The New Jerusalem

Annual

Courtesy of Erin Lee: I think we should have year books in the working world. "Have a great summer, It's so fun to go over spread sheets with you! Stay Sweet! PURCHASING DEPARTMENT4EVA!!!"

Simple Simian

If someone at work is kind enough to go get you tea when they're on the way to the break room, don't start calling them "Tea Monkey". No matter how satisfying it seems to just yell "Hey tea monkey, if you get master some tea he'll give you a fig!" the other person involved is a HUMAN BEING and deserves respect and, if you do it enough, may "Accidentally" spill the green tea on you which hurts like a motherfucker.

A man can dream

It is my dream to invent a new sexual fetish. I see all these guys online, and... they want people to pee on them or call them names or shove strawberry shortcake dolls up their asses. (Who's the purple pie man?) I feel so lame. I mean, all I want is standard, vanilla sex with a muscular blond supermodel. I'm as boring as an Anthony Trollope novel. I want to be unexpected. I want to get some guy over to my house, get him naked, then just administer eye tests to him all night long.

Tele-pathy

I have a law degree. Unfortunately, I graduated about two weeks after the economy went away. So to make ends meet, I telemarket. The company actually insist we say we do teleBUSINESS, but since we are marketing, not busying things over the telephone, I maintain it is telemarketing.

Lots of the people I call don't want to talk to me. Some say "i don't want to talk", which is fine, makes my job easier. Some are annoying and hostile fuckwads. Unfortunately my work has this policy about using the word fuckwad in official communications.

Stemple

I hate approaching men in bars. Like, there's absolutely no way to strike up a conversation without effectively saying "Hello, I am wanting to make the sex on you, please look at my body and figure out the top reasons you never want to see me naked." Thus, any time I talk to anyone at a bar, I get freaky nervous, like a 1950's game show contestant. You don't know how many potential relationships i've ruined by sweating on a man then saying "Can you repeat the question?"

Color Wars (Extra!)

I just got an image in my head of Ceasar Chavez as a goth with the whole black painted tear thing. It was really funny. I guess you had to be there. In my head.

Color Wars

Goths and Mariachis should rumble. Like the punks and the mods in Quadraphenia. It could do so much to revitalize both movements.

Wilde on E

I would be way more successful if there were such a thing as a witicism club. It'd be like a comedy club, except instead of trying to make people laugh, the point would be to make people nod, chin in hand, while saying "ahhh" or "touche."

Escalade

I've lived in Oakland for about 2 years, and it's been really interesting to watch the cycle of poverty and crime. Young kids, they grow up in a community with no infrastructure, no education, and the only people they see who are successful are drug dealers, driving around in their escalades, jewels on their fingers, beautiful homes. These poor children with no hope dream of growing up to be a drug dealer. After two years in oakland, I've started dreaming of becoming a drug dealer. I have a law degree and I'm TELEMARKETING. *I* want an escalade, *I* want platinum teeth,*I* want an unending supply of hookers.

Ethnic Struggle

My mother is half jewish and half native american. It's led to a highly ambivalent attitude towards camping. On the one hand, she believes firmly that wilderness skills are the best test of a person's worth. Her most regularly voiced criticism of my father is "If my father knew I married a man who can't even build a motherfucking fire, he'd roll over in his goddamn grave." At the same time, she hates camping. I asked her why when I was 9. She told me "Jews don't camp. The last time we went to camps, it didn't work out so well." The holocaust is my mother's answer to everything.

My Rod and My Staff

As a homosexual, I get most of my loving off of the internet. But sending all those pictures, making small talk, figuring out if he's old or creepy or TYPES IN ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME, that can be really time consuming, and with my busy schedule, I can't just spend 2 hours online every time I need to fuck someone. So I hired a temp. Her name is Leslie. She just graduatated from UCSC with a degree in Art History. She's a really bright girl, and a good little typist, but she's just always calling me up "Hello, Mr. Branum... he wants to know how thick it is." "Mr. Branum, what does PNP mean?" Ladies, huh?

Vino

Alcohol has the rare ability to make you simultaneously far more objective and subjective than you have any right to be.

