Show me your boobies! (titties not included)

I'll never forget the first time I heard the term "pasties". It was a quiet New Years Eve, and for the 3rd year in a row, the Space network was airing "Flesh Gordon"- watch as Flesh and his friends, Flexi jerk-off and Dale (?), battle heroically to save the universe from the despotic ruler of the planet Porno, Emperor Wang, and his evil sex ray. This film was made in the late 60's and was technically pornography, but so did it pale to anything XXX that has come out in this half of the century, that it is now suitable for late night family viewing. This film also features the Princess, heir to the sacred power pasties, and the most shockingly racist one liner by a blond super hero I had ever hear at that point; "let the woman go you goddamn chink".

Which brings me to an amusing event held in my sleepy ass town once a year, giving everyone ample time to plan for it accordingly. I am talking about the annual Brain Injury Society's Jazz and Blues Dinner, Dance, and Burlesque Nite, full costume. It is one of the few occasions that draws out the under 70 crowd, and even dangles promises of "after party" in front of the bleary eyes of the horny, attention-starved former high school clique leaders, newly single into their late 20's and starting to bulge at the frump.

The presence of a full bar at a function to raise money for brain injury relief was an irony completely lost on the organizers, and caused my recovering date to bail at the last moment, but nonetheless, and a grand time was truly had by all.

The evening began with a nipple tassled strip down ho-fest, hoes liberally supplied by the city of Vancouver, and the promise of a "climax" during the band's intermission. Climax following the strip-ease? Isn't that a rather tall order? Of course, it turned out to be more stripping, away from the stage and into the fray. However, the mass town hall orgy that I expected would soon follow was doused by the need for key players at the event to keep leaving the doors open everytime they dipped out for a cigarette: the blast of carcinogenic ice wind that followed was enough to freeze even the warmest juices.

The acts were all well staged, with the rare treat of a female Elvis impersonator, sans beer gut, struting her stuff with great poise and class. At one point, she was drapped in an American flag, which elicited a loud gust of "Booooooooooooooooooo" from the audience, that turned to riotous cheers when she dropped it, stomped on it, and then threatened to piss on it. My town is a mill town with one of the highest catholic teen pregnancy rates in British Columbia, and would rarely be classified as a haven for radical liberalism, so it is a real testimant to how far the US has fallen in international public opinion that their flag will not be tolerated even in a burlesque skit.

My roommate and I managed even to secure an invitation to small gathering with the preformers afterwards, where I attempted to smoke pot for only the second time in my life, and it sucked. Sorry guys, but I just don't get it, and now no one can say I didn't try. This night was preceded by a dance-stravaganza hosted by the Town Pants, a local Celtic band. I felt compelled to ask why they called themselves that, and heard a tale of horse betting in Ireland on a horse called the Town Pants, which came in dead last and consumed in it's abject failure the few remaining the euros the band had. However, that story did not satisfy my need to know why anyone would call anything that. I love celtic music, but I admit, there is a limit to the number of songs one can tolerate about how far away I am, it's dark, need more whiskey, the boat and sea, arrgh, me lass, I'm drunk.

At least they don't sing about dying from lack of potatoes anymore. See, the world just keeps getting better and better.

Have a taco

On a brisk halloween eve circa 1989, the idea was first put into my mind by kindly aged neighbours that there was something un-ordinary about my life and experiences, and that I should put pen to paper and try to express what that was. I had gutted my inflatable T-Rex, which would no longer hold air, and wore him like a skin, concealing the places where my bare human flesh was still visible with a massive, green angora sweater. Around that point in my life, all my inflatable things failed me, including a raft, which was later involved in an incident where I almost drowned my sister, and was punished by having my Star Trek priviledges revoked for a month. All and all I think I was let off rather lightly, but I digress.

Well costumed and feeling the part, I stomped and roared and gnashed my way up the road, jaws hungering for man-candy. My neighbours were a retired couple from England, long the envy of North End road for being the only painted two story house on the block, and sporting a concrete cherub fountain in the front yard. I had a infantile hatred of the rich brewing since infancy, and their house seemed to confirm how righteous it was. I knew from my father and Charles Dickens that the rich were never generous, so I never trick or treated there, until that year.

I swaggered up to the door ahead of the my sister, rang the "door bell", and waiting. An old woman came to the door with a bowl of individually boxed raisins and said something on how terrifying and ferocious we looked. I had to take my plastic dino-head off to get a better look at the goods, when she exclaimed, "Oh my dear, what happened to your hair?".

