cutecurmudgeon

[cutecurmudgeon]

out of the closet

I’m coming out of the closet.

No, I’m not gay.

I’m sorry, 

I hate football. 

Hey wait, if people don't need to apologize for being gay, I don't think I should have to apologize for hating football. so fuck it. 

I seriously loathe football.

I can only see it from a small number of perspectives and none of them are good. Athlete pay vs teacher pay. Jingoism and enforced tribal norms. Capitalism and the production of cheap shit that pollutes the environment. Seriously, everyone should be forced to bring their own fucking beer stein to the game so they can put budweiser in it. It's guilty of sexism or at least promoting a division between the sexes. The objectification and literal sidelining of women is a horrible offense. All of that shit wrapped in a package; It's always been harsh noise to me.

I remember when it hit me in high school, in exactly the same way it hit Noam Chomsky. “Why are we cheering for these guys, and not the other guys.” Why don't we cheer whenever anyone scores a point? Why doesn't everyone cheer when something cool happens? 

There would be teams that came in and they clearly didn't enjoy getting their ass kicked, they looked bored. And I thought, "why would anyone cheer for them? They don't even cheer for themselves." Shut up and buy two jerseys and a hat.  

And it wasn't long before I saw the exact same theme repeated everywhere. The idea of "brand loyalty" really started to make me ill. So I found myself trying a different brand every time I bought stuff. Not a good idea when buying underwear or canned soup. Fascism begins with brand loyalty and ends with authoritarianism. People tribally identify with some brand, it becomes a part of them. When the brand wins, they win. When the brand spouts filthy racism, they feel free to spout filthy racism.

So what I really hate is that the team that is supposed to represent patriotism is the one that has trump supporters AND people who have been caught cheating. That's not fucking patriotic. I'm willing to bet that no small number of rednecks have switched over to supporting the patriots because of the two...one is represented by patriotic symbolism AND just happens to support trump. Now a win for the patriots is a win for them. And that just makes me ill. I want to deny them every single symbolic victory possible and only allow them real ones. If they got tax breaks, i'd cheer. If their health benefits improved, I'd cheer. But if their fucking football team wins and they make one goddamn noise, I'm going to lose my shit.

Instead of using these facts to spur conversation about our countries sorry ass lack of integrity and how that brand is becoming pervasive, people are crying that someone spilled politics on their brand new football; which is ironically their only escape route from reality, and it leads into further fascist practice.

#sofucked

[cutecurmudgeon]

Wishing the 80′s

Okay, with rump sounding more like Reagan plus dementia, I felt it was time for some nostalgia. But I wanted to re-live the 80′s with new 80′s music that I hadn’t heard. I wanted to feel like I just put on my parachute pants and floofed up my party mullet permed in back. If you’ve never seen this hairstyle, let me introduce that particular nightmare. ...(massive google search)... Well shit. 

It’s a hairdo so hideous that all physical records of it have been destroyed. Just imagine someone curling a poodle up on top of your head, but then it slowly slides down off the back of your head revealing your many feathered layers. But instead of falling off due to gravity, you staple the pup so it can maintain it’s perpendicularity to the rest of your hair like some kind of invading plushie. Let’s just call it “The Poodle Mullet”

I can only tell you what a horrible nightmare it was growing this shit out. When I think about trumplestiltskin tweeting, I think, “Please god, I will wear that hairdo again if you smite him right now...exactly how I had wished you would smite me for getting that hairdo.” It only took me one weekend out to realize how insane I looked, but guess what...I fucking fit right in. Even with hair like that, nobody thought twice...cuz it was FASHIOOOON!

The eighties really should have taught me that you can do fucking anything as long as people think you did it on purpose. Below is the evidence.

If only there were a soldier of fashion who could fight the war against my bad hair and win. 

So here’s the main event...”80′s that was new to me.”

This Fear - Soldier of this Fashion [Listen]

I have to open the little hatch on my skull and let you watch how my brain works while listening.

She's the soldier of her voice (We never hear her so she’s probably a ninja) She's the soldier of her heart  (She’s in two armies, or at least an emotional militia)

FASHION - (”If David Bowie can sing the word fashion and make five million dollars maybe if we sing it we can cash in on some of that sweet “fashion” money.” and so off the boys went to hoot the word fashion into a microphone while an fm synthesizer tried to commit suicide by stabbing itself to death.)

The MORNING rain falls into this new frontier It's an everyday city (wait...how can it be a new frontier?) New additions of architecture transient thoughts spoken quietly (What magic is this? You can build new buildings using words? Oh, I’m dumb, it’s two separate thoughts...one of them is spoken quietly.)

She's the soldier of her voice destiny is company (What platoon were you in? I was in the 232nd Fate Infantry...we’d dance right into the enemy cities wearing our leg warmers and occupy nightclubs and bars. When the going got rough, we’d call in the break dancers to pop, lock and load.)