Dearest Kitty

My mental illness appears to be getting in the way of my hopes of becoming a cheerleader. I try to cheer along with the other girls, but i'm periodically suffused with senses of hopelessness and self-hatred. One can't really give a cry of "Defense" when one can think of nothing but her creative bankruptcy and social alienation. I fear the angst can be seen nearly vibrating from my pompoms. Where shall I find solace, Kitty? I fear it will only be at the bottom of a bottle of wine cooler. What kind of monster have I become?

Sincerely,

Guy's ID

Jumpin' Jumpin'

I got a cap a few weeks ago. A gold Toof, if you will. It took them three tries to put it in, because they didn't use lube and i'm very tight. But on the last trip, after it was finally in my mouth, the Tooth Nurse handed me a receipt and said I owed 40% of a fucking huge lot of money. I asked why it cost so much. She said, "well, gold teeth are made of gold, which you might have heard is pretty expensive, more expensive than avocados, even." I said i could buy a whole truck of gold avocados for the amount they were charging me, and then she said "Oh, yeah, we forgot to mention, the gold tooth comes with an escalade." I guess that's why it's so expensive.

Sex Bomb

I really like it when people refer to the "Sex Industries". It makes me think that there's a sex factory somewhere, full of ladies in smocks and hair nets giving hand jobs to penises that roll by on a conveyor belt.

Balltzhuva

A friend of mine finally convinced me to go with him to services at a synogogue in the castro. I didn't even know Abercrombie made yarmulkes.

Dalmation Plantation

My neice is two. I remember about a year ago, i was performing some sort of baby maintainance on her, I believe she was low on power steering fluid, anyway, Her skin, like most babies, was astoundingly soft and lovely to touch, and for one moment I thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be cool to have a couch apolstered with this stuff." And, of course, i was then like "GUY YOU FREAK DISGUSTING PSYCHO" then i got over it, but as time passes, i think if someone offered me a dead baby couch, I don't know that i'd say "no."

Green Mountain Boys, cont.

The US isn't ready for gay marriage. We're just not that comfortable with the idea of homosexuality. On the bright side, America does have a love affair with homoerotica: ultimate fighting, smallville, ashton kucher movies. America loves to see hot guys naked, bleeding and exchanging pithy one-liners, they just don't want to think about them going to pottery barn afterwards. I, thus, propose the following compromise: Instead of making gay "marriage" legal, forcing much speculation about who wears the dress et al, Vermont and like-minded states should create a "declaration of buddy cop". Through this process, men could officially register as rag-tag misfit police officers who fight crime in the smokey haze of their Starsky and Hutch style love. It'd involve most of the benefits of marriage, social security, immigration, whatever, except that the registrants would only be allowed to engage in public displays of physical affection while one of them was bleeding. Oh, and they'd have to officially notify the government which one was the "tango" and who was the "Cash" if you catch my meaning.

A similar declaration of Spinster Sisterhood could also be made available, but, you know, what state wants to turn into lesbian flypaper?

Green Mountain Boys

Canada has legalized gay marriage. Fuckin' Commies. Now, I'm as gay as the next guy, but it just pisses me off to watch those moose fuckers up there, toss their freedom around like it's candy. They're all like "Oh, we're soory abooot this United States, But we just have to proovide all of oour citizens with equal access to marriage." Then they have to say it again in French because they're fucking communists. They wouldn't HAVE freedom if it weren't for us whiping their ass throughout the cold war, i think it's only polite for them, while they are guests on our continent, to have respect for our puritanical sexual biggotries.

The Seventh Day

One time my friend steve went on sabbatical from work so he could try to finish his novel. He never finished his novel, because he's aloser. But he took a sabbatical from work, and I was thinking I should do that. But then I realized work isn't really what gets in the way of my writing. Then I wondered if I could take a sabbatical from my own psychoses, but if I do that, my mother will think I don't love her.

Last Night

Instead of going out last night I went to bed at 5 pm, slept until 10, made an Atkinsworthy dinner, then went back to sleep until damn near 8. I think premature baldness leads to premature boringness.

Songs of Experience

Flossing is a wierdly emotional experience for me. Like, after I'm done I've got this mouth full of blood and rancid food particles, my flesh is torn and I'm simultaneously feeling guilty I waited so long to do it, and regretting that I ever started. At least you can only lose your virginity once.

