squidbag

Michael Jackson: The Autopsy

According to this highly dubious source, the Discovery Channel is planning to air a dramatic re-enactment of Michael Jackson's autopsy.  This has spawned an outcry from people in the Jackson estate who are accusing the Discovery Channel of being exploitive and in poor taste, among other things, while also claiming that the Discovery Channel is attempting to "dupe the public into believing that this show will have serious medical value."

Where to begin?  I'll tell you, right off the bat, that I'm not interested in what you think, because a fair number of you I know are Jackson fans, and let your love of his music - even the later, crappy stuff - dominate your feelings about him.  I do think that anyone who allows themselves to believe that anything they see on the Discovery Channel has serious medical value should be caught and sterilized immediately.  Also, anyone who believes - as has been alleged that some will by the Jackson estate - that this is an actual photo of anything authentic is an idiot and deserves the pablum pumped down their brainstems by cable TV.  If you're a sucker who believes what you see on TV, then fuck you.

I think we're asking the wrong question in regards to the airing of this dramatization.  Is it exploitive, nasty, in poor taste, unprofessional, weird and wrong?  Most assuredly.  Is it unexpected?  Of course not.  I'm surprised it waited this long.  We are a world of ghouls and ambulance chasers, and this is the programming we lap up and treat like ambrosia.  What about inappropriate?  Is it inappropriate for cable television to dramatize the autopsy of the deceased King of Pop?  To sensationalize intimate details of Michael Jackson's life?  No, it is not.  Michael Jackson reached a point where he became a public commodity, a personality, a product.  He made the drama happen and he could have gone away at any time, but he kept feeding the drama.  This ugly little show will not be the last part of the drama - the drama will go on forever.  But the dramatization of an autopsy, when measured against, say, marrying Elvis' daughter, keeping a chimp, sleeping with young boys because you're Peter Pan, letting a filmmaker follow you around for eight months, dangling your kids out of a window, making your childhood abuse public, borrowing tens of millions of dollars, naming your kid "Blanket," or releasing this song seems pretty small, and only grows beyond its petty borders in our collective mind due to its relative immediacy and its presence on television.

If you don't want to see it, don't watch.  The world doesn't change because you love Michael Jackson.  Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go set my TiVo.

Making an Actual Difference

I'm not a big fan of much of what the Xmas season entails.  No new information here; the season lasts too long, I have unpleasant childhood crap splattered all over it, it is too commercial and religious for my tastes, and I have this lurking baseline issue with the fact that people wait for one special time of year to be decent to one another.

With the addition of my wife and kids to my life, however, the season is on a comeback.  I have made it my mission to redeem what parts of it I can on an annual basis, and try my damnedest to ignore the rest.  To that end, I have to push on the sides of my box here and there to see if I can't widen it a little bit.  Hence, caroling.  For two years in a row already.  From a guy who can only kind of sing, and who doesn't really like most carols, and who would really rather not deal with the widest cross-section of people.  I used to do doors for politicians, too.  It's only a little different.

There's still a financial element - this IS still America.  The group I've been caroling with is an unofficial subsection of Nashville in Harmony - my wife's group - and raises Christmas cash for the Fannie Battle Day Home in Nashville.  But the donation part is up front and strictly voluntary; if we show up on your lawn singing and you choose not to pay anything, we'll stand there in the cold and sing our collective ass off anyway.  It's a good group, lighthearted and funny, and there's usually a camera or two and dog with us, which helps my sense of fun.  I don't really know why that is.

Sunday night, then.  We're out caroling, and we stop at this house where two boys, one 12 or so, the other maybe 8 (?) answer the door and listen to a couple of songs.  Then, as we're wrapping it up, the older boy leaves and returns with an even yet still older boy - maybe 17 or 18.  He asks us if we won't come back and sing to his grandmother, who is ill.  We re-position ourselves around the now open bedroom window and sing "Silent Night."  The interior lights come on, and without belaying the point, the grandmother is very sick.  But she's also touched.  And enjoying her favorite carol, on request, being sung outside on the lawn by random group of strangers.

It's not often that I'm standing in a group being aware that I'm making a difference in someone's life, right this very minute.  Usually, the difference I feel I'm making is a small part of a long-term process. The immediacy of the moment was exactly what was happening for me, though.  A spine-tingling awareness that by going out and doing something I was initially ambivalent about, I improved someone's evening, and possibly their holiday season, and maybe their life, in a small but significant way.

Happy Holidays, everybody.

Freeze Dance

I had a perfect enjoyment of this, and it stars a friend of mine, Oliver. So watch and share.