I was terribly self-conscious about my hair, especially after I had cut my head attempting to shave and had the class bullies exclaim, upon knocking my hat off for the uppteenith time, "Hey you had a brain tumour, eewwwwww". It was just starting to come in again, a sparse downy fluff, that just barely covered my scalp. This was in the day when no one would have ever assumed that a pale, bald child had cancer, just that they didn't eat enough spinach and were terribly unpopular at school. So I was used to having to explain myself, and she seemed more kindly than not, so I told her all about my ordeal as articulately as my 9 year old vocabulary would allow. When I was finished she asked me if I would write my biography for her, because it would be "ever so interesting", and both she and her husband would really get a kick out of reading it. And I did.
About three months later, I brought her a 2 page manuscript, with complete illustrations, that said, and I quote:

"my name is XXXX 00000, and I was boorn in ledy Minto hosspitil. I have a mother, and a father, and a sistr, and a cat, and dog. I hat my dog, cause he is sooo stoopit. I got cancer, and I went to Vancouver for ceeemotherapy. It hurt, and my vains are bad. I had many operations, and no spleen. I stayed at Ronald Mccdonld house there, it was borning. I am better now, but I am bald. Thank you."

She looked quite surprised when I turned up, and reflecting back on this, I am sure she had forgotten entirely that she had made such a monumental request of the little cancer kid in the dragon suit. But I am glad she did, for though I may not fully understand the importance of this memory, it has been judiciously filed away, in the proper folder with tabs and bullets and eeeverything, so it is no doubt important.

After all, what doesn't kill us only makes us stronger,
except for all that other stuff that, you know, does kill us, only slower.
We'll just have to wait and see.

Japan, Land of the Free-ey wee-ey

"Knock, knock",

"Who's there?"

"International terrorist cell"

"International terrorist cell, who?"

"Wouldn't you like to know, HA".

And thus, God invented the airport immigration gate fingerprint identification system, which until last week, only one country on earth was stupid enough to employ. You get three guesses on this one, and the first two don't count. Until now, that sad lonely bully was stuffing his face at his own birthday party, no one to share the cake with, until Samurai Nerdy McNerdington, finally showed up at the party, 2 hours late bowing profusely and landen with prezzies. Because, hey, it takes two ta tango.

Japan has become the glorious second to use terrorism as a thinly veiled excuse for fingerprinting and keeping close records on foreign traffic in and out of the country. As far as I know, there is no Kantanomo Bay buried deep in the Salkin Islands in which to stock suspected riferaff, but there are ample military bases in Okinawa which I'm sure could use the entertainment. It'll be a beautiful marriage: no one loves poising for pictures more than US military prison guards, and no likes taking them more than the Japanese. But seriously, who would have expected this; Japan with it's free loving society and arms open to the wide wide world, doubting, no, actively SUSPECTING those whom it habours so graciously? Oh yeah, everyone. This is the Japan that during sakoku had armed guards attend every translator in the government when they negotiated trade with the Dutch and Portuguese. Not for the safety of the translator, but so that in the event the man was suspected of giving away national secrets, he could dispatched before his mouth ran too far afoul of him. They believed there to be something traitorous about a brain that understands other languages, yet how the guard, being a true and thoroughly ignorant patriot, was supposed to assertain the difference between a national secret in Dutch, or just the secret colour of a European women's private forest, is completely beyond me.

They have got to be on the right track, eh. Two massively xenophobic countries with long histories of military aggressionism and racial exclusionism...they wouldn't be fingerprinting foreigners if those people didn't have something dirty to hide. And if you don't like it, YOU must have something to hide too. Every morning when I wake up, I think to myself that there is entirely too much tolerance and goodwill floating around, and it's high time someone put an end it and reserved trust and honesty only for those who truly deserve it, like the starfish, and people who see Jesus in the water stains of their poor-ass ceilings. Heaven knows, I won't be able to go back now, not with my citizenship from Duel Country and my $300 in unpaid local residence tax. It all started apparently, after a French national was suspected of trying to form a terrorist cell while he resided there in the early 2000's.

Cest la vie.

Enter the Mind Reader

“tomorrow’s payday, that makes my pants happy”

I don't speak English, explain it to me in Science

As part of my study, I spend a lot of time on Pubmed, the National Library of Medicines journal database. Nutritional Medicine occupies a strange position between solid, research-based diagnosis, and traditional, sort of common sense, dont-mess-with-3000-years-of-blahblah-history, and Pubmed is one place where these two curse one another variably with eye of newt and ganglia blockers. It is also a place where one can see some of the problems rising from the ubiquitous application of single-variable research systems to everyone AND that other guy.

