** Disclaimer: Ranting includes all of the rampant cussing, screaming, and blatant idiocy that you'd expect of something using that namesake. Enjoy! **

Long Live the Queen!!!

(9/14/06) - Ann Richards is dead I found out yesterday. What a turning point. Not only in Texas government but for the people our democracy supposedly represents. A common, real person was elected to a proper position of power through her own merit after living a life we can recognize (drinking and speaking our mind - the latter of which is the greatest sin). Those frat boys (former and current) would be struck dead by the type of God they contemplate to be real for such blasphemy to elect such a person as George W. Bush to the position of Governor if they would stop the shortcuts to thinking.

This is one of the few times that you will ever hear me say something in this tone:

Bless Ann Richards. Bless the person she was.

And God Damn those who speak with fake Texas accents, win Republican nominations through impotent spinster muckrackers, have never worked a day in their life, skip out on duty as pathetic state air national guardsmen, and have the audacity to speak to "our" nation on the five year anniversary of September 11th and mention the word Iraq or anything when the inescabable reality is that the events of that day are the sole excuse to spy on our fellow citizens without warrant, start illegal torture programs in illegal prisons, disregard the Geneva Conventions, tell the UN to go fuck itself and overthrow sovereign nations.

Let's remember Bill Hicks: JFK. Dead. Jesus. Dead. Reagan. Shot. Wounded. Cancer 15 times. He still walks the Earth. - You really think "God" "runs" things?"

-T$

Ya'll Seen Any Shit Wrapped in Skin Running Around?

(7/29/06) - man, o, man! i just went to see "Nacho Libre" with josh and jackie at the cheap movie theatre largely so we could go sit in air conditioning for two hours. when we came out, some shit wrapped in skin had stolen the seat off of the bike i just bough to replace the bike that was just stolen that i bought from a crackhead in austin for ten measely dollars. what the fuck?!

hey but that's okay. i'll rise above and steal someone else's shit to replace mine. hell! it could be mine. i'm wondering which little crappy chicago garden around my place is bedded with the six bags of soggy sand covered in soot that got stolen outta the bed of my truck. i hope a sturdy asspineapple tree grows from it and consumes their fucking scum larvae.

but i'm not disheartend by the actions of the low lifes running around stealing the most random things on the streets i haunt because of the professional courtesy of my peers.

people like good old Jonathon at the wonderful newspaper The Chicago Dispatcher who refused to return my phone calls for two weeks only to finally get caught on the line a day before i was gonna drive down there and corner the guy. although i was disappointed to hear that he hired some blonde with big boobies over me, i was sure jonboy was not hiring this man over me strictly due to sexual attraction.

but what particularly peaked my respects was that they would still publish my article I'd submitted for my application in may and not respond to my emails as to my payment's whereabouts and let it show up a month and a half after the newspaper used my content.

i felt so proud as i cashed that $25 and walked straight into the nearest bar, slapped down my money and said, "pabst blue ribbon and a shot of your absolute cheapest whiskey!" i was glowing.

the next week when i got a note from my bank charging me a $6 bounce fee along with the check stamped "unpayable", i knew how proud my mother would be to hear that the chicago dispatcher knew i write articles about handicapped accessible taxi cab vendors operating out of a bus refurbishment warehouse eight gallons of gas away from my apartment not for money, but because my payment is knowing i've brought enlightenment to some barely literate albanian immigrant while he relieves himself of 20 white castle slyders. that's why the editor knew he was unworthy to dialogue with me when i wrote him to ask why my fucking month and a half late check for twenty-five pathetic dollars bounced and if they intended to reimburse me because i didn't bother doing the work to pay chase bank $6.

professional courtesy is what makes bicycle seat theives irrelevant to my outlook on humanity. it's the reason i respect the bvi beacon's editor for failing to respond to five messages on the three-month anniversary of my interview.

thank you all. i'm gonna go watch GG Allin play with his rock n roll sacrament now.

