Thursday, August 17, 2006

The Hick on The Hood

Looking for a place to live is a bitch. For the last couple of weeks, MG and I have been up to our pearlys in this moving shit. Both of us up late at night with our laptops, alternately switching from Craigs List to Google Maps: "Where the fuck is Ditmas?" "Hell if I know... Wait. There it is. Shit. Are there even trains out there?" The more we look, the more we realize we're fucked unless we want to live in Bed-Stuy, Bushwick, East New York, Crown Heights... Any of the neighborhoods otherwise known as The Hood.

What is it about The Hood? My feelings on the subject are complicated. A mixture of fear, ignorance, and guilt, I guess. I'm no urban anthropologist, but it seems to me that the more a bunch of Park Slope rejects like myself move into traditionally working poor neighborhoods, the more landlords see dollar signs in their eyes and the more rents go up. And as those rents increase, I wonder where do these working poor (who have suddenly been priced out of what can be still be considered blighted neighborhoods) go to live? Uh... I don't know. All I know is I want a coffee shop, a Brooklyn Industries, and someone to pick up all this fucking garbage. NOW!

Also, (ouch) I'm scared of The Hood. I'm not sure why. Maybe it was my rural Texas upbringing (I didn't shake hands with a black person until I was 17 - not out of choice, I just never met a black person until I got to college); maybe it was my year of living dangerously in the Tenderloin in San Francisco (smoked so much crack I thought my head was gonna fall off); maybe I'm just an idiot. Who knows? I'm too old and too fucking slow to do the hard math that answering that kind of question would entail. Suffice it to say, The Hood scares me.

But, goddam, have you seen some of these apartments? Shit, once they get the poor people moved out, they do a regular fucking overhaul. New everything: new hardwood floors, fixtures, appliances. Want a garden? No problem. What's the most you want to pay for two bedrooms in an historic brownstone? $1200 you say? Welcome to the neighborhood. "Shit, honey, let's get this place cleaned up! We got white folk coming!" I feel like a douchebag for even getting off the train in these neighborhoods. Meeting a realtor on the street and walking around looking at places that most of the people around me still could have afforded five years ago when it was an unrenovated shithole is damn near unbearable. What with my faggy plastic glasses and messenger bag, I couldn't be more obvious. More yupped-out vanilla and Dial-soap fucking WHITE. Fear and guilt. Wicked combo. Still, those floors are beautiful and is that mahogany on the mantle...

Another reason for me to not want to live in The Hood is the fucking retard hipster whiteys who already live in these fucking neighborhoods who wear their willingness to pretend they're not exploiting the shit out of the racism inherent in a dynamic like gentrification like it's some badge of fucking honor. "Don't fucking move here, man. There's already too many of you people. Keep it real, man! For the real people!" What? Fuck you, clowns. You're just as guilty as any of us for the rents going up and Starbucks moving in. Fucking landlords don't care if you're in some band or you're an artist or an anarchist or whatever the fuck you wanna call yourself. They only know one thing - you'll pay more than the last people who lived there. A lot more. And when you're gone, the people behind you will pay even more than that...

I guess I'm just an asshole. I don't want to be. I mean, I don't want a bunch of poor people to get priced out of their neighborhoods. But what about my poor ass? I can't afford the fucking Slope anymore, that's for sure. Where am I supposed to go? Bay Ridge? Bensonhurst? Coney fucking Island? Fuck it. Maybe I should just go live in the South Slope, Sunset Park, someplace where the music has an accordion and the tortillas are fresh, somewhere where everybody's a recent arrival... I'm down with brown... Ay, guey...

Friday, August 11, 2006

These Bombs Suck


(Photo: Mohamed Azakir/Reuters)

Can somebody please get Israel some bigger, more destructive bombs? Clearly the ones they're using now aren't getting the job done...

Monday, August 07, 2006

Genius...

Have you ever fucked a girl so hard...

Big ups to Toilet Paper for the funniest post I've seen in a really long time...

Wow.

DEATH FROM ABOVE 1979

R.I.P.
and
thanks for the best fucking concert t-shirt I own...

I'm Gonna Go to Florida... and SHOOT SOMEBODY

Being a native Texan, shooting shit is nothing new to me. Blowing away critters great and small provided me with no small amount of entertainment throughout my formative years, and I remember with much fondness the many times I took aim at one or another of God's unsuspecting creatures, drawing a perfect bead on a furry head before I pulled the trigger and turned the happy bunny/fox/gopher/squirrel/bird into a fine pink mist. However, due to a set of ridiculous and, as far as I was concerned, HIPPY FAGGOT murder laws, I did always stop just short of shooting a human being. No matter what kind of asshole he/she was.
Now, with Florida's new self-defense laws, I see a way to realize my lifelong dream of shooting some motherfucker who REALLY DESERVES IT. It'll be just like that movie with Ice-T and Rutger Hauer 'cept I'm gonna have to make sure the homeless rap star I get to play the Ice-T part threatens me (or at least stiffs me on a blowjob) 'fore I blast him in the face...

teens so horny

Sexual lyrics prompt teens to have sex

Also cited as leading causes of teenage sex were tits, ass, and liquor...

Search: AOL + Nuts in the Mouth + Dead Bitches

AOL posted a buncha their users searches on-line and one of the users was apparently some dude who was very curious about what would pop up when you type the words "how to kill your wife" into the search engine. I decided the poor bastard was being hung out to dry -- who the hell knows what he was searching for? Maybe he heard some shit about a website, maybe he's researching a book, hell, maybe he was just fucking bored at work and wanted to know what would come up if you typed "how to kill your wife" into the AOL search engine... Whatever the hell he was doing, God forbid the day The Main Cop gets a chance to start investigating every time somebody out there types something fucked up into a search engine.

As a test to see how on his toes Big Brother actually was (and because I'm at work and bored out of my fucking mind), I typed in a buncha fucked-up shit myself into the Google search engine -- here's what I learned:

Kill My Wife -- a website for killmywife.com (not sure what the fuck I was looking at, but I didn't see any dead old ladies); a coupla joke websites; and a link to an old episode of Kojak. Shit, I can hear the Feds knocking at the door now...

Dead Bitches Everywhere -- a link to a site from somebody called Rich Little Poor Girl and Snoop Dogg

Chopped-up Bitches -- I accidentally typed in "chopped up bitces" and Google was kind enough to ask, "Did you mean chopped up bitches?" Goddam, I love the Internet...

Kill Everybody In A Fiery Blaze of Terroristic Fucking Glory -- Instapundit.com??? Shit, I felt fucked up just typing that shit in... I don't EVEN wanna know what's on Instapundit.com...

Dead Nekkid Little Kids -- Nada. Figure that's gotta be the jackpot, right? Even when I hit Images, I didn't get anything (and, believe me, my SafeSearch is OFF)...

The point is that trying to figure out what some asshole has in mind by reading his search logs is FUCKING RETARDED. Pure and simple. Granted, most people in the course of their day aren't gonna type in Kill My Wife fifty fucking times, but just cuz somebody did doesn't mean the motherfucker's actually looking to kill somebody...

Then again, it sure would be funny if the law did start reading that shit and decided to swoop in, you know looking for the bastard son of Osama Bin Laden and Richard Speck, only to find some bored 12-year-old with his Dad's AOL password...