Robert Buscemi

"Whence the Googling? ... Seven Reflections on the Internet"

2010-12-26T18:17:00.000-08:00

(This piece appears in print in the Winter 2010/2011 issue of RE:COM magazine.)

1) FACT: The rise in digital music, deep-discount online book-buying, and the Kindle has left us with only 20% of the record-store and book-store employees there were a mere decade ago. As such, each has to be five times the prick to maintain the quantity of customer-facing smugness and snobbery we've come to expect.

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2) The internet has shrunk the world. But it's also INFLATED the world. Also, the internet is turning the world into a spongier, swampier, "stickier" place. And why is there no internet in the MIDDLE of the world? What IS in the middle of the world? People? Pulp? Opposite-beings with their organs on the outside? A chipmunk city?

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3) The word "technology" has four constituent parts:

1) "Te" comes from the Greek word for chicken nugget,

2) "chno" is Slovak for a rural, thick-ankled bumpkin,

3) that GD "L" .. WTF is THAT? I haven't a clue.... and then finally ...

4) "ogy," which is of course Aramaic for squirrel fucker.

So ... what is this mysteriously "L"d, thick-ankled chicken-nugget bumpkin squirrel fucker that has o'ertaken our lives?

I for one hate it.

I for one want to go back to hunting and gathering and the more reasonable 30-year life span, with lots of lion attacks and rabid beavers infecting and culling our feebs. At least you could concentrate for five minutes.

Because the Internet is freak-ducking-diculous, right? It's ruined all personal calm and peace and focus and introspection. Reading books is now laughably impossible ("Call me Ish--" PING! OMG I HAVE TO READ THAT TEXT SOME IDIOT JUST SENT ME!).

This one guy and I have been poking each other on Facebook daily for like TWO YEARS NOW. This is a GUY, mind you. Do you know how old I am, that I'm "poking" a male friend?

And I have a freaking MASTER'S degree.

What was I saying again?

* sound of desktop computer being thrown through a closed window then crashing down a rocky bluff *

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4) Twitter should raise its character limit so I can Tweet this:

"Remember when a bird flew into Fabio's face while he was riding a roller coaster? If I recall, the bird broke the man's nose and drew blood. Wasn't it at King's Island amusement park in Ohio? How perfect was life right then? I believe the bird died. But come on -- that bird was a hero. You ate a chicken recently, and we all got far less out of YOUR bird than the one who gave his life to deflate 'Flabio.' (That's my nickname for him.)"

* bird song *

(Did you follow that the bird song right there echoes both the sound of a "Tweet" AND the bird that died in the story? You did NOT. Don't lie to me. Well guess what, it ALSO refers to a THIRD thing -- that I personally am the canary in the Internet coal mine, and that I've died spiritually. But that's WAY too advanced for you to have gotten. I'm just that far ahead of you.)

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5) "Brick-and-mortar" is a weird expression. It's both too long and too short. It's longer than necessary to convey that "brick" stores are being replaced by e-commerce. I mean come on -- we got that concept with just "brick." But "brick-and-mortar" is too SHORT if you're trying to list all the things that make up a physical store: "Brick and mortar and bolts and concrete and a foundation and doors and windows and an electrical system and a bathroom and a counter and nails and pictures and floors and clerks and ..." etc. You get the idea.

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6) Commentators (I always think "common taters") lament that "virtual" relationships are replacing "actual" ones. But they don't remember that face-to-face interactions were often excruciatingly unpleasant. You couldn't screen your calls or hit "end call" or log off or stop chatting and claim your service had gotten interrupted. You had to shout "LATE FOR A HAIRCUT APPOINTMENT!" and sprint away. And I barely have any hair anymore, so that sell would be that much less convincing now. My point: THANK YOU, Internet, for giving me more ways to end unwanted interactions abruptly.

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7) Remember that weird baby who danced to that "Oogachaka" song who was all over the internet? He caught on fire and died. I'm sorry, but he totally did.

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* camera pans back to reveal I've been saying all this while sitting in a tree, and you suddenly see a giraffe very gently biting one of my ears. *

7 Ways to Score BIG at Your Next Comedy Fest!

2010-09-17T09:50:00.000-07:00

This piece appears in print in the fall 2010 inaugural issue of RE:COM magazine.

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LA-by-way-of-Chicago comic Robert Buscemi was named 2009's "Best Stand-Up" by the Chicago Reader newspaper, just released a stand-up CD ("Palpable") on the Rooftop Productions label, and has performed at the Rooftop Aspen Comedy Fest, Chicago Improv Fest (twice), the DC Comedy Fest, and Snubfest (where he twice won "Best Solo Act").

7 Can't-Miss Festival Strategies for Comedians:

1) Wear one of those costumes onstage where it looks like you're a small person riding an ostrich. Those are HILARIOUS! (The secret to this costume's illusion: YOUR legs are really the OSTRICH'S legs! Oh MAN is it great!)

2) When schmoozing, NEVER buck prevailing opinion. If you hear someone trash a fellow comic, PILE ON, even if you've never met the victim, or even if it's your best friend (note to self: DROP THE DRIP!). "Mean" brownie points are special, and count quadruple. Kindness, discretion, loyalty and integrity lead straight to doom. Instead, be a cool kid. Deceive, flatter, wheedle, blow smoke, laugh falsely, smile big, and cajole. Remember: This is POLITICS, baby. This is HIGH SCHOOL.

3) When a rival's onstage, laugh uncontrollably at some SET-UP (for example: "Yeah, my sister used to iron her hair ..."). Snort rudely, snot, cry, and struggle for composure for the duration of that comedian's set. You'll TANK the bastard.

4) If you encounter a bathroom attendant (I don't know -- it could happen), leave a dollar and grab a piece of chocolate. Chocolate's good and doesn't cost much under a dollar anyway. And come on: they're ATTENDING a BATHROOM. Show some solidarity.

5) Find the top festival-booker banana at the biggest, best-attended afterparty, approach when he / she is talking to the fest's biggest name -- the MAJOR headliner they flew in special for Saturday night's main-stage gala -- then butt in and give the official and the uber-comic SUDDEN, CRUNCHING, FULL-UNDERCARRIAGE GOOSES (tandem "geese," really) FROM BEHIND, HARD, RIGHT UP IN THE NETHERS. AND DON'T STOP AT THE NETHERS EITHER, BUT CUP YOUR FINGERS UP / AROUND / OVER THE "FRONTERS," OR WHATEVER YOU CALL THE OPPOSITE OF NETHERS, AND GIVE BOTH UNDERCARRIAGES YOUR TIGHTEST SQUEEZE, ALL WHILE YODELING AT TOP VOLUME.

Because ... come on! We're COMEDIANS!

6) (In # 5, you're wearing a purple halter top, a German-flag Speedo, flame-retardant goggles, and a vintage football helmet, which is just a very old deflated FOOTBALL split down the middle and jammed onto your head. Plus you'll be me, Robert Buscemi, and you'll not have been booked at this fest -- HAVE THEY NOT SEEN MY PRESS?!? -- but just crashed the party to accomplish your dual goose-quest.)

7) Write thank-you notes to anyone who books, helps, or converses with you. They're investing time, energy, and money into your ass, even if they're hoping to associate with you later when you get big. So listen politely and express gratitude for their support. On paper. Then fold it, stick it in an envelope, track down a street address, put a stamp on it, and mail it. You went to school -- show some breeding and initiative, you ostrich-cowboy bitch! (Oh I did NOT! Yes I DID! SNAP! TRIPLE-SNAP!)

ROASTING PEEPS: AN EASTER LESSON

2010-03-07T16:08:00.000-08:00

I took my niece Sausagella and her brother Dominic camping last spring, and I brought Easter Peeps marshmallow chicks and skewered them so the kids could roast 'em over the fire. And I had my buddy Ernie hide behind my pickup truck and throw his voice so it sounded like the Peeps were Joan of Arc ... "Nooooooooooo! Nooooooo! I'm stabbed and buuuuuuuuuuuuurning! I'm dyyyyyyyyyyyyyyying! Peeeeeeeep! Peeeeeeeeeep! PEEP PEEP PEEP!!!!!" to indicate the suffering and the sacrifice of death that's necessary before we can have bunnies and new life and a risen Christ.

Sure, the message is pretty confusing, especially since Sausagella and Dominic were crying hysterically at this point and Ernie slammed his thumb in the passenger door of my Dodge and was crying even louder than the kids were.

But I think they learned an important lesson. Sin always ends in hell fire.

Oh I forgot to tell you something important about how I made it all a morality lesson. Before all this happened I staged a little puppet-show scene in which the Peeps chicks had premarital sex, which was why they had to pay.

So yeah. I guess I'm a natural teacher.

Robot Vacuum-Cleaner Scarecrows

2010-02-22T08:39:00.000-08:00

Your best defense against thieves when you're on vacation is to create the illusion of activity in your home.

That's why I employ a fleet of a dozen of those new robotic artificial-intelligence vacuum cleaners, jam upright broomsticks into their bases, put a wig and coat hanger at the top of each, hang six tuxedos and six evening gowns, then BOOM: scarecrows. I set my vacuum-motion to "random" and blast Yanni music. Your would-be thief peeks in the window, sees your ballroom scenario, thinks "YANNI COTILLION!," either (a) flees, or (b) joins the party, forgets to rob you, maybe pulls down a little broom-handle-spined robot-Hoover tang. Everybody's happy.

Except maybe your cats, who studies show HATE Yanni's music. They love Yanni; just not his jams.

My Halloween Stand-Up Bit, AND My Vampire Video!

2009-10-31T14:33:00.000-07:00

I warn you, this stand-up bit is wrong. But I maintain it's more idiotic than offensive. Anyhow, don't say you haven't been warned.

Oh and click through to the AWESOME new 3-minute vampire webisode that reached number one on Atom.com with like 50,000 hits, AND WHICH I STEAL OUTRIGHT WITH A WICKED CAMEO!

