No.

Yes.

I can make up a ficticious backstory if you would like. It will, of course, focus on me somehow.

Go 4 it.

give me a few minutes to digest my chilli

"Digest" = expel 25,000 cubic feet of methane gas.

This is like, exciting edge of my seat shit. Where's my popcorn?

good thing i dont ever check my mail.

So you guys are all having a rough day at work, too, huh?

i kind of wish my name was Hewletts O'Daughter or Hewletts McDaughter or something more Irish sounding

Flip the script in overtime, G.

how many muffins is too many muffins?

Three.

Hot muffins?

I don't wanna smell your muff!

good news. one more muffin to go. this time, cranberry.


Hot Chips?

Will you at least smell my finger? Eh, wait. That'll cost you $1.50.

you ain't seen nothin'
'til your down on the muffin

And then, many years later, my father explained to me what "the rabbit done died" meant. And I wept and there was much gnashing of teeth and wailing for dead rabbits.

This afternoon's discovery: stale halloween peeps. I ate some from the same package last week, but they're much better after they've had time to cure in the staid office air. Mmm!

So my mom was like, "YOU HAVE TO GET A HAIRCUT TONIGHT BECAUSE I SCHEDULED YOU FOR AN APPOINTMENT" so I was all like, "Dude, I wanted one next week, not tonight, wtf" so then we're arguing about in the car, and the car just fucking breaks down right by Harlem/Lake and we just sat there for 45 minutes until the police called the tow truck, and "Show Me The Way" was playing on the radio. Good shit.

See what happens when you don't listen to your mother?

tjenz googled himself, i did too. i find this amusing:
kmac urban dictionary

I was at Harlem and Lake at 5:00 last night.

WTF?

So Sendspace just rips off other companies' advertisements to make their own? Nice.

They both could've bought the same stock image.

Or maybe this proves once and for all that Santa Claus rules the universe.

whoa!

Think about it.

If this is true, why aren't we all compelled to wear suits with white trim?

Just wait. These things take time.

You're part of them, aren't you?

Take, for instance, a young couple I met at a fetish convention in Florida, where they were attending a seminar aimed at teaching women how to tie up men. Neither of them knew much about bondage or the fetish world, but they had heard about the convention and thought it might be a fun way to spend a weekend afternoon. And so there they were, young newlyweds, raised in Tennessee and Texas, with strong religious backgrounds, learning how to get kinky the way other young, upscale couples might spend a Saturday learning how to tell the difference between 18th and 19th century sideboards.

Some of us have always experimented, of course. But now it can sometimes seem as if you’re a total loser if you’re not a dildo aficionado (“Oh, surgical silicone is just sooo much better than rubber!”) or don’t know the first name of the bartender at your local “underground” sex club.

Your bedroom, your business
While it's true that not everyone is experimenting, even those of us who aren't seem much more tolerant of the adventurous. As a woman in Missouri said, “Don’t pressure me, I won’t pressure you.”

Most of the people I have spoken to so far (and keep in mind I have deliberately spoken to those people who seem to be on sexual quests of their own) have no problem with access to adult porn for adults, sex toys, group sex, gay sex, fetish, bondage, you name it, so long as they are not forced to be exposed to it or pressured to take part. Another woman I spoke to said she disapproved of many sexual options, but then quickly added, “That’s just for me and my own standards. I don’t want to tell anybody else what to do.”

Well, America is famous for its guilt. You have to go back, way back, to pinpoint the source of this guilt, but here is one, written by a man who probably has had more influence on American sex lives than Hugh Hefner:

“Freedom from all sexual intercourse is … angelic exercise … But I am aware of some that murmur: ‘What say they, if all men should abstain from all sexual intercourse, whence will the human race exist?’ Would that all would this, only in ‘charity out of a pure heart, and good conscience, and faith unfeigned’ much more speedily would the City of God be filled, and the end of the world hastened.”

That was St. Augustine, perhaps the most important “father” of the early Christian church. Augustine didn’t like sex, believing that it inflamed lust and prevented mankind from following the discipline of reason, the path to God. He felt, as expressed in these words, that the truly charitable, the truly holy would forgo sex altogether and, in an apocalyptic vision, thus hasten the end of the world. His thinking was so dominant that the Catholic Church eventually overturned a thousand years of tradition and barred priests from being married so they could focus their minds more fully on God.

Lust was a source of shame. Sex, even in the marriage bed, was a sin unless its sole purpose was the begetting of children. Even then, those who remained abstinent, though married, were holier than those who were not.

Now look at what we expect from politicians and other leaders. They have to appear as paragons of rectitude, practically asexual beings. We want to see them in church, with a prim wife or buttoned-up husband, and we expect to hear lip service paid to, yes, "values." Then, when one slips up (yes, you, Bill), we’re all expected to be shocked at the hypocrisy.