-T$

Absofuckinglutely Nothing to Report

(6/14/06) - sorry so dull. hey at least you're working.

nope. not full time. i actually thought i was gonna get fired yesterday. i don't know how i'd feel about that if it happened. i'd immidiately book the next flight to the sun soaked paradise of cardiff.

there's four main folks. one just quit. one has shingles and is in the hospital. i don't work until saturday. ???? i'd called for three days in a row asking when the next shift was with no response so i showed up and the owner is all like, "hold on until the customers are gone. i need to talk to you."

not fired but underemployed yet again.

some cocksucker emailed me yesterday asking if i have any "short-format work" to show. i'm sorry to admit. i have no fucking clue what that means. i sent him links to some short clips of my video editing stuff and he emails me back today saying, "yeah. you already sent me those. i'll take that as a no. good luck."

gee thanks. tell you from me to go fuck yourself for being so clear.

i think seung-a has been calling all day and i've been too uninspired to even get out of bed to pick up the phone. i'm sorry but goddamn do i hate being this depressed. i'm so depressed i can barely be bothered to be fucking depressed. i don't think i've really eaten in three days. fuck am i bored.

chi-town is alright i suppose. i don't see much of it. i hate being like this. i think this happens once every 12 years or so where i can't even function anymore. think i was five when i first thought to try and kill myself. is that dysfunctional? yep. probably. i know what i need though. it's not meds or a shrink. it's a fucking reason to do anything. like a fucking reason to get up and tie my shoes.

anyhow. on that cheery not i'm gonna boil my last two eggs. cook my juevos and i guess i should call my wife back and try and tell her something other than i'm barely employed, yet again rejected, the peace corps turned me down and having too much with self-pity to get off my hardwood floor even if the fucker was engulfed in flames.

piss in your boss's file drawer for me.

later,

First Nephew Makes Me Feel Strongerest

(3/16/06) - Man, oh, man I don't really even know what to say about THIS ONE except that this well-spoken, young genius surely has a bright future ahead of him because we all live in that land of opportunity where you, me and Jim Beam can be president. I only regret the Houston Chronicle didn't publish his rockin' fuckin' article about the Pope. Oh, and that The Weekend Today Show made poor little PB (you know like PBJ jelly donut all over her face dude!) get up at 6:15am on a Saturday. I'm like totally sorry about that dude. It'd been more fair if they'd asked your PR person to do it for you since you don't need any credentials except your royal name to secure your future. But regardless, kick ass interview Pto theB!

In all seriousness though, writing an analysis of this letter to the Houston Chronicle by Pierce Bush would probably cause my head to explode. Just read it for yourself:

What kind of message is being sent to the American people when political leaders from both parties are trying to halt a transaction that would hand over London-owned American port operations to an Arab-owned company?
The message is both ignorant and offensive.
Leaders are trying to block the transaction because they claim the deal raises serious questions regarding the safety and security of our homeland. The only serious question this proposal raises for me is how racially prejudiced is Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and the others who are trying to block the deal?
Do these people honestly believe that a company should be discriminated against simply because it is owned by Arabs? This company has a proven safety record and at the same time is owned by a country that is a loyal partner in our war against terror.
If these leaders believe that all Arabs pose a potential security threat, then we truly have not moved that far away from racism. I am deeply saddened by our ignorant lack of progress.

-T$

I say, "Hey man, nice shot!"

(2/14/06) - Yeah Hallmark Day! I made my girlfriend a picture frame of me when I was a kid and wrote "Pink Pig" on it, but that's not the highlight this week!

I just about fell over laughing in front of the gangsta blood thug staff at Hi-Fi Video when they switched on the news to, "The Vice President's office has made no comment on Cheney's accidental shooting of 78-year-old Harry Whittington."

No shit! He shot him in the fucking face. What? Did he not have his orange helmet on so you thought his saggy cheeks and gray hair looked like a quail. Well, anyone could make that mistake provided they're in the advanced stages of glaucoma and it's night time.