Happy pumpkins, fans. xo BUSCEMI

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I've never cared for the scary holidays. Flag Day, Arbor Day, or Cinco De Mayo--which is fun to mispronounce as "CHINK-Oh" De Mayo because it offends two cultures in just two syllables....

But I especially hated Halloween. Because when I was a kid we'd go to haunted houses, and they'd do that tactile sensation trick, where they'd take you into a dark room and say "Reach in here!" and you'd put your hand in a box or whatever and you'd feel, like, wet grapes. But they'd TELL you it was human eyeballs, so you'd freak out and scream.

Or they'd say "Reach in here", and it was, you know, wet noodles and pasta, but they'd tell you it was ... guts and worms or whatever. So you'd freak.

Well this one year they got me really bad. They did that same thing: "Reach in here!" And I did, and ...

Well, it turned out to be ...

Well, a hippopotamus rectum.

And of course they'd TOLD me it was gonna be ... Frankenstein's rectum.

And I gotta say, it felt just like him.

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Ta-daaaaaa! I told you it was brainless.

Anyhow, now CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VAMPIRE WEBISODE, which they really did make funny and great.

Happy Halloween, everyone.

I'm HONESTLY Not Trying to Be a Jerk ...

2009-10-15T00:05:00.000-07:00

... but you totally, TOTALLY covet my gorgeousness as represented by this photo right now.

I'm not trying to be mean or rub your face in my beauty. I'm honestly not.

Honestly.

But my GOD ... just LOOK at me.

Daggone it.

I'm sorry. This was a mistake. Your jealousy is ruining you. I can feel it.

I'm sorry. I'm TOTES sorry. This one's on me. I really, REALLY should not have shown this.

You're melting. I can feel it. Your humiliation is complete.

Please, PLEASE accept my pity in the form of like three Chuck E. Cheese tokens and this old can of Billy Beer.

I honestly am sorry. Let's put this behind us.

Let's "behind" this.

yeah, my fave novel ever might be

2009-10-13T22:44:00.000-07:00

Straight Man, by Richard Russo. It's about perfect, I'd say. Especially that quote I can't find on-line about what it's like to get your novel accepted for publication, referring to his main character's secretary who sent off her fiction.

Turning your leaky vessel into the sea and all. That's pretty much what I've bankrupted myself for anyway.

Twitter Broke!

2009-08-07T14:03:00.000-07:00

Damn Twitter ain't lettin' me update.

Here's what I was wantin' to post ...

TO RAMADA INN:

@RamadaInn: I just don't want to have to return these nice Ramada Inn towels. Please can I not? I was kidding 'bout being so flutter-eyed pretty.

TO EVERYONE:

Leaves nice steaming summer corn in a wee Corningware pot at each door of the Ramada Inn, knocks, then runs like hell to repeat at the next.

Meat? Meet meat!

2009-07-27T13:54:00.000-07:00

I do this one as a stand-up piece.

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I'm a vegetarian. I have been for a long time.

But I'm not that strict, really.

I'll make an exception, for example, for any of nature's spreadable meats--all your mousses, pâtés, Braunschweiger, your softer blood sausages. Gimme your wurst, right?

Because come summer, I love all your festival meats too. Hogback, pig feet, butt steak, tripe, ox fritter, chili dog, knockwurst, mettwurst, bloodwurst--I'm on it. Just keeping it "veal," right, hot dogs?

I don't see how that makes me less of a vegetarian, necessarily. You can't expect me to live on rice cakes and soy-nnaise alone, right? The idea is to keep your principles flexible.

So yeah, I'll cut corners. I'll order a salad, but get the bacon bits. Not many--four pigs' worth, tops. I'll eat one, then use my creamy Italian to glue the other three back into the shape of a giant hulk-pig, leave that as a political statement in lieu of a tip.

Or I'll eat anything advertised as "con carne." I'll make an exception there. Or really any greasy, ethnic meat pocket, dumpling, pot sticker type deal of a street cart for a buck and a half. Hey, I'll eat six here and take a baker's dozen for the road, right?

Or I'm partial to young flesh--nature's newborns, before age and ennui make 'em tough and tangy. Colts, cubs, kids, goslings, grouper guppies--tender, succulent little bones like a crunchy meatloaf. I don't see how that suddenly makes me less of a vegetarian.

Or fish. Like most vegetarians, I'll eat fish. Or other water-based meats: crappie, carp, crawdad, snail, whale, eel, seal, squid.

Or really any animal that even just hangs around water. In any form: bogs, hot springs, glaciers--whether it be badger, beagle, skunk, beaver, urchin, weasel, penguin, pelican, swamp rat ... smurf.

It's weird though. You don't really think of a penguin as having innards, do you? Doesn't it seem like you'd go in there, and it'd just be more penguin? Like--an eraser? But trust me: You'll find that's not the case.

Oh, another thing I'll do--I'll drive a U-Haul to the slaughterhouse, fill it with low-grade remnant meat before they Dumpster it, cook myself up a big meal: Salisbury jubilee in a thick intestine gravy with pigeon-mashed potatoes, that good sparrow toast, gator skins. For dessert, chittlin smoothies, flypaper lick 'ems, newt roll-ups.

Of course I quit smoking cold turkey a while back. So now I roll these Alaskan-style, micro-thin caribou-jerky-strip cigarillos instead, smoke 'em out on the porch, watch the sun set, soak my feet in beef stock.

Now that's living.

But I am into humane methods of capture. And I try to be quick, mostly because when you drag out a kill, that final fear-flush of adrenaline gives meat a tartness I don't care for.

So, for example, I'll frappe a puffin.

Or frog-gig a wood sprite.

Or I'll trick a gazelle with promises of fame and women gazelles, then break a chair over its head. CRASH!

Or I'll pepper a wild boar's nose, sneeze-kill it, eat its fur. Which, by the way, ladies--is an excellent source of ... well ... of fur, anyway.

Or I'll dig a pit, just in nature somewhere, lay down spikes, throw a rug over it. Because any animal too dumb to know that there shouldn't just be a rug lying there? That's dinner, is what that is.

Oh and I figured out how to hypnotize a chimpanzee--you play it a Bjork album, then just eat the confused look right off its face.

Insects are good. I'll pry open my niece Sausagella's ant farm, toothpick 'em, drown 'em in my tea. (So she cries a little. So what. Hey--"circle of life," Sausagella. Heard of it!? ADJUST!)

Or if it rains, I'll grind an earthworm into the pavement under my boot heel just to prove my superiority. "Hey--face your place in the rat race, ace; I will MACE this place!" Somebody's gotta show that dual-gendered peckerwood who's boss, right?

Or if an animal and I are both at a cocktail party, I'll "spill" a kerosene martini between that animal and its shell, go to light his cigarette--flash-fry him--FOOOM! So beware, turtles, armadillos, medieval knights: I WILL turn you into a scalding, self-contained soup cauldron.

Oh, and mammal. You can't beat fellow mammal for taste. Especially mothers. Am I wrong? I'll anything that's a mother, I'll eat. But especially a mammal mother. Or her young. Like check this out: I'll put on a mammal costume, fool babies into suckling my poisonous Velcro teats, then put 'em to "bed" on my George Foreman Tofu Grill.

Or I'll flush out a mammal nest with tear gas, so everybody's running around, crying, screaming, Mom chasing me. Then after a few miles, she gets tired, I turn around, shoot her right in the face: KABLOOM!

Then I unsheathe my pirate sword, light my coals, skewer all her young first, then Mom last--so it goes ... Mom, baby, baby, baby, baby, awwwww-cutest-little-tiny-RUNT-baby! ... Then I'll barbeque 'em like a delicious, three-dimensional, shish-kabobbed "Animals Crossing" sign, only right into my mouth--CHOMP! CHOMP! CHOMP!

But I think my absolute favorite is to kill meat WITH meat. So I'll slingshoot a frozen meatball at an animal's temple. WHAP! You better pray, prey! Right? Because it's meet that meat meet meat. "Meat? Meat. Meat? Meat? Meat? Meet Meat. Meat? Meet Meat!"

Yeah, I'll mete out meat to meat. You bet your sweet peter I will.

Because make no mistake--meat will trick you. Like this "imitation crabmeat." Puh-LEASE.

"Hi! I RESEMBLE crab!" Screw YOU, fish blend.

And "free range" chicken my ass. Range freely past ME, ya cock--see if you don't get et!

So yeah. Anyhow, I'm thinking about opening a vegetarian restaurant.

Kind of a theme place--I'll call it Zingers and Zingers. See, I'll stand there whipping zingers at you all night. Bother kinds--figurative and literal, wisecracks and snack cakes. If I hit you with it, you eat it. That's the deal.

But we won't have, like, other kinds of food. Not even chocolate or lemon Zingers. Just those red ones with coconut shavings and whatever insults I cook up.

For that matter, there's no utensils, chairs, heat, ceilings ... Probably just you and me on the wrong side of the tracks in an alley somewhere, you know?

Oh, and here's the catch--I'll suck out the creme fillings, replace 'em with liverwurst. To trick you into getting a little protein, right!? C'mon!

Anyhow, a vegetarian can dream, right?

Wee, Lifeless, Blue, Bobbing Baby-YOU!

2009-07-08T14:01:00.000-07:00

I've done the following as a stand-up piece. Hipsters howl. Lame-o's stare preplexed. I deliver it slowly, methodically, with lots of eye-contact and a calming, serene, guiding voice. Except where I'm obviously yelling, of course. Enjoy.

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All right, I think everyone's a little tired. A little careworn. A little frayed. And we're looking at the juncture between Robert's thumb and forefinger and we're relaxing. Deep breath IN. Deep breath OUT. Good, good.

Notice where we carry our tension. In our jaws? In our spines? In our ding-dongs and pee-pees? Let that tension pass, like a state trooper on the highway. And IN. And OUT.

