Tuesday's Turds

Change

So I was just visiting a blog from long ago when I decided to leave a comment. And then I thought better of it. And then I realized that I used to think of this person as a friend and later, as someone who was not interested in being a friend at all to me. And so I sat there wondering if I should comment or if perhaps they would not care for me to. And then I realized that I waste time on a lot of people who don't make me feel especially welcome. And I began to wonder why I do that? Why do I spend one minute of my time on people who don't seem to care if I stop by and aren't even nice enough to be my friend on Facebook or Twitter or some other website that barely involves any real contact at all? Why don't I just write these people off and drop them from my world altogether? I don't know, but a change is coming. I can feel it boiling up inside of me.




Police

I just saw an ad for yet another new cop show on TV featuring pretty people playing cops who go around beating the living crap out of anyone and everyone who gets in their way. It's called "Chicagoland" or "ChicagoCode" or something. Basically, according to the world of TV, there are the cops and then there are the 'bad guys' and that means anyone who isn't a cop, reporter, prosecutor, or woman. So if you're some guy standing on the sidewalk working a hotdog stand and the TV cops come along, expect to get the shit kicked out of you because you're a 'bad guy' and therefore not a human being. I get the impression that the writers of these shows have never been roughed up by real cops or had anyone they care about beaten and tortured and sent to the hospital by overzealous and unaccountable real cops because if they had they might hold a slightly different view of a world filled with bad cops*. And that's what most of these TV cops are, bad cops. We don't need more of this.

I remember a brief period when I was a kid, the baby boomers had gained so much experience dealing with bad cops that, once they began to come into power, they altered laws governing how police treat private citizens to such a degree that many people felt the cops had their hands tied behind their backs because suddenly they had to respect a few basic human rights among the citizens. On television many shows wouldn't even allow their TV cops to carry guns (CHiPs) or really rough anyone up to any great extent. It was the age of Charlie's Angels and love taps that took a man down without any real harm or indecent assaults to the genitals. That didn't last long, though, and today we live in a world where it seems like things have gone too far the other way. Way too far.




Football

We're in the heat of the NFL playoffs leading up to the Superbowl, the biggest game of the year, and I'm already sick of watching football. Despite this football fatigue, the NFL corporate bigwigs are pushing to add 2 more weeks of games, which the players themselves don't want. And whose grand idea was it to move the Pro Bowl to the week BEFORE the Superbowl? Clearly anyone playing in the Superbowl can't play in that game, so that removes many top players from that game. Sometimes I think every corporate and political leader in America is high on crack.




Politics

For the past few years there has been a long overdue revolt among conservative voters against their own Republican Party. It couldn't be more obvious that the leaders of the Republican Party are totally out of touch with and often opposed to the views of their voter base. Following 2 devastating defeats in a row in national elections where conservative voters sent a crystal clear message to their party that they were not willing to accept the treacherous douchebags being offered to them in place of actual leaders, the voters grew fed up and formed the Tea Party, a movement more than an actual political party, which assembles disgruntled voters and mobilzes them to action. They kicked out many "party men" in congressional elections, booting the Republican leadership approved douches and replacing them with a third-party candidate from out of nowhere, often winning the overall election due to the fact that their candidate more accurately reflected the views of the voters than either the 'chosen' Republican candidate or the Democrat. Despite all this, the Republican Party leadership remains primarly a Log Cabin affair, with the same good old boys and girls being chosen for the more important positions, such as Speaker of the House and especially the Republican Party leader himself, previously held by a guy almost no one had ever heard of and then replaced with another guy no one has ever heard of. Meanwhile, their Speaker of the House, Mr Crybaby Boehner, continues to very cynically and shamelessly play his "I feel your pain" female-appeasement card by dressing himself in pink and crying like a blue-eyed infant every time the cameras are rolling, just to show how terribly sensitive and caring he is. Clearly this man has higher aspirations. He obviously believes that the key to achieving greater positions of power for himself is to sucker emotion-focused female voters into thinking he is a delicate flower who could substitute for Oprah if she should ever go on vacation. To the rest of us he is a good indication that the cleanup of that particular political party isn't nearly done yet. Perhaps the Republican Party leaders and the few males still left in the Democratic Party could get together and form a new party, the Metrosexual Party, with their official party color of pink, and devote as much time and energy as they please to tearful appeals to Oprah fans while the rest of us focus on the actual issues.