Those who have ever watched Bill O Reilly run off at mouth, quoting reports from mysterious "French Commissions" that never existed, should understand that information is like any commodity; the more there is, the more of it came steaming straight from the bulls ass. Nevertheless, the intergrity of Scientific information seems still to be remarkably intact, at least as far as the layman is concerned. They say things like, "Hey, it's science, I looked it up on the internet", and they MEAN it. I am not saying that true science, ie , data gleaned from judcious observation and testing, is irrelevant or non-existent, but it's scope is limited and it's findings subject to bias interpretation and further observation. Nevertheless, believers look to the Science for capital 'T' Truth and religious satisfaction, and as such, have a nasty habit of applying the scientific method to areas it was never designed to penetrate. You know, like, how gays have that gene or something, in their brains, and that is why they are so good at violin.

At its heart, this predilection is just the time honoured tradition of preserving ones sanity in the face of incomprehensibility by making generalizations. BROAD generalizations that take the complicated out of dynamic, multifaceted systems that less than a millionth of the population actually understands. The problem with doing this to science is that we are denying ourselves an objective lens with which to view the world, and are instead granting Science dominion over man in the same omnipotent form that Jolly ole God occupies. Just because we now KNOW that thunder is not angels breaking wind, we get all uppity. How many of you know exactly how it was scientifically determined that thunder is caused by a sonic shockwave from the rapid expansion of air surrounding a bolt of lighting? I only know the definition of thunder because I looked it up on wikipedia, an information source in which I have complete faith. FAITH.

It is also weird how this pnemonenon has led to people not daring to believe what is blatantly obvious if it cannot be somehow proven by Science. Some of NLMs recent headline include such items as, "Multiple stressors compound heart disease risk", and "Quality of life after stroke worse". No kidding, and like, having to eat chicklits out of a deadmans ass sucks too. Ill take my grant money now.

The real problem is...here it comes...the problem is that Life and the World are very, very COMPLICATED. And most people will die never knowing how or why anything works. There, I said it.

The quest for knowledge is one thing, but should never be confused with the quest for certainty, which is a thorny path strewn with grenades and mouldy feces; in short, tempting, but ulimately unwalkable. For there are a great number of false prophets and well commissioned scientists alike who may well say what they mean without ever knowning what they are talking about.

Smells like teen poetry

A glass of unripened poetry anyone?

The Dispensary

Don’t ever ask what happened to the truth,
He was mine to love and mine to lose
Closer than water to rain, closer still than me to mine
And yet what could rain soothe
But drown the fool in washing his wounds
What comfort can the deluge afford,
To one whose heart, like quarry sand
Is caked, scorched, and dour
Blanket this form in formless dress,
And take it to town,
To dine and dance,
And soak evermore the bitter cold down

Emotionsssssss

These walls are paths before me

From deeply irreverant to deeply personal in 12.9 seconds...
I never intended this to be diary format so much, but I need to take a moment to write about my day*

*warning, author reserves right to use time and space as she sees fit

I work 9 hours a day, so my workplace figures large in the space it fills in my day. It has been a family tradition of sorts for me and mine to regard work as nothing more than the place one goes to get paid, to be endured and enjoyed at the least expense possible. When work and the workplace become adversarial, those who turn and run away live to work somewhere else someday. I am a very hard worker, but I have never invested my personality much into what I do, feeling like most, that work places only use and abuse, and any emotional loans extended will only bring the bank calling with heafty interest fines.

I come in and was asked to sit down and talk a moment, Shit.

My co-worker asked me why I had re-arranged certain items in the store after being asked to leave them where they were, and I replied, "because that is where they belonged". She then proceeded to tell me what a disrespect that is to the others, who know no less where things belong than I do, and told me how I reminded her of a particular 13 year old who had matriculated to university, but who quickly fell to drugs, and other self destructive abuses, and said that she knew how hard it was for people of exceptional intelligence to take the reigns from their powerful ego's and let empathy and consideration do the driving. And then, she said that all the love I need to change was here. But...but work is where I come to get shit on. Work+love=wtf?

I must praise my coworker for so expertly phrasing her criticism so that the reason I am such a social retard is because I am an intellectual genius! But listening to this, I was forced to accept several things: that being right isn't always worth the human cost, and that running away from things and people that upset me only makes for a three page resume. So even though there has been friction, I am not quitting my job. This is just the kind of emotional endurance test that should help me prepare for the big triathelon next month.

As much as most people sincerely believe that they want the straight goods from life and those they share it with, this was the perfect example of the need to judiciously read and employ "handling instructions" to those we fear breaking. Honestly, the majority of us have no stomach for the truth whatsoever, and need it to be carefully shaped into a sweet ass bowl of ice cream that disguses the bitter pill we are made to swallow about ourselves from time to time. There are also many cases, terrifying cases, in which we must admit that someone else, who may not know us even very well, knows all our secrets and may even be far more aware of them than we are ourselves. While this is a ghastly prospect, the up side is that we can look to others for constructive criticism and opportunities for personal growth, rather than muddling in a dark corner, crying and jerking off to NIN, thinking that nobody knows the trouble we've seen. Belief in the uniqueness of ones pain or experience really is nothing more than an mastrabatory egoasm.