Days with My Daughter

Since January, when I quit my job (and never looked back), I have been staying at home with my daughter, which had two stated goals; saving on daycare costs, which are considerable, and teaching her life/kindergarten skills, so she'll be ready in the fall of '11 when the time comes.  Some days are better than others, some more organized than others, but we always have an interesting time.  I think there ought to be some kind of recognition ceremony for calculating one's grocery bill in your head in the middle of the dairy aisle while someone sings "The Name Game" over and over again.  Surely, there will also be consequences for her having spent 9 to 10 hours a day with just me during this formative period.  Some recent highlights:

Having spent a sold sixteen minutes climbing into a large blue ZipLock Freezer bag (with a hole in it, and under my careful, undivided supervision): "Wow, this is really hard."

ME: Yeah, some people would have given up on it long ago.

ABBY: Why in the world would they do that?

ME: (quietly) Hell if I know.

ABBY: What?

ME: They would probably decide that it isn't worth it.

ABBY: It totally is.  I'm a spaceman now.

_______________________________________________________________________________

ABBY: I think I can hear my feet growing.

ME: You haven't taken anything today that should make that possible.

ABBY: Well, I hear something.

ME:  And that was your default guess?  That it's your feet growing?

ABBY: Well, they're always growing, and I was really listening that time.

ME: You can't hear your feet growing.  I hope.

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ABBY: Look!  I drew a baby square.

ME:  There are no other squares around it.  How do you know it's a baby square?

ABBY: It's so little.

ME: It could just be really far away, though.

ABBY: (brings paper right up to my face) What about now?

A Christmas Carnage

Eben woke from his overstuffed leather chair in the drafty library of his country home to find that the fire had gone out in the wee morning hours.  He arose swiftly, cracking his back and knees, and stiffly walked to the window to watch the falling snow in the last of the moonlight, mindful of the dream he had just had - a dream about Christmas Spirits.  Bah!  Humbug!  Blasted singing do-gooders flooding the streets and using the pagan holiday as an excuse for laziness and excessive behavior.  Eben had no tolerance for it and he - wait, what was that?

Silhouetted against the treeline was the figure of a man, shuffling through snow, dragging something.  Eben's dream came back to him in a cold shock down his spine, and he bolted to the study to grab his binoculars.  Racing back to the study window, he focused the binoculars only to find the face of Jake Marley, his long-dead business partner, slack and in a state of advanced decay, staring blankly back at him.  Marley dragged chains across the snow, impeding his already stilted progress, and his remaining eye lolled listlessly in the socket as he shambled toward the imposing manor home.  Eben dropped his binoculars with an expensive crash, and flew to the gun cabinet near the foyer door.  Fumbling with the key, he could hear a scraping against the study window, then a smash as the glass imploded, giving way.  A low, keening moan - Marley, damn his blackened soul - penetrated the house and gripped Eben's heart in an icy fist as he racked a round into his flintlock Baker rifle.

"Only a head shot will do."  Words from his apparently prophetic dream.  Eben put his back against the heavy cabinet, and sighted down the long hallway, making a small adjustment and steeling himself for what he was about to do.  Directly, Jake's mouldering frame came staggering down the hallway, and Eben put his sights right on Jake Marley's forehead, on the ridge just above where his eyebrows used to be.  Getting closer, now.  Eben took a deep breath, held it, and squeezed the trigger of the rifle.  Jake Marley's head exploded in a gout of brain matter and bits of skull, like a fresh egg dropped on a kitchen floor.  His body proceeded for one more step, then tumbled to the floor like a noisy bag of rags & chain.  The smell of rot and putrefaction filled the hallway, and made Eben want to vomit.

"You will be visited by three more." Again, the words from his dream echoing through his skull, stewing his rising panic into enraged fear - he'd be damned if he was going to be cowed in his own house by abominations and time out of joint - to hell with all of them, he thought, as he kicked Marley's unearthly remains out of his way and pounded down the cellar stairs in his nightcap and slippers looking for the axe he knew was down there.

One hour later, Eben resolutely sat in his now gloomy kitchen sipping fresh, hot coffee and eating salted pork.  A minimum of moonlight streamed in through the small portholes he'd left when he'd hacked his furniture to bits and barricaded the windows.  The body of Jacob Marley, chains and all, was wrapped in a heavy woolen blanket and pushed over to the side of the hallway.  Eleven different loaded firearms were laid out on the oak kitchen table, fully loaded and clean, ready to fire.  Jagers, pistols, and three other Bakers.  Three more of whatever Jake had become were coming, tonight.  Now he was glad he'd kept so much food in store instead of being convinced by that office layabout Cratchit to donate to the widows and orphans fund.  He would wait them out, these coming three.  Christmas Spirits, bah!  Bring them on.  One hell of a Christmas Eve this would be.  Humbug, hell and damnation!