For example, I spoke to several civic officials and public employees when I worked at the adult store in Tempe, Ariz. They were all shopping there, but most of them told me that they could never, would never, stand up in support of such a store being allowed to open if it were being protested by, say, a local church group

And so, like former evangelical leader Rev. Ted Haggard (or Jimmy Swaggart or Jim Baker or too many Catholic priests) or politicians as far back as our lusty founding fathers, we learned to espouse one thing publicly and do another in private. We stashed our porn behind furnaces, hid our leather corsets under the bath towels, spoke in code to potential sex partners. We created the American sexual cliché of a repressed population that did it all anyway, but felt creepy about it.

When it comes to sex, we created a hypocritical culture.

The America Unzipped series and my research for the upcoming book of the same name is showing that this is changing, and quickly. Naturally, change makes some people upset.
Story continues below ↓ advertisement

So you have a man like Joe Beam, a sincere, Bible-believing leader of his faith, advocating the right of married people to enjoy their sex lives, and catching flak for it. Despite the good he seems to be doing for those who believe as he does, he is frequently criticized — one blogger labeled him a “heretic” after the Unzipped story about him came out — for trying to help married people throw off Augustine.

A bourgeois pursuit
But what such combatants do not seem to realize is that an awful lot of people have already done this. For them, the sex wars are over. Augustine? Who’s he? Americans are tired of feeling guilty. Sexual exploration has become a bourgeois pursuit.

This is especially true among people under 35. For many of them, sex has become wallpaper, not a hand-wringing issue at all.

American Apparel, the Los Angeles maker of clothing aimed at youth culture, uses a vaguely 1970s porn aesthetic to sell T-shirts, including hiring a porn star, Lauren Phoenix, who specializes in anal sex (“Buttwoman Iz Lauren Phoenix”) to model socks and underwear. The kids get the joke.

Abercrombie and Fitch’s famous catalogues have featured Bruce Weber-esque nudity and a French clothing maker named Shai goes further by hosting an online video catalogue complete with X-rated scenes of couples in action. You can stop the video and learn about the clothes they are taking off.

Paris Hilton, a parody of herself as the dissolute heiress preening in the grainy, greenish sex video, has ridden that strategy to create a minor financial empire.

There is a lot of fuss about all this, but Americans vote with dollars. So while church groups protest the opening of adult stores in an effort to “save the community,” the community is inside buying vibrators.

Trends like these illustrate something new about American sex and raise a question. We are consumers. If we are to keep up our end of the consumer bargain in the great American capitalist enterprise, we have to buy. To entice us into buying, we are saturated — flooded, really — with media, information and marketing. In it, we are told that a new Bosch dishwasher, a cold Pepsi and a BMW will lead to satisfaction, not just the satisfying feeling of clean dishes, a quenched thirst or great cornering, but of life.

In the void left by the banishment of social restrictions on our sex lives, sexual satisfaction is being marketed this way, too. We need window-breaking orgasms, penises the size of a chorizo sausage and the thrills of the Marquis de Sade or else we’re missing out. Women all over the country watched the striving Manhattan sophisticates in "Sex and the City" talking about rabbit pearl vibrators and suddenly had to have them for themselves.

But what, exactly, are we pursuing? Naturally, the details vary from one person to the next, but in the big picture, I think we are seeking satisfaction and not just the obvious kind.

Some of the people I have spoken to so far have clearly found a measure of satisfaction, depending on what they hoped sex could do for them.

Some have found deeper relationships, a more intense connection with a partner. A few have found membership in an extended community. No doubt some find the enforced open-mindedness itself to be liberating now that they are free to express themselves as they choose.


But as the marketing of sex becomes ever more pervasive, some find that handcuffs and a XXX German discipline video just don’t provide an escape from the loneliness of an atomized, hyperspeed culture in which entertainment is king.

So, caveat emptor.

gena: tell me something to draw
dan: a bear
gena: come on
gena: i knew you were going to say that
gena: whats the bear doing
dan: eating a person
gena: whats the bear doing
gena: besides eating a person
gena: cause i cant get a person to fit in this picture
dan: well he's really happy.
dan: and he's wearing a tie.
dan: maybe he's killing something else.
dan: or eating a pie.
dan: maybe he has laser vision
gena: no he doesnt
gena: i cant draw laser vision
gena: where is he
dan: he's on a roof.
gena: hmm no
gena: give me more
dan: fine he's in the jungle filled with ninjas.

And so it came to pass that through the miracle of DNA testing, it was determined, lo these many years had passed, that Gena and Undercooked Sausage are indeed not just genetically similar, but the same person.

Here endeth the lesson.

some schmuck who looks like Ed O'Bannon just walked in here.

Ed O'Bannon? Anyone? Remember him?