I know I'm getting my hopes up here, just like when Jerry Falwell looked like he was gonna kick the bucket last year and I figured Satan was lonely, but when I heard the news today that Whittington had a heart attack due to a pellet irritating his heart I got a hard on. I know it's bad to hope for someone's death when you haven't learned enough about them to wish for it, but think about it! How on earth can they justify letting Cheney off the hook for manslaughter? Don't get me wrong. I'm sure it will happen if this Whittington guy ends up dead and this administration isn't too concerned on their grade card for justification, but there's just no way Cheney could get around the fact that he is guilty of manslaughter.

I mean war for profit is one thing easy enough to swallow, but blasting a member of the AARP crowd with a shotgun cause you thought he was a quail. Maybe they can pass it off as defending us against avian flu. We'll have to wait and see.

-T$

Guns, Fart Jokes, & Relocation

(12/8/05) - I wrote a friend in New Scotland I hadn't heard from in a long time. The basic message was, "I think I've finally gone completely batshit."

This is a condition where you might suppose that imaginary friends would appear in the form of teddy bears that pick up random telephone conversations and incessantly relate them to you without regard to the fact that you're attempting to shower, sleep, or dream of a world outside of your dingy apartment which you haven't escaped for a week and can no longer sublet due to the rug being bleached white in pretty spirals from wall to wall after that freak out one night at 4am because maggots wouldn't stop crawling through the carpet after 12 relentless hours of picking them up and flushing them down the toilet even though I didn't have any food in the apartment and nothing spilt on the floor for them to be feasting off of. But it's not like that at all.

15 months. 250 applications. Not one single response from any job. From Sitka, Alaska to Greenville, South Carolina. From bus boy at a shitty cafe' to a decent reporter job to shooting video at weddings with my own equipment. Truck dead. Dog gone. Had to move out of house because roommate strangled me for no reason and I lived in an enclosed porch infested with cockroaches and mosquitos where a bed didn't fit so I'd have to say, "I sleep there baby!" while pointing to a Wal-Mart carpet with a blanket on the floor for the one girl nice enough to bang me this last year.

The batshitness seems to manifest itself in chain smoking and a heavy habit of staring at walls for hours on end going, "I think I must not actually exist." So I go outside and ask someone the time. "Good. Not invisible." Too bad actually because then I could just move into a high school girl's locker room, but i digress.

Moving to Chicago

- Why? Why the fuck not?

I got back from there recently from visiting the German Beef Initiative's old drummer and liked enough. So it looks like GBI will rise again. An aside: ZULEMA! MOVE TO CHICAGO!

An odd thing though during my visit to Illinois. I have traveled quite extensively with my whammy screw, double octave Strat that I love. No one in Texas, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Britain, Ireland or Finland ever got confused as to what was in that rectangular case clearly embossed: Fender.

But to my surprise, not once, not twice, but on three different occasions was I asked, "What type of rifle/gun is this sir?" The last one to ask me was lovely Helen, the American Airlines attendant at Chicago's O'Hare airport.

I was already slightly pissed off because I showed up to check in for a 12:38pm flight at 12pm on the dot and was told, "Sir, you'll have to take another flight. You must check in a full 40 minutes before departure with baggage." Fuck me runnin' daddy. I used to get away with coming home at 12:55 when I told my folks I'd be home 12ish, but let's move on.

After paying the $25 anal rape fee to get the next flight, Helen asked the question yet again. "Sir is this a rifle?"

I made a perplexed face. That was all.

"Sir! It was only a question!"

"I know. I'm not offended. I'm just surprised. I'm from Texas and've never been asked that before. Everybody knows what it is."

After the bitchy remark about people always traveling with guns there, I said, "Maybe we're just more refined in Texas." She was not amused in spite of the fact that I was trying to de-cuntify here attitude. She didn't even bother to ask the bog standard dumbass "is there a bomb, did you pack this, has it been with you the whole time" bullshit.

But that leads me to a lovely open letter I discovered this evening while reading articles on Cathars and Tunguska tonight while contemplating if I should go to the bar on the one night I could get really fucked up even though there's freezing rain coming down.

The first time I laid eyes on it I was at my pop's house with my girlfriend. She fell asleep on the couch and my dad said, "You should check out this blue collar thing." He sticks in the DVD and the retarded faggotry begins.