HUGE Mattress Sale

"Yeah, so - I saw your sign out front by the curb, HUGE MATTRESS SALE there, and I came in for my HUGE mattress.  I'm looking for a really huge one, too - like Andre the Giant's mattress, like the Jack and the Beanstalk giant's mattress, a huge GiantPedic affair with a cushion top like a fuckin' couch on steroids, you hear me?  A massive, hulking thing that the Hulk might sleep on.  Make with the HUGE goddamn mattress right now, like the sign out front by the sidewalk says.  I'm looking for a really big huge mattress, something so big that it makes an NFL linebacker sleepy just being around it, a thing with it's own soporific field that extends out six feet in every direction and negates snooze alarms and puts a chiropractor out of a job every five seconds.  I want a big huge fucking mattress that I can set a glass of wine on and grease wrestle six rodeo clowns and if we knock the wine over, we won't notice 'cause this bastard is so fucking huge we don't even mosey over there.  Make with the huge mattress, shopkeep - a mattress so big Godzilla would bed down for the night on it and still have room for a commemorative Mothra throw pillow.  From Toho.  Big enough for a Banksy installation.  I need, really, a mattress big enough that I can't see the curve of the Earth over this thing, it's got smaller mattresses orbiting all around it, and the search party we sent out six weeks ago with the Indian guide got lost and built a fucking casino on this thing.  A mattress with mineral rights and a zip code.  You could write on an envelope: ME, c/o The Huge Mattress, and the owls and postmen would know where to find me.  I'm looking to rent out ad space on this damn thing - This Space for Rent, Post No Bills, yeah?  Look, here's what I'm looking to do with this big huge fucking mattress you got on the sign; I got some troubles with my house and bank, right?  They're gonna foreclose on me and condemn the place 'cause of these economy bastards, so I figure I throw this huge motherfucker of a mattress directly over my goddamn house and when they come around with their wrecking ball?  It just bounces right off!  Then, then, I throw the biggest slumber party you and yours have ever heard of, and we stick somebody's underwear in the fridge and do each other's hair, yeah?  French braids or whatever.  I been talking awhile here, and I don't see no huge mattress being airlifted out of the back like a mattress phoenix which blocks out the sun; I need a huge mattress, okay?  Something Russians would defend, a mattress you'd have to invade with a plan and supply lines, a mattress that provokes a range war.  A Goliath mattress that's so huge, it can only be adequately measured by a sanctioned team of German and British scientists.  A mattress with a black hole in the middle, a legendary mattress, a huge monolith of a thing that accelerates evolution.  Something Her Highness the Princess wouldn't feel fuckin' shit through, 'cause there ain't no pea anywhere could measure up.  The Green Giant could be underneath, she'd never know, that's the kind of Titanically huge I'm talking about.  A mattress so freaking huge people will swear it's a fake, a hoax, impossible, that aliens did it years ago, that the Freemasons must be involved.  A God sized mattress.  A mattress with a sand trap and a water hazard.  A huge postage stamp country mattress that makes the Vatican weep.  Huge like Yao Ming or Ron Jeremy.  Makes Richie fuckin' Rich commit a deadly sin huge.  Like I could keep the trade deficit with China in it.  Redefines HUGE.  You understand me?  Hello?"

Mallday

Stones River Mall in Murfreesboro has a cool play place in the middle of it for pre-K people, and I have one of those, and I wanted to read a little, have some lunch, and write a postcard to my grandmother. And if you're the sort of person who gives shit to guy - who writes his grandmother once a week - just because he went to a fucking mall, then I invite you to put some comments in the comments field that will push down some of the crazy shit that's over there now!  Yeah!

A shopping mall should be the most generic experience ever - it is, essentially, a closed in outdoor space. However, much in the way that some sports arenas are more symmetrical than others, (as it says in the Book of Matthew, 10:48) malls seem to generate their own personalities, and in the case of most, this is not a good thing.  Stones River is no exception.  It's not a dying mall, which would make it a member of classic genre and give it some retro credibility, no - it's a desperate mall, filled with the clammy sweat of commerce junkies and airborne spores of quiet wishing for crowds that float from the bodies of the clerks in the reconditioned air.  The shoppers are too sparse to congregate and form any kind of real crowd, and so everyone is individually on display, from the angry vet ordering fries to the guy reading a folded paperback on his lunch break from Unflattering Shirt Retail Emporium.

The other parents are worth noting, with the typical child abusers on display, practicing phone negligence from the steering wheel to the playground when not actively yanking tiny arms from sockets and yelling at their offspring for falling down or pretending stuff on the way to the car.  Like YOU wouldn't pretend to be somewhere else if you had you for a mom.  One woman has gone on and on about her Up With Jesus Experience while three other skinny, bored moms struggle to concentrate - the children she's ignoring now will get her attention with drugs and fucking years from now, and only Jesus will answer her calls.  That's the fantasy, of course.