You whack away the cares of the day like golf balls from a sand trap. You fry and crackle your worries like moths in a bug zapper. Your mind is a bug zapper drenched in honey. GZZZ! GZZ-GZZZZ!

We're breathing. Robert's holding you. You're safe.

And SWOOOOOOOOOOSH! We're airborne, as though on the Macy's Thanksgiving parade Underdog balloon. Isn't that pleasurable? And Robert's wearing his stretchy purple unitard which arouses you, and you feel a freeing desire for his supple, knife-like body. He's a fatherly figure, a yogi.

You feel Robert's hand on your back and now it steals lower, lower, and lightly cups your left buttock and comes back up. You laugh. You want it there, don’t you? And Robert makes a deeper, more aggressive grab—you giggle, you think it's playful; he's a source, a guru, he's NOT hurting you, he's nourishing you, he's stimulating you.

You want to touch the stamen of Robert's healing flower. Go on. Touch it. AH! But when you attempt to grip and manipulate Robert's stamen, he deflects your clumsy efforts. You bad, bad child!

And now Robert's chasing you! He tackles and mounts you quickly but then runs away—you chase him, but he's too fast for you to catch! Look at him skip away through the purple prairie! Ahhh, he’s beautiful! That physique! What a fine specimen! His muscular back forms a perfect, rippling "V"!

And suddenly everyone in the room is revolving together on a giant inner tube in a pretty pond. What FUN! We laugh as we feel the water pulse into and out of every orifice. In and out. From me ... into you ... into him ... into her, fluids intermingling freely, healthily, cleansing and rejuvenating us in a hhhh-omeopathic way.

Oh! But what's that! Through the scrub weeds there! A DEER! And right behind the deer—a prodigiously genitalia'd naked hunter ... who's now CHASING THE DEER AROUND AND AROUND THE POND, AND—OH MY GOD!—THE HUNTER TACKLES THE DEER AND TEARS INTO ITS THROAT WITH HIS FANGS AND SCURRIES BACK INTO THE TREACHEROUS SCRUB WEEDS!

OH, YE NUDEST OF PREDATORS! DEFILER OF BEAUTY!!! COWARDLY, UNCLAD VILLAIN!!! NEMESIS! BAAAAAAIN!!!!

Ah, but what's that? A cooing and gurgling on the opposite shore! It's a BABY. Awwwww! It's YOU as a baby! Full of hopes and dreams and baby food!

But what's this? Why is baby-you crawling into the pond? You're too young to swim!

OH MY GOD, BABY-YOU IS DROWNING!!!! THAT WAS SO QUICK! THAT'S TWO CORPSES NOW FLOATING ON OPPOSITE SIDES OF THE FOUL POND! A MANGLED DEER CARCASS AND WATER-PUFFY, BLOATED BABY-YOU! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

And as you paddle to shore to dry yourself—crying, panting, drained and helpless on the spongy sand—Robert comforts you by reaching into your body to massage your organs, one by one. Now your spleen, now your pancreas, now your left kidney.

And you are healed, my child.

And we drift away from the pond with its bloody, twitching, just-dead deer and wee, lifeless, blue, bobbing baby-you. And when you wake in a few moments you'll be back in the company of the most visionary comic mind of the infant millennium, Robert Buscemi.

And 3-2-1 we're a-WAKE! [*SNAP!*]

FROSTED SQUATIES *

2009-07-01T10:45:00.000-07:00

So I've been dating whole groups of these short bleach-blondes lately. Mostly from Appalachia.

I call them "frosted squaties."

They hang out in packs, or "scrums," to use the scientific nomenclature.

And they've divided themselves into two warring clans, which is awful. It would be funny if it weren't so bloody.

Anyhow, their big beef with each other is over their central philosophies.

Scrum One has as their central belief the tenet that ... my best feature is my gossamer-soft body hair. Which I can see--they have a point, I do have a gorgeous, downy, near-invisible spider-webbish coating, which you can see if it's a dewy morning.

Now the problem is that their sworn enemies, Scrum Two, led by a particularly vicious, vindictive frosted squatie named Sausagella, they have as their "raison d'etra" the conviction that my best quality is my ... vestigial tail. Which again, point taken. It's lovely.

So yeah. You see the problem. Never the twain shall meet. Gossamer-soft body hair versus vestigal tail -- you're talking Cain and Abel, the Hutus and the Tutsis, peanut butter and jelly, Jake and the Fatman. Eternal war.

Now me personally ... I happen to believe that my best quality is my world-class Hamburglar drinking glass collection. But what do I know, right? I'm only the hottest thing any of these little hoompuses will ever know between the sheets.

Or between the second and third acts of an opera. Because who knows when I'll strike, right?!

So yeah. I'm about sick of them all anyway. They've turned out to be nothing but gossips and gold diggers.

See, they got wind, through the FS grapevine and all their little Internet chatboards ("peep! peep! peep!") that I just finished writing a men's empowerment book, and they all smell money. So they're clamoring for my attention worse than usual.

If you're curious, it's called ... "Yonis, Unitards, and You: Using Yoga to Unleash the Power of Each Man's Ghost Vagina."

Yeah. I'm pretty excited. I'm looking for a publisher.

Though at this point, I'd settle for a typewriter. It's currently scrawled in crayon on the backs of about 70 cereal boxes in my old apartment.

And I don't even live there anymore. I'm what you'd call a beach bum.

And I don't mean I like volleyball and boogie boards. I mean I sleep in the sand, and fight seagulls for hot-dog buns for sustenance.

So yeah. That's that.

* Credit for the term "Frosted Squaties" goes entirely to Jenni Lamb, a very funny writer / actor / improviser friend of mine and her husband Josh Hetherington, who vacationed in Southern Ohio about 3 years back and invented this phrase for short, round, bleach-blonde hill chicks. She said I could have the term for stand-up and other comedic purposes, which I gladly took her up on.

Me in the Barber Chair!

2009-06-24T13:59:00.000-07:00

Sometimes on stage I'll push a joke too far. You may have seen me do it.

It goes on and on and gets more and more abstract and abstruse and trips over itself and grows more and more tenuous and floats further and further away from any reality, including its own, like a cotton candy bridge over the Pacific.

When that happens, it's like ...

... when Jim the Barber puts the smock with the paper neckerchief on you, starts cutting but lets the conversation flag (TALK TO ME, Jim! TETHER me!), so you let your mind wander, and it astral-projects straight through the mirror-tunnel in front of you (formed in optical-illusion collusion with the huge mirror BEHIND you), hurtling you through a light-years-long portral , so you fly FAST (YouJimRoomYouJimRoomYouJimRoomYOUJIMROOM ZOOM ZOOM ZOOOOOM!!) into infinity, but at a curve ever so slightly off to the left (just like space, just like Space Mountain), and time goes unstuck, so you see incongruous stuff fly past ... mastodon bones; a pterodactyl; a Rubik's Cube; a page from the Gutenberg Bible; two googly-eye-topped pyramids like jagged, mouth-scraping, seeing-eye chocolate Toblerone spikes; a really old Mac Computer (DUCK!) ... until finally you've looped around so far and for so long that you come up behind your real, actual self in the present-moment barber chair, and as you're about to re-enter your body, you think ...

DAMN, I'm even balder than LAST month!

So you hand Jim $20, tell him to keep the change, go home, and wait for what's next.

That's what I do anyway.

You as a Torturer in Historic Times!

2009-06-05T11:11:00.000-07:00

So I think the hardest job if you were a torturer in historic times would have been trying to shut the double-doors with the nails on the inside on that standing-coffin iron maiden thing.

Say you were further along in your career and maybe a little battered by time like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, and all your torturer buddies were hanging around to catch your act (I picture it being a real chummy scene, like being a stand-up comic or a vintage-car collector), and your liege or lord or feudal chief or county nobleman or whomever the condemning adjudicator was is there, so you're totally nervous already anyhow.

Plus you failed to sharpen and smallpox-bedaub the nails (YOU IDIOT!), since you were out partying the night before, which is a strictly amateur mistake because if the nails are blunted or dull or flesh-covered from previous use, they don't puncture nearly as well, and that's what's happening now!

Because to make matters WORSE, your client / patient / customer (I don't know what you'd have called him) inside the coffin is a young, strong, burly, portly guy who's really too big for the damn thing anyway, and he's pushing back, the bastard!

PLUS he's a really popular Man-of-the-People / Robinhood rebel type who steals from the rich and gives to the poor (after taking his own cut, of course) and has hoomped half the local female population, so you REALLY look like a chump!

So there you are shoving on this thing with your aching, tired-ass shoulder, trying to look cool and nonchalant but wheezing and panting and sweating buckets and breathing heavy as hell and feeling a numbness in your left arm, and ...

... and I imagine it would be like trying to push shut an overstuffed suitcase, you know? But your underwear are huge and screaming and bleeding and pushing back and also super-popular with the ladies and the peasantry.

you LIFE-COWARD!!!

2009-06-04T09:36:00.001-07:00

You know what it reminds me of when some REALLY buxom woman wears a dress/bodice-thing that CUPS her boobs like an old-time beer wench, so you look down and the tops of 'em are just roilin' 'n' jostlin'?

Well, for starters, it's like an eddy where the sea has come ashore, but the waves are caught between a breakwater and an embankment and kind of cross-crash-smash each other up and down and across and askance because their currents have gone all jostly and confused.

Or like when you peel back the foil lid from your pudding cup and look down into that wet shiny jiggly fresh tapioca.

Or like when you're in a blimp looking down into Toronto's Skydome just as the rain stops, and they retract it to expose the fleshy, glistening sea of humanity inside.

Or when you look down at a newborn baby's head where the skull hasn't fused together, so you see all that barely-subcutaneous, rippling, spongy, pulsing, moist brain-matter thinking its pre-lingual thoughts.