Exercise

I don't know what to make of this, but four days after my last pump class workout I am still walking like a testicular cancer patient because my legs are so sore. I had complained repeatedly here and elsewhere about my trainer not really doing what I hired him to do. This intense pain combined with my lousy performance in pump class seems to support my view. Its ridiculous the shape I'm in after working out so much over the years. If I can survive this class I think it will help me a lot.




The Blog World

Blogs come and blogs go and why I'm still here I do not know. I've noticed that truly spectacular blogs often inspire new blogs written by their real-life friends, but those supplementary blogs seem to flame on and then burn out much more quickly than the original that inspired them. And then there are the supernovas, the blogs that burst onto the scene, dazzle us all with their newness and unique perspectives, and then just as quickly shut down. There are so many great blogs that have come onto the scene and inspired us over the years, only to eventually retire and walk away, leaving a hole in our blogrolling hearts in need of filling. After almost 7 years of this I have begun to feel that some blogs simply cannot be replaced. Those blogs tend to be written by people who are remarkably unique and likeable. And then there are the other blogs, like mine, written by dysfunctional people who seem to inspire as many haters as fans, if not more, and yet continue to creep along for reasons that make sense only to the blogger themself.

A fellow blogger had suggested to me that the name of my blog, Nude Memphis, actually drives a lot of potential readers away as it creates the impression of being a porno blog. I don't know if this is true or not, but I'm betting most of you aren't still reading at this point and thus won't see or respond to this question, but I'd like to know what you think about that? Should I drop "Nude" from the title of my blog?




And speaking of nude, what the fuck is this shit?

EL GUINCHO Bombay from MGdM Marc Gómez del Moral on Vimeo.

* Bad Cops - I just want to make clear that I do recognize the existence of both good cops and bad cops. We need good cops and good laws. Unfortunately, recent developments in our laws have done nothing to encourage more good cops, but plenty to create a lot more bad cops. Our lawmakers have been totally absent on issues in need of authentic leadership and decent legislation dealing with many very real problems. Even many veteran cops have voiced concerns about a lot of things going on today and Lord knows the medical community has.

You Used to be Funny

I'm sitting here in my office with one shoe on and one shoe off, scratching my head because Spring changes do funky things to my scalp, while reading an email. This mysterious email person is telling me "you used to be funny, but now you're just angry and bitter and unhappy. And you criticize women too much and say 'cunt' which I don't like. I think that word demeans women."

I'd love to brush this off, but she's about the fourth person to say this. True, it might help if I recognized the email address so I knew who she is, but it doesn't make that much difference. Kitty said it. Sssshe-who-should-not-be-named said it. Wanderlusting Karina said something sort of similar once. I'm trying to think who else has said it but my brain won't work.


To quote the always hot Linda from the TV show Becker, here's the thing, many of those same people had also criticized me awhile back for saying I was unhappy about certain things that are going on, but not doing much about them. Well, now I'm doing something about them. And in order to do something about them I must face them and confront them. Consequently, they are on my mind a lot. What is on my mind is going to affect my blog, obviously. The only realistic alternative is that I can close my eyes and go back to doing nothing, only now I do nothing while ignoring the constant waves of attacks that keep hitting me and others like me.

Perhaps I would be funnier if I shut my eyes and closed my mouth? I do recall that some of the best posts I ever wrote were written during a time when I was feeling completely numb to the world and just fed up with caring. I know it wasn't a healthy time for me, but I did write better stuff. I was as detached as if I were on drugs or mentally ill, neither of which is a good way to be. But it enabled me to be funny.

Ellen Degeneres has always made me laugh. When I look at her routines I notice that I never see anything controversial. I may be out of touch since I haven't watched her do stand-up lately, but I never saw her do an act where she talked about being a lesbian, or any of the issues you would associate with that, or bashed men, or even talked about just generally controversial issues of any kind. She made jokes about her mother, mostly. And they were always funny. I like Ellen. She cracks me up and never makes me feel insulted or attacked. I don't care who she sleeps with (Portia is hot, by the way) and I don't care who she votes for because she never makes it an issue.