Weird, floppy mutant strains of giant ferns and spinach lurk in mammoth fake terracotta urns and flank the entrances, soda machines, and greasy teenagers, who seem largely unchanged, with the exception of music delivery devices, since 1993.  The desperation infuses everything, from the stressed voice of the non-Greek, prison tattooed food guy hawking chicken, "Hey buddy, how are you?  Try chicken?"  (nobody does) to the pathetic half-racks of ceiling hung Christmas lights that even look wrong to a four year old.  "White Christmas" is crooned into a slur by some half-wit studio hack, and played as the soundtrack to Cartoon Network's League of Super Evil on the flatscreen, which somehow makes both more entertaining.

But my daughter was happy.  And she made a friend, and we solved a ladybug puzzle together.  So it was ultimately worth it to brave the mall.  For now.

Squidbag's Holiday Survival Tips

I hate Christmas, blah fucking blah, we go over this every year.  No new information.  Except for this: I have recently had a conversation with my son in which I confessed that I probably wouldn't tolerate this holiday if it weren't for my kids, and that I do get genuine love and enjoyment out of watching them do Christmas stuff, and that their very presence on Earth is slowly redeeming the yuletide.  He found this to be positive and heartwarming.  Mostly, though, I hate the stuff, and here's some things I do to avoid instanity (instantity=instant + insanity).

If you have grown weary of a Christmas song - and you have - sing it at the top of your lungs and with some children.  Go all lounge singer on it, like Bill Murray in early SNL.  Rub some funk on it.  Silly it up, make new & better, less socially acceptable lyrics.  Laughing will ensue, and if it doesn't, you're doing it wrong.  Scream it aggressively.  Your sanity may depend on you embracing and reclaiming the song and making it fun again - picture an angry, spitting Christmas elf with a sharpened candy cane shiv.  He's coming at you, and the only way to protect yourself is run forward and hug his arms to his sides, pinning him.  It's like that.

Don't be afraid to be a complete prick.  This holiday shit's been out now since before Halloween, and it's unreasonable to expect people to be nice to each other for a full quarter of the year, so fuck it.  Shove someone out of your way and bonk 'em on the head with a roll of wrapping paper on your way by.  You've got places to be for Baby Christ's sake.  If they complain, scream "FAH-LA-LA-LA-LA, FAH-LA-LA-LA!!!" at them.  It works.  Make sure to wear goofy antlers or a stupid red hat while doing this.

Bell ringers:  "Sorry, I'm allergic to bells."  In this society, people don't know whether you're serious or not.  People are allergic to everything now from wheat to peanuts to canola to gluten to air, and they'll swear they saw a Learning Channel documentary about bellinitis.  "I can't count when there are bells ringing" isn't bad either.  Running past while incoherently screaming is always an option, and works on Girl Scouts and cheerleaders in the Spring, too.  Bottom line - I don't give money to churches, or bell-ringing door blockers who make too much noise at me.  Merry fucking Christmas.  At least the Girl Scouts have a product I actually want.  And some dignity.

Those signs exhorting you to "Keep Christ in Christmas" have got to fucking go, so steal them.  I've got two of those bastards in my trunk right now.  If you're uncomfortable with theft, simply vandalize them.  Step up and stomp it flat, or if you can get a good angle, kick it like an assailant's ball sac.  Then stand there on the lawn, glare at the house and dare that divinity-sweet conservative old couple to come out and say something.  Or, or, carry some stickers for covering "Christmas."  "Church" is a nice substitute.  If you prefer the surreal, be prepared to cover "Christ" with "Superman," "Papa Smurf," "Lesbians," "Booze," or "Allah."  Shit, those aren't bad suggestions for regular daily life, either.  If you're uncomfortable with vandalism, I don't really know why you're reading this.

A very wise man, Sid Millson, once told me that he always shakes hands with Santa, because "you never know when it might be the real one."  This was over breakfast one morning when I was already old enough to drive and hold down a job, and yet - it sticks with me.  So I do this, whenever it's practical.  I'm not busting to the front of the photo line at the mall to pump the jolly old elf's hand and mutter "I love your work," but I do approach and shake the hand of any Santa I see out walking, and I encourage my children to do likewise.  Keeps things interesting.  Of course, I also do this for Elvis impersonators and anyone in a mascot costume the whole rest of the year.

Carry a can of flocking.  Flock away.  Spray "FLOCK YOU" on a nativity scene.  Flock a bell-ringer.  Or a cop, if you're really out there one night.  Flock stuff totally at random.  Spray "Flock the Man" on a big-ass window somewhere.  Flock "Just Married" on people's vehicles.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to start pricing trees.