Doesn't it all just make you want a SPOON?!

Right?

Oh, WHAT. Are you honestly offended by my comparing baby brains to boobs? Well that makes you a LIFE-COWARD, because it's ALL CONNECTED, yo!

SNAP! In your FACE!

Me Inadvertently Dressing As Indiana Jones

2009-05-27T11:48:00.000-07:00

So I get dressed to go to watch the "Tiger Lily" comedy show in LA Monday. Big scene. Maria Bamford and Marc Maron were on the bill, tons of scenesters and players. Sorry, but it's true.

I'm a bit of a clothes horse, as you might know. Daffy, but attentive to style for sure. Also I'm brand-new to LA, so I want to impress and make friends and circulate and get booked, right? Right. Get in with the in-crowd. Sure I do. Of course. You would too, right?

TONS of Chicago folks at the show. Crazy. Like 15 comics. GOOD ones. We all got pretty lit and stayed late too.

Three comments on my outfit in the FIRST HALF HOUR I'm there, with (I verified later) NO coordination from the commentators:

1) Mike Bridenstine (from Chicago, in a group of three Chicago Mikes--Burns, Brido, and Holmes) smoking cigs out back as I approach:

"You look like San Francisco Jones."

2) Kyle Kinane (from Chicago, 10 minutes later, over by the bar):

"What's goin' on, Indy?"

3) Matt Braunger (from Chicago):

"You look like Indiana Jones if he looked for artifacts in thrift stores."

My question: WHY IN HELL DID I LEAVE MY APARTMENT TO GO MAKE MY MARK ON THE WORLD CLEARLY DRESSED AS INDIANA GD JONES??????

Life is an unrelieved succession of failures, humiliations, and disappointments.

I believe I'm quoting Bill Gates there.

Me in YOUR DREAM!

2009-05-14T09:15:00.000-07:00

So you're running and running through a mythical forest in a white linen nightie with a matching stocking cap and the summer breeze is SO warm and you're without underthings!

Everything feels SO fertile and the moon is HUGE, and I am all the creatures in these post-Roman-Empire but kind of half-pagan / half-Greek dream-woods, and as you run, I'm the squirrels and the fawns and owls, and whenever you stop to drink or investigate some piece of nature or just giggle with pleasure, I'm a man-goat or an old wood-elf coming up and putting my wet nose on you in REALLY surprising places. You bend over to examine a huge pine-cone and WOW what is that wood sprite doing to me, you ask!

You think it's a great game and leap and laugh, and when you get a drink out of the shiny stream, you suddenly feel a school of wee wily fish rushing between your legs (THEY'RE ALL ME!) and WHOOPS aaaaaaaaaaah what's that feeling you just had! Oh YOU know what it was! Don't be coy, you plump glade-runner! You have them and have them and have them (those "feelings") all OVER our fun little glen, don't you!

But finally, oh my gosh, FINALLY a HUGE STAG comes out (ME ME ME) and MAN it's not kidding around this time! THIS TIME there's no playing, IS THERE? We find a tree with a veeeeery low crotch and this spongy bark and we ...

Well. We go to TOWN, don't we? A judging panel of a fox, a goose, and some weasel-looking thing give us THREE "10"s!

HA ha-ha! TRA la-la!

You take it all in and look up through your closing eyelids and see a thin smoke-wisp of cloud glide over the moon, which suddenly becomes a gigantic dinner plate with an eel slithering across its bottom inch!

You wake up and feel calm ALLLLLLLL day.

You're welcome! See you again at midnight!

xo :)

ROBERT!

i am NOT necessarily a "BIRD WATCHER," ok? SHEESH!

2009-05-08T13:33:00.000-07:00

Look, just because I happen to be "WATCHING" a "BIRD" does not ipso facto make me a "BIRDWATCHER," okay?

Maybe I'm just a "BOOK FORGETTER" who happens to be waiting for the bus on this bench next to you when I see ...

... what's clearly a ... common merganser perched on that mailbox just yonder. And I happen to admonish you to silence as I examine it more closely through these high-end field binoculars under the shade of my expensive sun-hat and jot in my notebook its features, then text all my birding buddies about my sighting and inform YOU that this is the northern-most summer terminus of the migrating wood-fowl, which winters in the inland lakes of Guatemala.

So LEAVE ME ALONE already, okay?!

Punchline Mag Interviews Me as "Chicago's Best Stand-Up!"

2009-04-03T06:48:00.001-07:00

PunchlineMagazine.com packs a lot of punch, and they interviewed me on getting named "Chi's Best Stand-Up" by the Chicago Reader. Here's the link, and here's the text:

INTERVIEW, ROBERT BUSCEMI, NAMED BEST STAND-UP IN CHICAGO

2 Apr, 2009 | by Dylan P. Gadino

For the last few years, comedian Robert Buscemi has spent most of his time honing his stand-up comedy in one of the country’s major hubs for said artistic expression. The Chicago scene has embraced the man and all of his odd musings onstage. In fact, the Chicago Reader has just named him the best stand-up in Chicago.

Sadly, for regional fans, Buscemi will leave the Midwest in May (just when it’s getting warmer) for Los Angeles to begin the next chapter of his career. We chatted with Buscemi recently about that and other stuff. Check that out — and enjoy some video — below.

The Chicago Reader named you the best stand-up in Chicago in their best of performing arts edition for 2009. How did you celebrate?

I gave a wee yelp. I did. A pal congratulated me on Facebook, is how I heard, then I read the link, then I yelped. Is that the word I want? Maybe ‘whelped.’ It was a very spontaneous sound. Not graceful or focused. Not your standard, How-We-Doin’-Tonight-Folks? Whoooo-woooo!’ Not ‘ALL RIGHT!’ Not ‘YEAHH!’ More a super-abrupt “HWHAH!” right there in the coffee shop. Then I had to act cool and stuff my emotions. I blame society in advance if I ever get colon cancer from all the emotion-stuffing it makes me do. Society, I damn thee! THRICE!

I actually think the journalist who wrote it up nailed my style and what I’m trying to do extremely well, which was really satisfying. I’m playing, but I’m playing with playing. I do boxes in boxes. It’s obnoxious, I know. But I’m kind of a snob who gets mileage out of showing off my brain and then immediately mocking myself for being douche-y and show-offy for thinking I’m such a smarty-pants. That’s central to my character.

I went to school for too long, and studied way too much postmodern philosophy, so in my head I’m always quadruply-undercutting everything I do even as I do it–my jokes, my persona, everything. That’s why I get along so well with the hipster-comics and anti-comics and cynics. I trust nothing and no one, myself included. But I want to be inclusive and goofy and vainglorious, and I don’t take myself remotely seriously, like Steve Martin (my hero) or … stand-up-era Woody Allen. So I felt like the journalist got a really good read on all that. So I was genuinely gratified by that.

It’s been said that Chicago is one of the spiritual centers of comedy. Why do you think that is?

We’re a historical mecca, for sure. Possibly the biggest, in stage terms — there’s a mythic quality to the Second City, and to Steppenwolf folks. And in a fundamental way we’re proudly off-the-radar and underdog and scrappy and scruffy and tough. There are maybe 2% of the cameras here as on the coasts. Maybe 2% of the show-biz income. So we’re poor and under-filmed. That’s just a fact. So … we’re judged on different grounds. By each other, mostly. By our own ambitions and enterprises. So we fancy ourselves more artistically pure and pristine because of that, since we have nothing else to claim, really. Certainly not your standard show-biz credits or screen appearances or wealth or fame.

But there’s lots of mutual support here, perhaps because there’s less to gain and less to lose. You have the freedom to experiment. Because NO one is watching, most of the time. No one industry. You just have to please your audience and each other by your own wits. And that’s good training–to have to get strong on your own.

And Chicago stand-up is even MORE off-the-radar than sketch and improv and theater, because we don’t have the Second City and iO and Steppenwolf and all the rest. We have a standard comedy club, Zanies, but … they mainly headline touring acts and stars from the coasts, so … our local scene is largely our own — our showcases and projects. But it’s been a real golden age over the past, say, 7 years. Some real super-star stand-ups have risen through our ranks. Some mega-talent. That’s the truth.

And there is a real bond between us all. A whole wide network from Chicago, channeled through NYC and LA. So yeah, I really identify with the Chicago ethos: DIY, off-the-radar, for the love of the game. It’s like a study in patience and endurance. You HAVE to enjoy the artistic fruits, because the financial and industry rewards are so rare and sparse.

Of course all that has changed significantly with internet video and social media tools in the last several years, which has been fantastic news for us out here in the hinterlands. The world has shrunk, which is great for those of us (like me) whom the camera loves and craves and worships.

You’re moving to LA in May, leaving Chicago behind. How long will it be until you develop an inflated ego and a terrible cocaine habit?

I’ve begun acclimating that way already. Like changing my sleeping schedule before an international flight, for years now I’ve been sneering at babies on the street and snubbing “fans” (well, my cats mostly) and under-tipping waitresses (I put a little homemade table-tent with my “Why Tipping Hurts Us All” manifesto on every table in lieu of a gratuity. At Christmas I add a single walnut.). And I stuff my pillow with cocaine and then poke holes in my pillowcase so I breathe the stuff in all night, every night. It cakes in my hair and clogs every orifice of every living being in my house. Cocaine, powdered sugar … whatever, you know? What’s the diff?

Seriously, why are you moving to Los Angeles, say, as opposed to New York?

Oh … I like LA. I’m shallow, so it agrees with me. I like the beach and the weather and the West Side and I don’t particularly mind driving. And I have the look. I’m profoundly, classically handsome. I honestly am. People forget that because I’m so funny and jolly and brave and glistening. But … I’m one of those people who just glows. Like a Tim Conway or a May West. And I’m still in my 20s. Early 20s. EARLY 20s (BUT I CAN PLAY UP TO MID-40s). And I have really hip jeans I wear and I’m RIPPED in my chest. I have a barrel chest. But slim. Very slim. A slim, hairless barrel chest. And “gun-style” biceps with exactly the right tattoos on them. The tattoos that just popped into your mind just this second. Those.