The Great American

America is really good at creating ethnic combinations god never intended. My mother is half jewish and half native american. That's not part of god's plan. He never intended jewish braves to be out tracking down wild brisket. Jews can't be braves. Jews can, at best, be awkwardly cautious.

Hmmm... nice clean hack ethnic juxtoposition material.

Breaking News

So an old gay guy at my work was talking really loud in the break room. Turns out his Siamese cat has *ATTITUDE*. Yeah, when he bought the cat, he thought HE was in charge, but then the cat showed him. But despite the cat's sassy, take charge nature, he manages to "sense" the special nature of children and treat them with care. I was floored.

I think this guy should totally write a comic strip about it.

In other work news, lay-offs have left the office with virtually no one i'd sexually harass given the chance. I'm really quite devastated.

ALERT

My local UPN affiliate has replaced the 4:30 Hughleys rerun (Ahh, how I love the Hughleys) with COACH. COACH is being syndicated.

How culturally bankrupt could our society be that there are people spending their time watching episodes of COACH that aren't even new.

IMDB tells me Coach ran 8 years. Newsradio barely lasted 5. And apparently there's a god, too.

My Accursed Kind

My friend Chris got a web cam. he is, in all likelihood, the least awful gay man on the planet. He's highly unlikely to participate in fourgies or bestiality or the stockpiling of chemical weapons. He is a barometer for homosexual propriety. That said, he got a web cam, and can now broadcast his image to the four winds.

So I dialed up his web cam and demanded he take his shirt off. Because I'm me. The odd part: He did. And we're like entirely platonic friends.

Moral: Gay men are slutty. to the very core, slutty.

Peroxide Durga

I secretly theorize that Martha Stewart and Hillary Clinton are the same person. I'd argue we could conceive of them as dual incarnations of a single diety, Martha the nourishing Parvati to Hillary's dangerous Kali, but, frankly, they just aren't different enough. It's not like they're separate flourishes of the same essense, rather, they're nearly identical women.

Both blonde, both successful, both prone to stretching the truth in front of federal grand juries. They're almost like Janus: two heads on one body. Martha performs the domestic with imperial tactics, Hillary attempts the imperial with constant refuge in the domestic. But at the core what is the same is the sort of waspy, passive agressive self-assertion. Once, on martha, she had on a guy who made red bean candy. he'd studied it his entire life, he was a master at it. at one point martha corrected him and pulled the bean paste he was working on out of his hands. That's it right there. We can all imagine Hillary doing the same thing to Bill.

At root is the weird period during which these women came of age. Looking at the photos in Hillary's shitty book, I finally had some insight into her. She was the most talented child in her community, but she was a girl. She had to express her talents in female ways: competance, management of men, adherence to social norms. I mean, throughout Hillary's pass through the counter-culture of the sixties she always remained firmly lashed to popular propriety. She struggled against her prison, but also, secretly, desired the complascency of the women who are content. Similarly, her hunger to achieve became stunted and perverted by society until the only way she could acheive was through a husband.

Martha must have led a very similar life. Beautiful, smart, hellaciously motivated. Prison, should it come for martha, will be no great departure. Until now, her career has been the careful maintainance and improvement of the prison of domesticity. It's so profoundly sad the way Martha's singular intention to create a bountiful, perfect home shredded her family. A domesticity too strong for mortals.

Dude, these bitches so need to date.

Lamb Fat

I theorize that the Atkins works not by forcing one into Ketosis/Lypolysis as suggested by the eponymous and sainted doctor, but simply by stopping people from snacking between meals. Like, let's say I get randomly hungry and want a bite to eat. Normally I'd just grab some crackers, or matzah (cuz i'm jewish like that) or maybe some yogurt. EMPTY CALORIES. see, the Atkins says "Yes, guy, you can snack, but the only snack you can have is Lamb Fat." And I'm like "dude, you can keep your Lamb Fat, I can wait until dinner." Thus, weight gain is evaded.

