overwhelming feeling that I’m completely alone and nobody truly gives a fuck about me. But that’s a whole different issue I’ll explore later.
So, in an attempt to avoid any judgement, I attempt to blend in, to just act normal, mimicking what I think normal looks like. But it feels awkward. I know everyone can tell I’m an imposter. And if someone speaks to me, the jig might be up. Depending on how well I’m doing on any given day. On a good day I may be able to hold a conversation for a few minutes without seeming too strange. But on a bad day I may nod, smile, mumble something incoherent, or just walk away muttering to myself.
I was shy, awkward, overweight, a late bloomer, and had a pornographic last name. My school life was not pleasant. I didn’t get beat up, but I was mocked mercilessly. For some reason I flush red really easily. I’m not easily embarrassed, I mean, I don’t feel embarrassed, but I sure as hell look embarrassed. Some group of assholes would decide to start asking me stupid questions, and I’d do my best to ignore them, but I’d turn bright red. And then they’d make fun of that. They would begin insisting I was about to cry. I was so far from wanting to cry at those moments. What I wanted to do was stand up and plant my knee in their face.
Sometimes, by myself, I’d wonder why people couldn’t just leave me alone. I just wanted to be alone. What, exactly, was me not wanting to participate hurting? At those times, sometimes I’d cry.
I wonder how I got back here. I wonder why I often feel like I did in school, because I thought I had overcome that unpleasantness. These are things I must explore.
I wish people wouldn’t ask me if I’m going to my mom’s house for Mother’s Day. That leaves me in an awkward spot. I can either lie and say, “Yep.” But I don’t care for lying. I can tell the truth, “Nope,” and leave it hanging unexplained, making me look like an asshole. Or I can tell the whole truth, “She’s dead.” People usually flinch at that. “She passed on.” “She’s no longer with us.” They take that better, but no matter how I say it, they always apologize. “Oh, I’m so sorry.” What am I supposed to say then? “Don’t worry about it, it was a long time ago?” Well, it was, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still hurt. Especially this weekend. I guess, “Thanks,” is the right response, but what I’d really mean by that is, “Thanks for bringing it up, I wasn’t thinking about it at all before you asked. So, thanks. Thanks for that. I appreciate it.”
When I was in school, I would do a lot of spacing off, tuning out and daydreaming. Sometimes when I was in the middle of a particularly strange and unusual daydream, or an embarrassing one, I would become convinced that someone near me could read my mind, hear my thoughts; I would become absolutely convinced that someone knew what I was thinking. I was sure of it. I would then become obsessed with this idea, and, depending on my mood, I’d either try my hardest to think normal thoughts, or, I’d think of the most fucked up shit I could imagine and casually look around to see if anyone reacted.
I never did see any evidence that anyone knew what I was thinking. But that didn’t stop the paranoid idea from creeping into my head time and time again. It didn’t make me feel any more alone with my thoughts. I didn’t feel alone in my head. I mean, I knew my personalities were driving, but I always felt like there was an observer. Someone, something watching, listening, to everything.
I’m sure I’m far from alone in feeling that way. Perhaps that’s one thing that helps nurture a belief in deities. The absolute certainty that someone is listening, even when you’re scared and alone. Someone is there, and they can hear you.