The Dokkodo ("The Way to Be Followed Alone") was a work written by Miyamoto Musashi a week before he died in 1645. It is a short work, consisting of either 19 or 21 precepts; precepts 4 and 20 are omitted from the former version. It was largely composed on the occasion of Musashi giving away his possessions in preparation for death, and was dedicated to his favorite disciple, Terao Magonojo (to whom was also dedicated the earlier Go rin no sho), who took them to heart. It expresses a stringent honest and ascetic view of life.

The precepts:

1. "Accept everything just the way it is."
2. "Do not seek pleasure for its own sake."
3. "Do not, under any circumstances, depend on a partial feeling."
4. "Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world."
5. "Be detached from desire your whole life long."
6. "Do not regret what you have done."
7. "Never be jealous."
8. "Never let yourself be saddened by a separation."
9. "Resentment and complaint are appropriate neither for oneself or others."
10. "Do not let yourself be guided by the feeling of lust or love."
11. "In all things have no preferences."
12. "Be indifferent to where you live."
13. "Do not pursue the taste of good food."
14. "Do no hold on to possessions you no longer need."
15. "Do not act following customary beliefs."
16. "Do not collect weapons or practice with weapons beyond what is useful."
17. "Do not fear death."
18. "Do not seek to possess either goods or fiefs for your old age."
19. "Respect Buddha and the gods without counting on their help." (Novelist Eiji Yoshikawa, in his novel Musashi, claims that this precept originated during Musashi's third duel against the Yoshioka clan, in which he found himself praying to a shrine's god to protect him when he launched his ambush, and violently breaking it off when he realized he shouldn't be praying.)
20. "You may abandon your own body but you must preserve your honour."
21. "Never stray from the Way."

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after running into someone i hadn't seen in 3+ years over lunch i'm currently having trouble with #10

screw you, musashi!

Joshu's Dog

A monk asked Joshu, a Chinese Zen master: `Has a dog Buddha-nature or not?'

Joshu answered: `Mu.' [Mu is the negative symbol in Chinese, meaning `No-thing' or `Nay'.]

Mumon's comment: To realize Zen one has to pass through the barrier of the patriachs. Enlightenment always comes after the road of thinking is blocked. If you do not pass the barrier of the patriachs or if your thinking road is not blocked, whatever you think, whatever you do, is like a tangling ghost. You may ask: What is a barrier of a patriach? This one word, Mu, is it.

This is the barrier of Zen. If you pass through it you will see Joshu face to face. Then you can work hand in hand with the whole line of patriachs. Is this not a pleasant thing to do?

If you want to pass this barrier, you must work through every bone in your body, through ever pore in your skin, filled with this question: What is Mu? and carry it day and night. Do not believe it is the common negative symbol meaning nothing. It is not nothingness, the opposite of existence. If you really want to pass this barrier, you should feel like drinking a hot iron ball that you can neither swallor nor spit out.

Then your previous lesser knowledge disappears. As a fruit ripening in season, your subjectivity and objectivity naturally become one. It is like a dumb man who has had a dream. He knows about it but cannot tell it.

When he enters this condition his ego-shell is crushed and he can shake the heaven and move the earth. He is like a great warrior with a sharp sword. If a Buddha stands in his way, he will cut him down; if a patriach offers him any obstacle, he will kill him; and he will be free in this way of birth and death. He can enter any world as if it were his own playground. I will tell you how to do this with this koan:

Just concentrate your whole energy into this Mu, and do not allow any discontinuation. When you enter this Mu and there is no discontinuation, your attainment will be as a candle burning and illuminating the whole universe.

Has a dog Buddha-nature?
This is the most serious question of all.
If you say yes or no,
You lose your own Buddha-nature.

Alright, I'm out.

In this post I deem The OC to be back in all its greatness.

I also flipped on VH1 during a commercial break and watched 2 minutes of How To Be A Player. It stars Bill Bellamy

Bill Bellamy used to be on "Cousin Skeeter."

EDIT:

this was an email I received today.

subject: Thanksgiving Joke

01. Talk about a huge breast!
02. Tying the legs together keeps the inside moist.
03. It's Cool Whip time!
04. If I don't undo my pants, I'll burst!
05. That's one terrific spread!
06. I'm in the mood for a little dark meat.
07. Are you ready for seconds yet?
08. It's a little dry, do you still want to eat it?
09. Just wait your turn, you'll get some!
10. Don't play with your meat.
11. Just spread the legs open and stuff it in.
12. Do you think you'll be able to handle all these people at once?
13. I didn't expect everyone to come at once!
14. You still have a little bit on your chin.
15. How long will it take after you stick it in?
16. You'll know it's ready when it pops up.
17. Wow, I didn't think I could handle all of that!
18. That's the biggest one I've ever seen!

More Pie instead, please!

hahahahawesome





i am going to try and start using the word "ubiquitous" more often

tis a good word.