Insoluable Me

A while ago I stayed with a friend of mine. The only cereal in her house was Kellogg's All-Bran. The name is no exageration. It is, quite sincerely, all bran. They should really put a hazard warning on it. Caution: do not consume this product unless you want to consider shitting a hobby.

You Don't Own Me

It's sort of strange when people get registered trademarks tattooed on them. Not that I have a problem with submitting the sublime beauty of the human form to the crass icons of consumerism. Nay, I dream of a day when I'll become "Dr. Pepper Presents: Guy", but in exchange for vast wealth and power. Confidential to all the fools who decided to use their bodies to sell disney and marvel sans remuneration: Only chumps sell out for free.

Kosher

People have long criticized Judaism for being a backwards religion full of rules and mumbo-jumbo. I think that we should concede the point and just start re-marketing judaism as a low-carb diet. dairy for breakfast, meat for lunch, then a sensible monotheism for dinner.

Pseudopud

I can't believe I just did that. I hate the word "pud". My natural revulsion by (from?) most curse words appears to have been stripped from my by popular consensus: My need to percieve myself as hep and racy displaces all of my aesthetic senses. Well, makes sense, that's how Old Navy stays in business.

Thank you, I'll be here all week.

But, also, it's a pun. A lame pun. But, oddly, I think it's called for. Just bare with me, gentle reader, wait for the catharsis that'll never come because I have no natural sense of narrative.

Yok, so last night I went out to an unpaid gig at a bar in Sebastapol, CA. To my european and subsaharan african fans, sebastapol CA shares little with its crimean cousin save a profound sense of saddness and the harbored remains of at least a few communists. It's up in sonoma county, so has that whole hick town/hippy refuge dichotomy. Lots'o'Yoga parlors. Anywhoo, it was unpaid, i got in contact with the booker from a craigslist ad. This was, probably a mistake. If online sex has taught me anything, it's that the internet is filled with potential, but none of that potential is actually worth driving an hour.

So I thought I was running late, hurrying to this place in Sebastapol, eschewing even the Roehnert Park In'n'Out (I realize the Atkins Diet, like Marxism, is a dream too perfect to be practical, but I'm in love enough with the dream that I do my best to try to believe its lies.)

So I get there at 8:15, and the host isn't even there yet. Wa-wa-waaaa. He was supposed to give us a) Free Liquor, b) Dinner, and c) tolls. likelihood of seeing any of them seemed low.

The other comics were already there. One was a guy I'd seen around SF. Pretty experienced, as I understood it, was in the Laugh Riots a coupla years ago, a regular at Cobb's before it's temporary departure for Avalon. Let's call him "Captain Ron". Not because he in any way resembles Kurt Russell or his delightful seafaring creation, but because it's the first name that came to me. Thank god i will never be allowed to make or name a child.

So Captain Ron talked to me and blah blah he hates all the SF open mics except the Mock. An opinion I understand well enough. The others were a new kid from Santa Cruz who, I must note, was possessed of a tawny loveliness seemingly plucked from a William Beckford novel or one of T. E. Lawrence's masturbatory fantasies. I wanted to pet him real hard.

And there was a girl who eventually became a drunk girl.

The host was one of those guys who is close enough to being a bro that he dresses like a bro, but dorky enough looking that he fails to pull it off. Sad. The set up was a bar complete with pool tables, drunk people, and a sign that said "Oprah Author's Drink at Jasper's". As I dazzled at the sheer number of apostrophes used in the sign, I immediately knew it was indicative of the literary quality of O's book club authors. I really think they should also have to put a sign under it that specifies that the sign is not in any way refering to Jonathan Franzen.

Ok, so the host did show, he must have, because i described him above. the dinner he had for us: a cold pizza. Dude, Dr. Atkins died for my ketosis, I can't eat pizza.

The show finally began at around 930. First up the host... who did about 30 seconds of material then introduced the first comic. Yes, it was going to be a night of pure professionalism, I could tell already. Poor pretty. Damn, i know i just started a paragraph, but I really need to do it again to properly emphasize the plight of poor Mike, the first comic, poor, beautiful, mike.