NYC is great. There’s no place like it for excitement. None. But … it’s also alarming as hell. People don’t discuss that. It’s like paying triple to live in a freaking pinball machine. Or in a lit string of firecrackers in a pinball machine. And I’m anxious already, thank you very much. Why do you think I do stand-up? It’s the only time I relax. And I’ve got lots and lots of friends in LA and I’ve been scouting the scene out there long enough to know that the hip kids are there in force, doing tons of cool comedy shows and projects, and are in possession of a great scene. I mean that. I just like LA a lot, actually. A lot. Always have. And I look great in shorts. SHORT shorts.

I’ve heard Chicago is really cold in the winter. Is that true?

It murders faith. Even fundamentalists disavow all religion by March. And in summer, at least for a few week-long waves, sometimes more, it gets CRUSHINGLY, HELLISHLY hot. You literally can’t move from the humidity, especially if your whole-earth S.O. finds air-conditioned air somehow inorganic and unhealthy. You have no idea. You wake up to the sound of your sweat splashing into the pool of sweat you’re sleeping in.

So there are maybe four months of non-hot, non-cold weather where everyone sprints outside and desperately sucks up fun and photographs it all so they can store it for the cold and hot times. It’s pitiful to watch. There’s deep insecurity on their faces. There’s a frantic-ness to their play. It’s quite pitiful. Like terrified lobsters “playing” with their claws rubber-banded shut, looking out through their prison-tanks at hungry sea-food diners. But we love Chicago weather precisely because it’s so trying, I suppose. It gives you something to push against. That and the obscurity we toil under. We enjoy our martyrdom. Martyrdom is one of the finest, most self-satisfied, sanctimonious feelings you can have. Ask any suicide bomber.

Car Alarms: USEFUL!

2009-03-30T07:01:00.000-07:00

I remember when car alarms were new, and one would go off ... this is, what, 15 years ago? I would RUN out of my house with all the surrounding neighbors to protect the poor car!

It would BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP by way of emitting its "fear cry," and i would SPRINT down the blog to PROTECT IT!

I remember the neighborhood really bonding when that would happen, as all of us neighbors would stand vigil in a "hands around the car" position all night long, sleeping in shifts, lighting a street fire to keep the Pontiac or Chrysler or Buick warm and putting blankets over the BEEEPing car to protect and calm it.

I was so involved in this "Car Protection Movement" ("CPM"!) that was sweeping the nation at the time that I missed my brother's wedding (I was supposed to be his best man!) and missed so much work from staying up all night protecting car-alarm-emitting Volvos and Fiestas and Focuses that I got fired and wound up homeless, which gave me still MORE time to protect the threatened cars on my* block!

(* I say "my," but at this point it wasn't really "my" block anymore since I'd lost my home and now lived in the alley behind my former home and the former homes of my neighbors, who had mostly, like me, gotten fired from sleeping in too many times after protecting cars all night!)

In fact, I'll attach a photo of people protecting a car! Let's see what I come up with in a photo search and whether it will enhance the comic effect of this Note!

Oh wow! I found a photo of what we used to do calm BEEEPing, upset cars! We'd wrap them in plastic like in this photos!

I'm almost always happy when I'm using lots of exclamation marks, btw! Just fyi!

The Reader Names Me "Chicago's Best Stand-up!"

2009-03-27T08:22:00.001-07:00

So The Reader is Chicago's main arts weekly, akin to Seattle's "Stranger," Washington DC's "City Paper," NYC's "Village Voice," or the "LA Weekly." Everyone reads it.

And they just named me CHICAGO'S BEST STAND-UP!

I know, right? Anyhow, I'm extremely pleased and humbled. Ryan Hubbard really nails what I'm after in his write-up, if I do says so.

Click here to see the piece, and or read the transcript below.

Thanks for your many congratulations, everyone.

BUSCEMI

+++++++++

BEST STAND-UP COMEDIAN

The Reader’s Choice: Robert Buscemi

It’s been a banner year for surreal comic Robert Buscemi. He’s done national festivals, appeared in commercials and short films, and this month released his second live DVD. But he also remains a local fixture, performing frequently at showcases like Chicago Underground Comedy and the Lincoln Lodge. Trained in improv and theater, Buscemi says he enjoys the mental challenges of stand-up—a form he’s been experimenting with since at least 2004, when I first saw him hosting an open mike.

Buscemi walks a thin line onstage: his persona is genial yet macabre, his style conversational yet sophisticatedly self-reflexive, his material accessible yet eccentric. (His subjects include the innards of penguins, sponges that have given up on life, and using the classic Prague phalanx chess stratagem on Jesus.) Buscemi earns his audience’s trust with serious charisma and a command of performance cliches to which he never fully submits. He likes to play the part—wearing a fedora, an ill-fitting suit, and a wisecracking grin—while playing with the part. Buscemi shares the bill with five other comics at Chicago Underground Comedy, Tue 3/31, 9:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, 773-281-4444, chicagoundergroundcomedy.com, $5. —Ryan Hubbard

My Facebook Legend Is SO Vast, and You Are SO Jealous!

2009-03-08T23:32:00.000-07:00

I guest-blogged the following polemic on Zulkey.com, which gets mad traffic.

Here's the link, and I'll reproduce it here in full as well.

+++++++++++

"My Facebook Legend Is SO Vast, and You Are SO Jealous!"

As a great man (me) once said, "Fame is like peanut butter. You have to spread it."

And Facebook provides the right ... peanut-butter-spreading knife for the job.

OK. How to start? Well, as a stand-up comedian (of rare gifts and pluck, mind you), I have a wide network of friends, fans, peers, and associates. And it's very, VERY easy to balloon this on FB. My FB clique is around 1,300 right now (they don't let you have more than 5,000, I'm told, which I'm already irked by). You collect names at shows, you see performers you like, you find people, you say "yes" to whomever asks to be your friend (Why not? You can always block people who go weird on you - I've done exactly that 5 or 6 times already), and in no time, voila: you've reached some critical mass where you're kind of hanging around a massive, perpetual party of people, yapping and commenting and yucking it up back and forth any time you like.

Which ... for me is pretty often. What can I say? I'm a middle-school girl at heart. My preferred comic weapon in life has always been the snarky, sotto voce quip in the back of class. I'd either whisper or (better yet) actually write down in my notebook some wee bon mot designed to get a laugh from a pal or a cute girl.

How could you beat that? That's my M.O. Speaking "truth" just out of earshot of power.

Oh lord. I've gone a long way around with this, haven't I?

Back to Facebook. "Status updates" are your chance to make that comment in your notebook in the back of class. I love that they're short. I love that they're stupid. I love that they're throwaway. I love that now other people (most of whom I don't know in real life) can make some jack-ass comment right back at me, or give props or bust chops--or whatever. The whole thing is like candy to me. I absolutely love writing them. I love being snarky and annoying. And having 1,300 people be able to see it? Bliss. I'm not kidding.

And ... yes, I actually have "fans" of my status updates now. You think I'm kidding. I'm not.

And I SAY my comments are "throwaway," but that's just me trying to be cool. I'm not an idiot. I have an RSS feed that collects all my status-updates so I can go back and turn them into whatever book ideas or stand-up premises I might hatch later on. I'm aware I'm spinning gold, yo.

Oh, and here's how I claim the authority to write so vainly about my experience: I GOT WRITTEN UP BY THE PRESS FOR MY EFFORTS! That's right. Eat it. They said "We can't all be consistently witty with our update status like a ROBERT BUSCEMI [that's me], but can't we at least strive for some occasional insightful insight?"

How sweet is that? They're basically admitting that I am King of Earth.

So anyhow, an illustrative (and VERY middle-school-drama-ish) FB story. This one Poor Bastard (we'll call him "PB") literally didn't "get" several status-updates of mine in a row (he'd asked if I was speaking some kind of "code" the day before), and I had to school him in our comment-exchange after the fact, for all the world (all my 1,300 friends, anyway) to see. The exchange:

My update: "Robert ... needed to move just 20 yards, but it was from cliff to opposite cliff, so he had to go down in the gully, then 30 hard miles south to get out, then back."

PB commented immediately: "again, what are you talking about? Is this from a movie?"

Poor, poor, slow-on-the-uptake PB ...

My response: "PB! it's just a bit of imagery. mildly funny (i hope) floating poetry of sorts. i was actually thinking about stand-up, if you must know -- how it's a long, long road to a short place: me being funny on stage just like i used to be funny at parties. in one sense, no difference (20 yards). in another sense, a long, long, long, arduous trek through the treacherous desert (7 years of stage time). capice? now please, stop making me explain. just open your mind and go with 'em or ignore 'em. they don't 'mean'-mean ANYthing. dig? and i don't quote movies, PB. people quote me."

Then, after "Steve" intoned, somewhat cleverly (" '30 hard miles south to get out...' It may be hard Robert, but you can lick it!"), I added, perhaps belying too much pique: "See, PB? Steve took it on what appears to be a sexual turn. It works well enough -- you have a canyon, you're 'going south,' and it's sexual-prodigy ME we're talking about. Just go anywhere, baby. This is the '60s, after all!"

Don't you love how I'm the hero of my own story (thanks for the assist, Steve!), and how I circle my prey like a pack of hyenas?

Ahhhhhh, Facebook.

So get bent, all you I-Won't-Go-On-Facebook snobs. I make no apologies. I love the crush of idiocy that are my status-book updates and their devotees who try in vain to match my comic heights.

(I write tons of text-messages too, if you're curious. "Eat it, sofa-butt!" is in my text-message outbox as I type.)

What can I say? It's a literary age. And before you throw stones, just remember: You're not writing Proust either, Einstein. Though it occurs to me that the minutiae of Facebook information parallels Proust more closely than, say, Faulkner.