Project Personality: Currently under construction, with cost overruns projected into the billions.

And now it's time for DEAR LORD: straight up advice from the all-mighty for life's quandaries


Q: Dear lord, how can be spared from passing gas in front of my intended? I ask thee in Jesus name.

A: Love brings many movements, not only of the heart, but of some less appropriate organs as well. This is the satan-fear and its accompanying curs-ed wind: be not blown away, my child. Simply eat nothing for at least 6 hours before your encounter. This will not only keep the dogs of gas firmly chained, but will also prevent the nervous release of other superfluous and unholy excretions. Can I get a hallelulah?


Q: Dear lord, how can I ever know for certain that I have left the house wearing the right pants?

A: Hold your two hands together and put the thumbs together outstretched. The side that makes an L is your left, the other is your right. Now that you know left from right, I ask thee child by what standard you judge your pants? Are you concerned what ladies may think of them, or has your ego simply gotten the better of you? In both cases, a good self-flaggulation with a young birch branch and 100 hail Mary’s made in sincere repentance of what ever will undo the problem with your pants. You may want to remove them first in any case, blood is a bitch to get out.

Q: Dear Lord, I’ve just creamed the butter together with the eggs and sugar. I know the recipe says to add the flour next, but I was thinking I need this cake to be extra special, so maybe I should do the spices first and that way the flavour gets more into the butter. What do you think?

…

It's not just awful, it's GOD awful

The following represents a most feeble attempt to extend the limits of my existance into the realm, hereintonow relatively virgin territory, of Cyberspace -ace-ace-ace. We'll see how long I have the patience and determination to keep this up. The trace should last between a wine stain and a fart in the wind.

Your self introduction PLEASE, why thank you

Name: V-Unit, Vitamin V to those who need me
Location: Somewhere beyond the sea, North of Vancouver, South of Alaska, In the country Canada.
Status: Female, living on a prayer

I am working on my second degree, having studied for years what I hated to do as work, and have retreated to this corner of the world to relax and construct some meaningful sense of composure. It's working, I swear it is. I decided it was time to blog when I saw the little button saying "create blog" on my friends site, and felt a strange pang of jealously and longing for the extraspecial otheriness of existence that nobodies glean from putting their crap out there for all to smell. I used to do this on solid paper for a zine called Madame Guillotine, but that was back before Work (tm) and School (tm) were a part of Life (tm), and I had nothing but time to dedicate to feeding the beast that was my gutwretching angst, screaming for expression and circulation with low readership. My mother also recently brought back a diary of my great grandfather's in which he had painstakenly written an entry for every day of the year without fail. Yes, 1954, a year marked by great events, as he told them. For example, on August 16th, the day the 1st issue of Sports Illustrated was published, my great grandfather remarks, "Virginia owes $15.14. Went to drug store, still have cold, sore throat". In your face, Samuel Pepys.


Jaaaaaaaa, Some Nonsense to Start

The Phone sex Thesaurus

DID YOU KNOW…that, according to my ex-landlord/former phone-sex worker, Canadian regulations prohibit explicit profanity even in such intimate telephone scenerios as “dirty office hooker and the big boss man”? That’s right: you can’t say c*&t on the tele, or c))k, or a**hole, or tw@. You can’t even say f#^% mI w*^m jui$y c)?t.

Of course, as many who have used such services will attest, there are women who throw caution to the winds and let their potty mouth spill over and flood the bathroom, but one should be aware that such pleasures taken from those fudge fests don’t conform to CFC regulations.

The following may serve an inspiration to those frustrated sex talk workers and learning lovers whose minds are overrun and vocabularies under-furnished. Cum on people, let’s get those creative juices flowing.


“I want your pink submarine to explore the wetness of my deep stormy ocean, and fire off some nuclear torpedoes”

“Saddle me up and ride me bareback all the way over steamy mountains, into Pleasure-ville, and right up to the door of the Orgasm saloon”

“Probe the deepest reaches of my space with your starship Enterprick”*

“Unleash your ferocious sexy beast on my quiet, unsuspecting community”

“Gas up the pink Cadillac and take a ride on my Hershey highway”

“I wanna make a fruit salad with your ripe plantain”

“R U ready 2 69 with me and my raspberry beret ?”#

Legend: * use may violate copyright law where trekkie porn rules the pond
#- to be used only by licenced Prince impersonator