Poor stupid mike. Like, it's not the fault of the criminally attractive that they believe they're funny when no empirical evidence supports this finding. See, they go through life bedecked in a loveliness that cures all ills. I mean, who needs to be funny when they've got a net of eyes and cheekbones with which to capture prey. "But Guy," You say, "That only explains why Mike who should be Porn wasn't funny, not why he THINKS he's funny." Well, gentle reader, I can only assume that the world so longs to favor the likes of mike that his however rude attempts at jocularity have been met with unearned if emphatic approbation and laughter. It is even true that the mere presence of one who is quite viscerally attractive has been known to create such a tension as any excuse to laugh is fully entertained. Why, on a corollary note, just days ago a petitioner for a political movement i don't support (he was gathering signatures against the Recall effort. while i don't look forward to a Governor Kindergarten Kop more than anyone else, I do so enjoy political drama) but I signed without question. Why? He had very nice biceps. VERY nice. And when people with very nice biceps ask me to do things, I comply. I wonder if that's how Hitler rounded up the gay guys for the camps: Just sent around a bunch of really HOT Nazis, and the faggots did whatever they asked.

So point is, Mike sucked so long and hard I really should have given him $150 at the end of his efforts. Then me.

By this point the audience was quite uninterested in comedy. the front of the bar was entirely oblivious. chatting and playing pool. In my naivetee, i still thought "hey guy, do well, make a good impression on Captain Ron, maybe you can get work. You remember work, right, it's that thing lots of people who aren't you are getting."

So I did a set. A sassing the audience, loud, pounding set. It didn't all take, but it got all the pool-playing, drunk people looking in the same direction, acclimated to the idea of comedy, and on a nice footing for the person to follow me. I finished, sat down. Captain Ron leaned over and said "subtle".

Now, beloved reader, it took me a good minute to realize if he was being sarcastic or not. To quote Jackie Beat, I'd long believed I put the 'b' in subtle. Then I realized Captain Ron, mistaking texture for text, had failed to really note the contents of my mouth. He saw himself as smart and subtle, and had decided to counterpose me as "what's wrong with comedy."

The beauty of structuralism is that like all good academic theories, it's TRITE. The simplicity of dichotomies saves us all that time we normally use thinking.

In conclusion, Captain Ron's attempt at a subtle set to the drunken hicks failed miserably, but I was only slightly able to enjoy it. His intellectual inclinations were made very clear as he referenced *gasp* sartre. Yeah, we've got a mensa member on our hands. oh, then he told a joke about haiku, and said his favorite haiku author was Basho. Yes, that astoundingly obscure haiku author basho. And my favorite type of catsup is heinz.

You know, Dr. Prof. Captain Ron, maybe some of us know a bit of european philosophy and japanese poetry, but we put it in the back pocket when we're in bars in sebastapol and our job is to entertain the crowd. He, and the woman before him, spend much time chastising the crowd for not paying attention. Um, dude, they're not there to cater to you. Your job is to entertain them, and if you're failing so hard they have to make thier own entertainments, it's your own damned fault.

I don't care anymore, i just wanted to finish this so i could go to lunch.

We just had this team-building meeting at work. Like, get excited about the fact that the company somehow manages to skirt bankruptcy for yet another week. as I sleepily scoff, I wonder, what will happen when I have a job where I actually do have to care? I tell myself I want a career, but mainly I want money and respect. Mostly what I want out of a job is the perogative to be disinterested and uninvolved. Maybe I should become a Guidance Counselor.

6:00 am

I had to come in to work at 6 am today. Ok, 6:30. Ok, 6:42. Point stands that the hour was ungodly, and even approacing the solstice as we are, it wasn't quite light yet. I may never recover. But as I approached the early-hours entrance to my building (the ever fungible 505 14th St) a guy I know popped out of the security building. He's a guy I know from my non-work life. Let's call him "dan" as that is his name. Dan plunges on me and starts talking. Which is cool, he's an entirely affable guy. Apparently he's worked graveyard there as a security guard for about a month. Cool. But then Dan followed me into the building and started going up the elevator with me, still talking, and then i remembered something about dan i'd previously forgotten. See, apparently dan somehow learned how to talk without learning to have a conversation. He just sort of says things, random, unrelated things in succession. It was very odd, but i was finally able to escape him at the security door on my floor.