Did I just hit on a dissertation topic?

Just search "Robert Buscemi" on Facebook and I'll pop up. You can friend me. Then you can see for yourself what a ninja I am.

Oh, and here are a few short compilations of my better status-update work. Just scroll down a bit and you can't miss 'em. It'll take you two minutes. Have at it.

See you on Facebook, suckas.

25 Words I Know that You Don't *

2009-02-16T12:49:00.000-08:00

1) vitriol
2) erudite
3) perfidy
4) munificent
5) avuncular
6) redolent
7) bathetic
8) titular
9) eponymous
10) mawkish
11) impecunious
12) bailiwick
13) atavistic
14) Teutonic
15) prostrate
16) abnegate
17) torpor
18) inexorable
19) unctuous
20) implacable
21) parsimonious
22) lachrymose
23) ablutions
24) invidious
25) catholic (with lower-case "c")

* I invented this kind of list. Yes, it's a way to be obnoxious and superior and show off. Yes, I fried you. Yes, I can smell your back hair burning from the humiliation you feel from comparing your mind to mine and realizing that yours comes up way short.

EXCLUSIVE! Buscemi interviews himself!

2009-02-10T09:07:00.000-08:00

I understand you're considering publishing a book of your famously clever Facebook status updates, which have actually, honestly, already been written up in the press?

That's right, Darian.

Robert. I'm Robert.

Right. Robert. That's right. I picture some funny, clever little thing at the counter at Borders and Urban Outfitters. Something like that. A fun little nonsense book. Like Jack Handey's "Deep Thoughts," which I always adored.

Great. Now, what is it like to command such massive power in the show business industry, to be revered by your peers, and to be so universally beloved by women and children?

Oh, I fear you exaggerate, Klaus--

Robert. I'm Robert.

Well, to be honest, I see myself as but a vessel and believe that God is working through me. I am but His lowly instrument, channeling the lightning of His Divinity through all I do.

I see. Now they say every culture has a "trickster" character. Native Americans had Kokopelli, pre-Renaissance Europe had Pantalone, and contemporary America has Don Rickles.

They do say that, don't they?

Now, tell me about your ... shall we say ... prodigious gifts in the realm of ... physical pleasure administration, or "PPA"?

Yes. Well, Phineas--

Jevin. I'm Jevin.

Right, Jevin. I see a physical body, and I see ... almost a Google Earth image of that person. I see every nook and cranny, every avenue and traffic circle, every prairie expanse, every Starbucks, as it were. Then I zoom out and see entire verdant continents on the human body, whole swathes of fornicatable hinterlands. Then I just bore in with my "cursor," if you will, and Bob's your uncle.

Oh, I will. Believe you me, I WILL.

Yes?

Yes.

Yesssss?

YES. STOP ASKING.

Hmm. OK. Pull up that sofa over there. The one with shaped like a heart.

Yes, commander.

Please. Call me "Leff-tenant."

How do the Germans get "leFFF" from "lieugh-tenant," or however it's spelled? There's no "F" in sight, is there?

No. There's not. Hey, do me a favor and handcuff yourself to that chair in my breakfast nook, will you?

Sure.

Great. Is the interview over?

A better question might be ... did it ever really begin?

How is that a better question?

Oh lord. You just killed our ending. There was this comic rhythm that dictated that you not respond to that question, Einstein.

Oh, sorry. Right. My bad. And it's Tim. I'm Tim.

catapulting prisoners at walls

2009-02-07T09:01:00.000-08:00

i guess this fantasy must come from Monty Python's Holy Grail movie, when i believe the french catapulted a cow over a wall, but i think about this all the time. no kidding.

that the best way to torture someone is to put him in a cocked catapault ...

oooh, this detail just hit me! you'd have some excrutiating slow-release system, like ...

ooh i've got it! honestly, this just hit me right now.

the rope holding the catapult in place could be made of some fiber that a mangy, stinky goat likes to nibble! then you'd have the goat slowly nibbling your rope for like two or three days while you were roped into the spoon part of the catapult, never knowing just when the goat would chew through.

and when he did ... you'd be flung right into a stone wall right next to the catapult!

that's what i think of all the time. i think it would be the world's funniest way to be executed. if i ever commit a capital offense, that's how i want to go. you're my witness.

WHAAAAAAAAAP!

i think really you'd have the last laugh, since everyone watching would be grossed out watching your lifeless bag-o'-bones slide down that freaking wall.

HEADACHE CITY, RIGHT??? OUCH!

plus you'd scare the S***T out of the goat. which would be posthumously satisfying, even though, really, the goat would be the last, best, really the ONLY friend you'd ever had in your whole life.

you felon. me felon. prisoner felon. whoever felon.

you get the idea.

Is Buscemi Hasidic? You tell ME.

2009-01-11T15:42:00.000-08:00

I was just told--bizarrely and accurately--that this new photo, taken by a friend and posted on Facebook, makes me look like a Hasidic Jew, because of the curly locks coming down in front of my ears. It's uncanny.

I loved the photo initially because I look crack-pot sexy-man in it, which is what I AM, by God, but then my friend Randy Coburn pointed out the ghostly forelocks.

Too much. It all makes me so very happy.

i OWN FACEBOOK!

2009-01-04T17:10:00.000-08:00

BIG NEWS!

THE MEDIA HAS BEGUN TO REALIZE HOW ASTOUNDING MY FACEBOOK STATUS UPDATES ARE!

actually i'm not kidding. journalist Marcus Riley found me and gave me props in an article.

"Not everyone can consistently comedically update their status like a Robert Buscemi, but can't we all strive for some occassional insightful insight?"

so do you hear that, lame-cheese "friends" of mine who mock my incessant updates? BITE ME!

Kidding. Come friend me on Facebook and find out what the fuss is about. Thanks! xo BUSCEMI

Cross-walk Mime

2008-12-30T12:27:00.000-08:00

One thing I've noticed:

If you're walking across the street, and a driver is kind enough to stop and wait for you to cross, you acknowledge them: you smile, nod your head, wave, and then ...

... and then ...

YOU DO THIS SPECIAL "RUNNING" PERFORMANCE, AS THOUGH YOU'RE HUSTLING ACROSS THE STREET IN GRATITUDE FOR THEM STOPPING!

BUT YOU'RE REALLY TRAVELING SLOW AS HELL!

BUT YOU GRIN AND WORK YOUR KNEES AND KIND OF HOP -- "HUSTLE"-STYLE"!

GUESS WHAT? YOU LOOK LIKE AN IDIOT!!!

Best Xmas Video in History

2008-12-02T11:06:00.000-08:00

You just have to watch my SHORT Christmas video, OK? It's astounding. You'll see.

Nude Puppeteering?!

2008-11-22T14:33:00.000-08:00

i heard a rumor that this new puppeteer in the neighborhood where i go to my coffee shop is naked down in his puppet booth thing, which i guess he wheels to the corner and then wheels home at night.

ok i didn't "hear" that he's naked in there exactly.

i ... invented it.

then started spreading it around.

now whenever he's out i march with a placard that says

"BAN THE PUPPETEER!
HE'S NEKKID IN THEER!
HE'S NOT WEARING PANTS!
LET'S SHIP HIS ASS TO FRANCE!"

i know my rhyme scheme appears forced, but i'm making a point and i'm educating society, so you can bite me.

++++++++++

iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit's beginningtolookalooooooootliiiiiiiikechreeeeeeestmaaaaaaaaaas!

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeverywheeeeeeeeeeeeeereyougoooooooooooooo!

can you picture me singing that song?

yeah. yeah. now you've got it. oh yeah. you naughty thing! imagining me in an elf costoom, no less!

ooh. i like the way you think, santa bear.

The Non-Industriousness of Children! (a lament)

2008-11-12T13:23:00.000-08:00

Ah, children! They see the world with such honesty and truth! Unsullied by having to work in factories and drudge-like offices!

They are so pure!

Even though they contribute to the GDP not at ALL!

In fact, they're droolingly, miserably unable/unwilling to enhance the economy AT ALL!

They're a SUCK on our VAST MONEY PILE!

They're what's dragging us down!

I say we PUT THESE CHILDREN TO WORK!

Make them work in factories! In turnip fields! At ... I don't know ... cleaning up movie theaters between screenings! That can't be that hard!

Quit crying, you babies!

I'm sick of the "ultra-youths" LEECHING OFF SOCIETY!

So I say let's protest! Let's march!

Let's "educate"!!!

Say it with me now ...

"2, 4, 6, 8! Children need to 'PRECIATE!
1, 2, 3, fo'! Quit leeching off our HARD-EARNED DOUGH!
12, 15, 20, heck! Go to work and EARN A CHECK!"

Join with me! Help me "educate"!

Enough sucking the good parts of our money-mass with your childish needs, babies-and-children! Get out there and PULL YOUR WEIGHT!

(Forgive me. Guess I'm just in an exclamatory mood this afternoon. What? You say something funny, Einstein! Huh? Yeah. That's what I THOUGHT. Not so EASY now, IS IT, "Groucho Marx"?)

Halloween Party in Haiku

2008-11-01T14:47:00.000-07:00

candy corn and wine
then early swim aerobics -
damn near blew pool chunks

my neighbor pam went
as a dung beatle -- fit her
personality

her boyfriend Daniel
was Andy Warhol, flitting
his hands perfectly

we put a cape on
my cat scooter, who prefers
women, just like me

delia wore her wee
grampa's suit, with mustache --some
natty checkov dude

andy was a dork
hoosier hoopster who couldn't
tear away his pants

lisa wore price tags
on her sarah palin garb --
her 'do done special

i was just a decked-
out fool. when asked, i'd answer
"star of your sex dreams."

my wife sarah was
a red-hat lady, adorned
with e-bay treasure

josh was siegfried,wigged,
his wife jenni the tiger
their wee baby roy

a huge peasant marm,
bob regaled us with his in-
imitable shtick

marion a blue
haired punk with nose ring, ripped tights,
and high-heeled freak boots

My Mean Friends (K-ROCK & JOHN!)