She's the soldier of her heart In uniform and mystery (At this point I’m concerned she’s a double agent. There’s only a few things we can be certain of about her identity at this time, one is that she had a huge perm and mumbled buildings into existence.)

(uplifting arppegiation solo)

She's the soldier of this fashion! (stab stab) (FUCK! I wasn’t paying attention...I’m not sure what fashion they are talking about. It’s the fucking radio, I can’t see her. MTV doesn’t even exist yet. What fashion!? Please god, let it be popped collars, i can do popped collars and nobody gets hurt.)

A face reminds her of a distant mem o ry She's lost again [me singing: she’s easily distraaacteeed] A face lost in dark history [me singing: she used to be a hippie] the silence of gentle men (WAT!? oh shit, it really is a dark history! Kudos to these guys for tackling rape culture all the way back then.)

[me singing:This is where we cut and paste the song...so it’s twice as long...we can���t go wrong...FASHIOOOOON]

...

She's the soldier of this fashion! (stab stab) She's the soldier of this fashion... She's the soldier of this fashiooooon...

Young people today don’t understand the danger of those times. The fashion army was trying to free the slaves to the rhythm. One misplaced can of Jheri Curl could start a quiet riot. This was no party at ground zero!

[cutecurmudgeon]

I keep my spirits up with a different motivational background every day.

[cutecurmudgeon]

If I were an alien and saw all the humans go sleep...I would suspect they were communing.

did you see mad max?

ya

it made me think about a couple of things

when I was a kid I was always fantasizing about getting sick. a girl in my school had a trisomy disorder that got worse in front of me until she was pulled out of our class. she would be talking about safari animals or something and then her head would slowly pivot up and off to one side, as though she was pausing to think. and then she’d just be off somewhere very else. the most frightening thing to me was how her hands changed. over the course of the school year her middle fingers would creep across her forefingers in an involuntary gesture of luck. eventually these fingers couldn’t be uncrossed and she became unable to write.

the other thing that haunted me as a child was having familial fatal insomnia. this is a vanishingly rare condition in which a person slowly loses the ability to sleep. at first they simply can’t sleep through the night. this makes them irritable, as it would anyone. but then, as their insomnia worsens, layer after layer of their humanity is peeled away. irritability gives way to intense phobias about things which had previously seemed innocuous. these phobias generate intense panic attacks, paranoia and eventually outright psychosis. for several months the person hallucinates almost continually as their ability to sleep is steadily destroyed. finally, they are unable to sleep at all. this is the terminal stage. they stop eating, begin steadily losing weight, become unresponsive both to communication and to pain. and then, after six or eight months of perfect wakefulness, they die.

it made me think of scurvy or rickets. diseases which showcase all the ways in which a vitamin whose presence we take for granted can destroy life when absent. familial fatal insomnia is a vile experiment that nature performs to demonstrate that sleep and dreaming are as essential to life as vitamins C or D.

when I fantasized about insomnia grating away my mind, I think that I was entranced by the necessity of the immaterial to life. that’s how I explained my dark attraction to this hideous way of dying. it’s easy to understand how vitamins facilitate the hundreds of thousands of distinct chemical reactions that produce biological life: less easy to understand how sleep and the dreams which flourish in it permit us to know that we’re alive.

I began to think of a hierarchy:

nutrients like vitamins or sugar that enable the sort of life which molecular biology studies

‘nutrients’ like sleep and dreaming that enable the sort of life which psychology studies

?

does something happen in waking life analogous to these? something that enables a sort of life that sits atop the other two? I started to think that waking life also has its dreams, and that these nurture a further sort of life. this further sort of life, I realized, is the one that lives in stories.

stories, with their paths of necessity and engines of plot are the dreams we dream while awake. I thought of them as ‘dreams’ because these daylight fantasies nurture our waking life just as those we have in sleep protect our minds. it’s easy to dismiss this as bullshit, but then again

imagine a hair cell on your head, living its life

pushing out its follicle

but even if it’s an inch away from the physical site of your dreams, what does it know about them?

the dreams of sleep are solitary, and the waking consciousness they permit is tragically individual. but the dreams that stories permit are communal. public dreaming.

imagine an alien who does not sleep. what could be stranger than watching all of humanity go into a dark room every night and become inert for a third of each day? likewise, to an alien who could not experience our communal dreaming in stories, what could be more incomprehensible than that billions of people, each seemingly individual, should gather in enormous, darkened rooms, sit side by side, and watch a dream projected on one wall?