I don't know if I can be like Ellen. I suppose if I could then I might actually get paid for this crap that I write. I mean, funny is worth some money, you know? If I were really all THAT funny then I could get paid to put the crap in my mind down on paper, or e-paper or whatever you want to call it.

Several times over the past 2 years I had mentioned feeling like I needed to just shut down my blog. That's about how long some people have been complaining that they don't like me anymore. I used to get ideas in my head and race to the computer to write them out before they escaped and disappeared into nothingness. But these days I don't feel that. I don't wake up in the middle of the night with an idea that I think is just soooo funny and a compulsion to write it down. I don't see people in traffic and feel the urge to take their photo because they are such a selfish ass and I want to post their photo and story on the internet for the world to see. Oh, just the other day a stupid selfish bitch in a Volvo did the most insane and idiotic thing to me, and I nearly hit her as I held down the horn on the steering wheel, which she either ignored or couldn't hear because she was so old. But it didn't even cross my mind to write about it. My blog didn't flicker in my thoughts for even a brief instant.



I don't know what I'm trying to say here. And maybe that's half the problem? Every time I go to shut down I catch it from both sides, with people who like me saying they don't want me to go, and people who used to like (tolerate) me but don't anymore saying they don't want me making them feel bad because I shut down after they told me how much they dislike me.

The worst part is that I actually thought I was doing better. I honestly thought I had done a decent job the past few weeks. But apparently not. Sometimes there is just no pleasing people. Once someone decides they don't like you anymore, at least with some people, you are just never going to win them back over again. Or maybe it's not that at all. Maybe its all me.

One odd side-effect of all of this blog-related drama is that I don't know if I want to go to Australia anymore. It makes no sense, I know, but it's how I feel. I feel like that whole dream suddenly has a giant dent in it and I can't smooth it out. Now before you go off saying "oh, you just wanted to go because of one person," I'm telling you, that's not so. I've wanted to go since I was a kid. I just never thought it was realistic to think that I could. And then I encountered several Aussies on the internet and I liked them, so the dream revived and then some. But lately I feel, I don't know, I don't seem to have a dream anymore or else I don't know what it is. I just want to wander and not talk to anyone and be left alone to see the sights like a regular tourist. I feel wounded, I guess. Yeah, I'll catch shit for saying that, I know, but it's how I feel and this is my damn blog and if I can't say it here then where can I say it?

Let me see if I can explain it to you from my point-of-view. Imagine you have this big group of new friends. Maybe you don't know them well enough to call them friends, but you really like them and they seem cool. Now say they are having a big party and you are invited. It's a big group of people, some of whom you have talked to quite a lot and really, really like, and some you have talked to less and like, but don't know as well.

Now, the day before the party you get a call from one of your absolute favorite new friends, and she says to you, "I heard you were coming to the party tomorrow night. I want to make one thing clear. I don't like you and I don't want you talking to me. In fact, most of my friends don't like you either and they don't want you bothering any of us, so just you steer clear of us when you see us. Understand? We don't want anything to do with you. You go hang out with everyone else, but fuck off otherwise."

Now how do you feel about that party? Are you still excited about going?

Yeah, well that's how I feel.

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So, lately I've noticed a bit of a, hmmm, how can I say this, an edge to my personality. That is to say, I've been really fed up with just about everything. Also, I've been screaming at my computer more than usual. It seems that the more 'patches' they forcibly upload to my PC at the office, the slower it runs. And slow running computers really piss me off. Today my computer was so slow that I actually shouted "for God's sake, get me a pencil and paper so I can do it the old-fashioned way!"

Yes, I really said that. Loudly. Sprinkled with some creative curse words, one of which certain female bloggers keep emailing me to tell me is derogatory to women even when it's my computer I'm shouting it at.

The biggest problem with what I shouted is that I'm not really sure if there ever was a time when my line of work was done "the old fashioned way" with a pencil and paper. At some point they clearly had to actually get on a computer. But that is beside the point. The main point is that I'm pissed off and it doesn't seem to be abating. At all.