2008-10-20T08:43:00.001-07:00

So two of my mean friends told me it's lame of me to compile my (BRILLIANT) Facebook status updates as blog posts, and that I need to come up with original content to post instead, otherwise I'm a lame-cheese. Like these two friends were my fuddy-dud freaking middle-school English teachers, swimming in shapeless sweaters and the regrets of two wasted lives (apologies to middle school English teachers out there who are wasting their lives)!

My first instinct was to say "Well POOP on YOU!" Which indeed I did say, since I'm a "gut player," like the current U.S. President, George "Double-U" Anheuser-Busch, the playboy beer heir.

But then I said "Fine." I said "I'll make a compromise. I'll post MORE Facebook updates at a time when I do post them, and I'll do it LESS OFTEN, interspersed with MURDEROUSLY FUNNY new posts FUNNIER THAN ANYTHING YOU LAME-CHEESES COULD COME UP WITH EVER IN YOUR LIVES, AND I BARELY EVEN HAVE TO TRY, YOU BUCKET-HEAD DORK-FACES."

"FINE," they said.

"FINE," I said back.

Then two LOOOOOOONG silences. One with each interlocutor.

Then I broke both silences:

"Um, do you have money to pay for that pulled-pork lunch we just ate? I haven't been to the bank. Any bank. Ever. Sorry."

Then they paid.

"FINE," I said when each insisted I at least pay for a pack of Reece's Cups after from the loose change in my fanny pack.

So here's more CLEARLY UNDER-APPRECIATED Facebook status updates, you INGRATES, which PEOPLE ON FACEBOOK actually LOVE, I'll have your lame asses know.

On Facebook, everyone says I'm "brill" (that's British for "brill").

Also in Canada. They definitely "get me" in Canada too.

+++++++++

FACEBOOK UPDATES # 81-90

Robert ran smack into the MAYOR!

Robert makes a sandwich. For company. He talks to it. It's quiet, but seems friendly. It likes Robert. It's his friend now. Until it betrays him.

Robert has had it up to HERE. (*is standing on his head, making the 'had it!' sign with a hand up toward his shoes, which makes him fall forward into a somersault*). TA-DAA!

Robert is SERIOUS! STOP CYBER-(*sniffles*)BULLYING (*snorts*) ME! I'M GOING TO (*sniffle* *snort* *weep*) TELL ON YOU! Please? (*sob*) Just (*weep*) stop! (*sob*).

Robert is TIRED of being CYBER-BULLIED and had his DAD teach him how to CYBER-BOX out in the GARAGE so I can DEFEND MYSELF against CYBER BULLIES.

Robert pressed his pants between two giant stones down by the river, but now he can't seem to get the top stone off, and he remembers he left $20 in the pocket. DAMN.

Robert ripped his pants on a splinter in a bench in a park in a state in America in the world in the Milky Way in our galaxy in the universe in whatever that's in.

Robert totally knows he totally has it going on, totally, like utterly and completely. Like he's like SO COOL compared toward you.

Robert stuck his whole entire face about three feet up in there, only to discover it was BUTTERSCOTCH pudding after all!

Robert is firing up his grill, getting it ready to bash its head against a locker and beat up a freshman.

Broccoli Trees, HMM-KAAYYYY!?!?

2008-10-19T16:41:00.000-07:00

1. A tree is just a large plant!

2. A plant is just a small tree!

3. Broccoli is just a small tree, or kind of a bush!

4. A bonsai tree is like a regular-size plant!

5. Broccoli is like a bonsai vegetable!

6. In nature, broccoli grows like in "clusters," I'll bet! (Like a bush. I mean that's practically how they're sold at the grocery, right? In kind of a "cluster-bush"?)

7. Bonsais were bred cruelly for their miniature-ness, like toy dogs! (This is cruel, because you know how overly-bred dogs get whack and spaz and have medical problems? Bonsai trees are known to be highly nervous too.)

8. Broccoli, if not murdered early to be sold as food, would grow to the size of the largest redwood!

9. Can you imagine a world full of huge broccoli?! (No, right? That's why I say: "KILL AND EAT THEM ALL!" I often say this right in the supermarket produce aisle, right in their broccoli-faces! They wither and die. Honest.)

10. All in all, it's good that trees are so huge. Otherwise, we'd be tempted to eat them -- and they're made of inedible wood! BLECH!

Good Names for Cats

2008-10-04T14:45:00.000-07:00

Eels
Soup
Knock-Knock
Crush
Megan
Tumbleweed
Mickey
Spike
Clubber
Hedda Gobbler
Pastiche
Gainful
Ilene
Elbow
Emoti-Cat
Hillbilly
Oakus
Man-man
Crouton
Cheese
Pilfer
Grempy
Fart-sickle
Weiner
Tyrone
Darrel
Humane
Hot Dog
Sniffles
Crimp
Shit Bagel
The Prime Minister of Turd-istan
Space Case
Show Off
Scooter
Flab
Jelly
Jelly Flab
Flab Jelly
Kitty Combs
Blandishment
Two-To-Too
Flying Disc
Gunpowder
Armory
Scrubby
Scruff
Bird-wanter
Gorilla Cheeks
Climber
Redwood
Shrimp
Blaster

A Real Email

2008-09-09T19:14:00.001-07:00

This is a real email I really sent my real friends (like seven of them):

Hey, guys!

Just want to check in and say I hope you're all enjoying your late summers!

I wanted to tell you about a goal I've made, so you're posted and current about me.

I've been doing some push-ups, like only ten a day, but every single morning, and I'm feeling really good about myself because of that. I'm sure you guys are happy for me and support me in those efforts!

My goal, then, just so you all know, and I don't want anyone to think it's weird or to take it personally, and I want Ben to know it has nothing to do with any perceived slight from him or anything like that, since I've always enjoyed his friendship and talents and generosity, especially at his New Year's parties.

But my goal now is, since I've been doing these pushups ...

Is to beat the crap out of Ben!

In a really, really public way. In front of his wife and two daughters and some of Dina's relatives and also Ben's brother Nick. And in front of Kent and Dan as warnings to them.

And then I'm going to drag him by his ankle from one sorority front-lawn to the next, beating the crap out of him a little bit more at each one.

I'll start with the popular sororities, and by the time we get to the skanky butt-face sororities, he'll be a bloody pulp and I'll throw him into a thorny hedge and leave him there for Dina and his daughters to clean up.

Thanks for supporting me in my goal!

xo Rob!

SUMMER PEST CONTROL!

2008-07-08T06:17:00.000-07:00

Tips for Ridding Your House of Bugs:

1) SILVERFISH hate Michael Bolton, so play The Bolt Man incessantly for a week for any infestation. Vacation at this time so you don't have to listen along. (TIP: To prevent theft while you’re away, epoxy mannequins to those new self-sweeping vacuum cleaners and set their movements to “random,” so invaders will think there’s a cotillion happening in your house.)

2) If ANGELS are nibbling your curtains and bedclothes, play them Otis Redding. They can't abide him, since the beauty of Otis's songs challenges their primacy as the most beautiful things in your home.

3) If you have TERMITES, carve your house beams into scarecrows. This won’t control them, but crows shouldn’t bother you anymore (assuming they had been). Oh, and plant some corn now that the scarecrows are up. You might as well, right?

4) Shake a rain stick at your LADYBUGS. They won’t leave, but you’ll start one hell of a party!

5) Imagine that the COCKROACHES crawling across your tummy as you sleep are Mother Nature’s bug-fingers tickling you (her child!) on your silly, silly belly!

6) If you capture ONE BUG, use A BIGGER BUG to attack and eat it (this is called “holistic” bug control, I bet). Then smash the bigger bug, and voila – you’ve killed two bugs with one smash-gesture!

7) Train your dog to gently cradle BUGS in his jaws out to the woods behind your house, where Fido will release them to take a few “natural” bug steps before he eats them, overwhelmed by canine curiosity at what kind of “cream filling” each bug contains!

8) Try cussing the little pests out – IN SWEDISH!

9) Squat low at the hips, unmoving, unblinking, stark naked, in a threatening, gargoyle position atop your fridge for a fortnight, then emit a horrifying series of sharp, piercing, inhuman shrieks to convey you’ve been trapped in stone for millennium and are only now coming back to life, bent on vengeance and murder. Forget bugs – that’s freaking ME out!

10) Spread peanut butter on your counter for ants. If they don’t eat it, you eat it!

A Bad Day at the Pool

2008-06-09T08:21:00.000-07:00

I totally showed up at the public pool this morning and ripped my swim trunks on the turnstile getting in, because I was showing off for my friend Hammond and pretending to do a kind of airborne somersault over the turnstile, and I made the mistake of trying to rest my weight on the metal bar for a second.

And it totally didn't work out right, because the turnstile turned and didn't support my weight at all, so I kind of fell / lurched / tumbled forward and cracked the back of my head and the top of my back right on the floor and ripped my trunks on this rusty little jagged spot on the side of the turnstile bar.

So now I was all humiliated and scraped up and crying HARD and scared, and my friend Hammond just sailed through whistling that brainless Sting song he always whistles and pretended he didn't know me at all, and started hanging around these kids he barely even knows all day who are WAY cooler than we are (I don't even know why they let Hammond hang out with them) and ignoring me COMPLETELY because I had a bandage on my upper back that had a blood stain on it and I was "benched" all day and forbidden from swimming, which was partly a punishment for my ill-advised show-off somersault stunt and partly out of genuine concern for my health and the sanitation of the pool waters since my mom wasn't coming back to pick up Hammond and me for another two and a half hours.