Give me a break! If this is comedy, then I guess I've never laughed. It was worse than my idiot childhood friend in Oklahoma that while watching television (at the age of twelve) every single female appearing on the screen from a detergent commercial to Cheeta-Ra on Thundercats, "Man, would you fuck her?! Oh, dude! Would you fuck that? Man, I'd fuck the shit outta her!"

Okay. I would fuck Cheeta-Ra, but that's not the point here. The Blue Collar comedy crap (lead by a guy who's career I thought had seen its 15 minutes: Jeff Foxworthy) is abysmal trite. It's like Beavis & Butthead only not a caricature making fun of our culture and stupidity, but a celebration of anti-intellectualism and prejudice reinforcing the POVs of those zombie walkers and vacuum assholes without the courage to live a life they desire and long to oppress the existence of anyone/anything not self-sentenced to the same fate - all told through the bad jokes I heard on the playground in Oklahoma and Texas as a kid.

The thing spurring my thoughts back to that horrid night where dad thought I would be amused hearing Ron White talk about Texas getting an express lane for execution (Oh, yeah! We got our 1,000th state-sanctioned murder since reinstatement. Can anybody say Fuckaire?!), was an open letter by David Cross to Larry the Cable Guy.

Thank god not everyone has been completely overtaken by the starring-at-walls disease and have some passion to acknowledge the truth.

Zippo time.

-T$

Storms

(9/23/05) - Whether or not hurricane Rita hits our Gulf Coast, the storm of 14,000 refugees, along with the 30,000 returning students to UT and the couple thousand folks here for the Austin City Limits festival has bitch slapped us Austinites like Pootie Tang. Two of my friends have already had their trucks totalled by crazed drivers in the last three weeks alone.

I had to hide out at the apartment all day waiting for the Time Warner cable guy "Who'll be there sometime between 12 and 5." After showing up to do the ten minutes worth of work at 4:40pm, I drove the quarter mile back to my old place to see utter pandaemonium. At the tiny little yellow store across the street from Hoover's is a line stretching out into the street for gasoline. Last night when I went to get a few things from Fiesta, you'd swear the Germans were about to invade. The water isle was barren. The canned goods must've been picked clean by church groups.

I still seem a little fevery from doing hurricane Katrina work at the Astrodome, but I'll volunteer to help out here too. My one thing to suggest to poor George though is: offer EVERYONE who fled disaster areas and those who live in areas taking in evacuees/refugees free inoculations for Hepatitus and the rest of the nasties that can be prevented. Try doing something before the accident please.

-T$

Cable TV Invades the Mind

(8/15/05) - Me and the random girl had ill feelings about every last thing around us. We figured, "Why not rob the aquarium and take them out to the coast."

The lionfish, hammerheads and Gus3 Cairn Terrier were loaded into our hijacked milk truck as we roared out of town. Just one more stop to get back the money owed us by some random stranger. How could we've known Irish mobsters were hiding in the basement?

The fishies didn't make it and I thought we were gonners too. There'd be no need for violence if there was going to be any directed at me and the girl. We just wanted everyone dead and to leave town. Sorry if we'd never bought into those sour images love in A Christmas Story

We were moved. We waited. They fed us cigarettes and we could hear waves through the concrete walls.

The mobsters put us to work removing pirate's treasure in a nearby cavern. Everyone was happy. It seemed we'd escaped the bad people we were before and found a new beginning along with the means to start over.

The last of the treasure was out of the cavern and we'd all collect our cuts. But just before a celebration exploded on the beach, a fleet of limousines rolled up. Lawyers and a task force jumped in all our faces. Me. The girl. The Irish mobsters. Even Gus3.

"Thank you for participating in Fox's Fugitives Get a Fresh Start Island".

Our new beginning had been a reality TV show! Lawyers from the future traveled back in time to this event in our lives to document and exploit it. The treasure was to be repossessed, the footage to compete with Who's My Baby's Daddy and us to be sent back to the previous miserable state of affairs.

I bet they'll cut out me giving them the finger as they drove off.

-T$