‘humanity’ exists because of this community of dreamers.

joseph campbell spent most of his life trying to find the eternal recurrences in our communal dreams. and to anybody with eyes, mad max is a movie made in total consciousness of this fact. the movie is a cathedral consecrated to the greater glory of the monomyth. nobody needs me to point out all the ways that this is true. nor how every idea in every frame has been boiled down to the mythological equivalent of an essential oil. again, anybody with eyes.

but think about the moment, early on, when max is strapped to the hood of nick hoult’s car. max is pumping blood through an IV line that has been woven through the links of a chain. a chain that connects the two men and by which one gives blood to the other. this image makes plain what’s true for all of us but which individuals cannot see. one can wander, but two are always going somewhere. we’re all of us linked by the umbilicus of dreams.

[cutecurmudgeon]

I started tearing. Movies as empowerment fantasies have real impact!

My Reaction to Mad Max: Fury Road and the Utter Perfection that is Imperator Furiosa

Okay so. Buckle up, kids. It’s time for Furiosa feels.

Here’s the thing.

I am what’s called a fetal amputee. Fancy way for saying I was born with a missing limb. I’ve written about this on here before, but it’s been a long time and I’ve gained a lot of new followers recently (hai guyz) so it might be news to some of you.

This is me. 

This is Charlize Theron as Furiosa.

I finally wound up going to see this movie Monday night after work, by myself, cause I was too thirsty for it and couldn’t wait for my friends to be available. Everyone was out of town this weekend for various reasons, so I figured I’d just wait for someone to go with, but then Facebook started talking about how amazing it was and I just couldn’t put it off any longer. So that’s how I ended up in a theater last night, completely by myself – not another soul in the room, sobbing my eyes out.

Because you guys. I am turning 30 years old next week. I’ve been a fan of action film my entire life. And I have NEVER seen a physically disabled, kickass, female lead character in a Hollywood movie EVER – not once, until yesterday.

(SEMI-SPOILERS AHEAD)

Keep reading

[cutecurmudgeon]

Bozo will approve your children’s marriage!

BOZO APPROVED

Children say “that album’s fine / A friend of Bozo is a friend of mine" 

ONLY BUY GENUINE BOZO APPROVED RECORDS. Thus is wholesomeness assured.

[cutecurmudgeon]

Okay, this is one reason I don't fit any recognizable norm. I thought Flash was kinda dumb and Super Girl was healthy camp. Sure, a bit Disney, over orchestrated girl power, but fun. I hate that there are cliches that can press my buttons...and they are doing so hamfistedly.

The Flash trailer and Supergirl trailer

[cutecurmudgeon]

I found this in Jimmies room. I’m pretty sure he’s going to get pierced. But there are a lot of places you can put a ring like this...

[cutecurmudgeon]

You need to stop making excuses for him Janet.

This was a long ongoing campaign that amused American smokers with the notion of getting into a fistfight with people who attempted to change their cigarette preferences. Since no one would hit anyone to make them switch, the Tareyton smoker presumably initiated physical combat, and was repaid with a black eye. 

Damn right I hit her, your Honor - she wouldn’t even listen to my reasoned appeal to try Larks on a regular basis!

[cutecurmudgeon]

We all know the coffee morning after a bender...thanks for reminding us.

Ad copy, or surrealist poetry? The world may never know. 

[cutecurmudgeon]

Fuck the Alka-Seltzer....where do i get Nerve Pills?

One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, collagen injection

[cutecurmudgeon]

Actually, you know this is urine because there aren’t any bubbles.

Friday! Hurry up everyone and drink that beer here comes more beer it’s beer v.2

[cutecurmudgeon]

She's not really having an amazing life if all her sparkles disappear at once.

I laughed at first, but then I clicked through and realized this loony cunt bills $500 an hour for something called “Clairvoyant Coaching.”

Part of me respects her hustle. Get paid, girl. Then again, the most dangerous con artist is the one who believes in her own bullshit.

[cutecurmudgeon]

Yes it did. But the angelic smile was the backbone.

I should explain this photo. 

In the early to mid 90s, there was a thing called Glamour Shots, available in most small town malls. It was basically a photo studio that would also do hair and makeup. It stocked jackets and hats and gloves, and promised to take sexy gorgeous photos of you that you could take to your grave.

This is not the result of Glamour Shots. My parents instead took me to my friend Kim’s mom to get glamour shots done, because she said she could do the whole thing for cheaper than the mall. She did my hair and makeup and then pulled box after box of fringed jackets and cowboy hats out of her closet for me to try on.

Being in sixth grade, I just wanted to look pretty and thought that if fringe was gonna do it, hell, I’d try it.

Fringe didn’t do it. 

[cutecurmudgeon]

Oh hey...you know...that Met Gala was today... O_O

update from a baltimore public defender

OK…here it is… I’m going to try to keep this as brief as I can, but I’ve been asked by several people about Central Booking today, so I’ll give you guys the shocking highlights. As much as I’d like to, I can’t describe the particulars of some of the more egregious arrests, due to attorney/client privilege issues, but I would like to describe the Civil Liberties violations, and the deplorable conditions which people have had to endure. As many of you know, more than 250 people have been arrested since Monday here in Baltimore. Normally when you are arrested, you are given a copy of your charging documents and then you must see a commissioner within 24 hours for a bail determination (“prompt presentment”) and given a trial date. If you are not released after the commissioner hearing, you will be brought before a judge for a review of the bail set by the commissioner. None of this was happening, so we sent some lawyers to Central Booking yesterday to try to help. I heard, however, that only 2 commissioners showed up, and the correctional officers only brought about 9 people to be interviewed because the jail was on a mysterious “lock-down”. Today we were divided into two groups. Some of the lawyers were assigned the task of actually doing judicial bail reviews for as many folks as they could get interviewed and docketed. I was assigned to the other group. We were the “habeas team”, and we were to interview folks that we felt were being illegally detained, so we could file writs of habeas corpus. Governor Hogan had issued an executive order, extending the time for prompt presentment to 47 hours. We believed that this order was invalid because the governor has no authority to alter the Maryland Rules. As a result, all people who were being detained for more than 24 hours without seeing a commissioner were being held illegally. Knowing all of this, I was still not prepared for what I saw when I arrived. The small concrete booking cells were filled with hundreds of people, most with more than ten people per cell. Three of us were sent to the women’s side where there were up to 15 women per holding cell. Most of them had been there since Monday afternoon/evening. With the exception of 3 or 4 women, the women who weren’t there for Monday’s round-ups were there for freaking curfew violations. Many had not seen a doctor or received required medication. Many had not been able to reach a family member by phone. But here is the WORST thing. Not only had these women been held for two days and two nights without any sort of formal booking, BUT ALMOST NONE OF THEM HAD ACTUALLY BEEN CHARGED WITH ANYTHING. They were brought to CBIF via paddy wagons (most without seat belts, btw–a real shocker after all that’s happened), and taken to holding cells without ever being charged with an actual crime. No offense reports. No statements of probable cause. A few women had a vague idea what they might be charged with, some because of what they had actually been involved in, and some because of what the officer said, but quite a few had no idea why they were even there. Incidentally, I interviewed no one whose potential charges would have been more serious than petty theft, and most seemed to be disorderly conduct or failure to obey, charges which would usually result in an immediate recog/release. The holding cells are approximately 10x10 (some slightly larger), with one open sink and toilet. The women were instructed that the water was “bad” and that they shouldn’t drink it. There are no beds–just a concrete cube. No blankets or pillows. The cells were designed to hold people for a few hours, not a few days. In the one cell which housed 15 women, there wasn’t even enough room for them all to lay down at the same time. Three times a day, the guards brought each woman 4 slices of bread, a slice of american cheese and a small bag of cookies. They sometimes got juice, but water was scarce, as the CO’s had to wheel a water cooler through every so often (the regular water being “broken”.) My fellow attorneys and I all separately heard the same sickening story over and over. None of the women really wanted to eat 4 slices of bread 3 times a day, so they were saving slices of bread TO USE AS PILLOWS. Let me say that again. THEY WERE ALL USING BREAD AS PILLOWS SO THAT THEY WOULDN’T HAVE TO LAY THEIR HEADS ON THE FILTHY CONCRETE FLOOR. Interviewing these women was emotionally exhausting. Quite a few of them began crying – so happy to finally see someone who might know why they were there, or perhaps how they might get out of this Kafka-esque nightmare. These women came from all walks of life. We interviewed high school students, college students, people with graduate degrees, people with GED’s, single women, married women, mothers, the well-employed, the unemployed, black women and white women. Almost all of them had no record. Those that did, had things like DUI’s and very minor misdemeanors. Our group didn’t interview any of the men on the other side, but my colleagues reported very similar situations. On the men’s side there were journalists and activists, as well as highschool kids with no records, barely 18 years old. As we were getting ready to leave, we heard that many of these folks might be released without charges, after being held for 2 days. When we returned to the office, our amazing “habeas fellow”, Zina Makar, single-handedly filed 82 habeas petitions. That is when we heard that 101 people were released without charges. I’d like to think that the amazing legal response to this injustice played a large part in their release, and I feel privileged to have been a part of it. They may be charged later, but I’m guessing most of them won’t based on how minor their alleged infractions are. There are still over a hundred folks in there that need to see a commissioner and/or a judge, but hopefully we have thinned the ranks a little, and we will keep fighting until everyone has received due process. (We are concerned about these folks’ potential bails, as we are hearing about bails in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for misdemeanor charges).

[cutecurmudgeon]

I'm convinced Pizza Hut is now owned by ikea.

I’m convinced Pizza Hut wants to kill us

[cutecurmudgeon]