So I just sat there pathetically on my bench, watching Hammond look all cool and have fun learning tricks off the high dive with his new cool gang (which included a GIRL I have a huge crush on -- Nancy Kightlinger -- who's SUPER-cute and a member of the Pint-Size Panthers Cheering Squadron). Nancy has spurned my love many times before, crushing my hopes mercilessly as often as in five or ten minute increments since I ride her same bus every day.

Anyhow Nancy and these three guys -- Tim, Rodney, and Francis -- were hanging out with Traitor Hammond (that's how I came to think of him) all day like they were the world's best, oldest friends, while I cried and got sun burned and suffered all day on my punishment / recovery bench.

There were three consolations though.

1) Tim, Rodney, and Francis totally wound up de-pantsing Hammond and made him cry and run naked into the locker room. That was great. Nancy thought Hammond was a total scrub-wad after that. You know she did.

2) This new lifeguard, Cherise (I'm not sure that's how you spell it), totally took pity on me and brought me a towel to cover the parts of me that my swimsuit rip kept exposing and kept checking on my bandages and one time even BROUGHT ME AN ICE CREAM SANDWICH, which I normally hate those since the paper wrapping always gives me the creeps somehow, but I ate the damned thing anyway, out of love and gratitude for Cherise's attentions toward me in my time of need. I asked Cherise why lifeguards always wear two swimsuits and she had no answer. So she's no Einstein, clearly, but my love remains pure. And I didn't even badger Cherise too badly -- only once every 15 minutes or so -- since I read this new book about playing it cool with "chicks." I did show her the trick I can do with my navel though, since I felt quite close to her.

3) Even AFTER his public de-pantsing humiliation, Hammond calmly expressed his love for Nancy Kightlinger as they waited in line for the high-dive, and clearly overstepped his bounds, since Nancy immediately told her goon squad -- Tim, Rodney, and Francis -- and they made fun of Hammond so badly (calling him "The De-Pantsed One") that they reduced his turncoat ass to tears yet again and cruelly mocked his love for the rest of the day. So Hammond wound up crying (well, SNIFFLING really bad and PRETENDING not to cry) next to me on my punishment / recovery bench. So by the time Mom showed up to pick us up, we had both been stripped of all dignity and honor and were starting at an equal playing field again -- dead bottom -- so we kind of patched things up and are friends again. I told Hammond not to feel too bad, since I totally would have ditched him too if the situation were reversed. The only thing I DIDN'T tell Hammond was that I would have led Nancy and my three new brutish male friends over to the recovery / punishment bench to throw corn-dogs and ketchup at him to mock him endlessly, and probably nicknamed him something cruel like "The Turnstile Idiot" to boot.

A "Word" Problem!

2008-06-07T18:19:00.000-07:00

Say "Enrique" has to go to a rock concert with six friends.

One of those friends only dates women. Three only date men. Of the other two, one dates both men and women, and one dates neither men nor women, though occasionally expresses interest in androgynous persons, and IS noticeably androgynous him/herself.

If the six of them are traveling and stop for burgers, WHO THE F*** PAYS????

(Answer: Who EVER pays in such a collection of persons? It's the person who loves both men and women. Such persons ALWAYS pay in the end. And NO, there's no double-meaning in "end" there.)

Leave me alone. That's the end of the word problem and the blog entry.

Go live your life. There's nothing else here for you.

Walk away.

NOW.

Florfingle GLOOPINORE!

2008-05-12T14:21:00.000-07:00

Here's a funny joke in a vaguely Nordic language I'm just making up right now.

It may help to picture me dressed as the character in the photograph to the left. Oh -- the joke's about shaving and grooming, as the photograph also indicates. It's a RIOT, as you could tell if you had a way to translate it!

Fleefen shtrugel flavel klantz minxin minxin. Florfingle gloopinore dis playvee ploofle, gorting?

Nay flee quibz shrantzen krantzen, gay floon "nub! nub! bub!"

Doon klein-floozen plantzen kraiger, glik-nard glancen crankouser.

Per shtroopveeflen, koon whilly vartoong, be SPLECK-zhen!

"Be spleck-zhen? Duben roomshtiple FLAVE KRADOOSH pullvinard!"

You Work Too Hard!

2008-05-08T09:11:00.000-07:00

Please sit down. Here. Have some homemade cumin tea. That should calm you and steady your calloused workman hands!

I worry about you, Derrick. You work too hard. You never rest! You never rest your body, even when your mind is in repose!

Stop it! Stop doing supplementary push-ups whilst I speak to you!

It's infuriating!

I don't know why you insist on working your fingers to the bone, when all those other idiots and ethnics (excuse my language) do nothing but lollygag and lean against the truck all day under the hot sun singing incantations from their native lands, while you slave away separating beets by hand and painting the undersides of public bridges all by your lonesome!

Are you even aware that your foreman, Erskine, makes illicit drug deals on the side, getting rich off hashish and claiming credit for YOUR hard work!

YES, Erskine is a handsome, dashing man! But I fail to see how that is relevant right now!

I'm sorry, Derrick! But you must face the truth!

I know you don't like for me to go on so, and I know it's not lady-like of me, but ... things have gotten desperate! You don't stand up for yourself! You're being made a fool of! You're nothing but a goat in monkey's clothing!

Are you a robot? A pack mule? An automaton? Have you no eyes? See ye not what's in front of ye?

I worry about you. I do. You have no more sense than a piece of driftwood with a rusty nail sticking out of it!

And you've grown so ugly!

And your smell! Sometimes you come home and I think a wet alley dog has come back to life and crawled from his shallow cesspool of a grave after a maggoty fortnight!

You stink so! I can barely stand it!

Out! Go sleep in the barn with the pigs and mules ye love so, you horse-faced wood-brained dimwit!

I'll have no more truck wi' ye!

Where Is Bjork Taking Us?

2008-04-23T11:34:00.001-07:00

Doesn’t it feel like Bjork’s so large and we’re so small? I wish I had some idea where she, our musical elf-mother, were taking us next.

I had a dream about her yet again last night. I looked deep into her ice-blue eyes and saw tundra -- salted cod, whale bone, scrimshaw, the future. Everything. She was sledding straight for the Nordic hinterlands, mushing her huskies toward my North Pole, cold blue eyes ablaze. There I was, wearing only a sealskin loincloth and bowling shoes, stumbling across the ice, about to be set upon by howling wolves and scavenging cormorants.

Like everyone, I feel privileged to live in a time when Bjork lives, to share my time on this funny little planet with such a shining, fleshy space-being. Her music makes my spiritual life-journey tolerable as few others could. She is my siren from the north. She navigates the Arctic skies in her magical swan dress.

Herds of thundering caribou rumble through her songs. Icy winds whip through her melodies.

I long to tear her swan-dress off her, swing it around by its dead neck, rewrap my newly naked, frosty banshee Bjork in snowshoes and regal polar bear robes so white they’re almost blue, and have my way with her.

Listening to her tortured proto-musical wailing, I feel so small and vulnerable -- standing on an ice floe wearing a sealskin loincloth, trembling in the salty, stinging polar winds, about to be feasted on by packs of hungry sea lions. But suddenly Bjork's sled appears on the horizon, and her bluish lips and lean, elven neck comes into focus as she approaches.

Suddenly she’s dragging me into her igloo to have her howling way with me. She makes me scour the surface of her body like it's a glacier, stripping trees and mountains as I go.

The magical half-light of the midnight sun illumed our airborne coital acrobatics. We landed finally atop Bjork’s igloo, where a kick-line of penguins cheered our snowy descent, our loins still locked in languorous love-making.

But then it turns into a nightmare, and I become Bjork’s albatross, flying ominously behind her doomed musical schooner all the way to Valhalla.

Yardonia!

2008-04-17T06:24:00.000-07:00

[I did this as a one-man-show monologue. That's me as this character in the photo.]

Welcome to Yardonia, my magical home and Wisconsin’s 134th largest tourist attraction. Please stay with the group and prepare to see things you’ve heretofore only read about in travel brochures.

I am an artist and inventor, and I am driven to make the wondrous creations you see before you just like Tom Jones is driven to make his wondrous musical recordings.

I direct your attention to the canoe I carved entirely from Gouda cheese to navigate that duck pond at the bottom of the hill. Isn’t my canoe majestic, glowing in the late-afternoon sun? Please do not touch it, nor any of my other crafts or inventions, unless I invite you to do so.

Now this small waterfall you see here is a “WPS,” or Water Purifying System, which I created from chicken wire, bottle caps, and my grandmother’s gigantic braziers. She lives in that farmhouse at the top of the hill, and this used to be her yard until I lost my job at Orange Julius down at the mall a while back and colonized it. You may taste the artificially freshened water by cupping your hands in the plastic kiddy pool I placed at the bottom.

It’s good, isn’t it, young fellow? [pat imaginary young fellow on head] Wholesome and pure. 100% potable too. I guarantee it.

OK. Next you’ll notice the cast from television’s Friends, which I sculpted by smashing together fresh field manure and day-old baked goods. As you can see, I used cupcakes to reshape Jennifer Anniston’s sagging breasts, and a baguette to represent Joey’s manhood.

Stand back from that, ma’am! Thank you.

Of course I also make all my own camping gear, so I can live out here year round. This here’s my dome tent, made of old jean jackets and coat hangers, with the Yardonian flag flying proudly atop [pause 15 full seconds to salute]. I cross-stitched that flag from hundreds of argyle sox I purchased from thrift stores with my Guggenheim Genius Grant money.

And hanging from that tree just yonder by a bungee chord is the Slumber Jack 2000 Dangling Cucumber sleeping bag, featuring custom-made crotch vents and Anterior Draft Tube designing. It only came untethered the once, when a 400-pound man and his wife tried to sleep in it one night and came crashing to earth just like adolescent pterodactyls shoved from the nest [make screeching pterodactyl squawks followed by huge crashing sound].

You like the way it hangs there like a cocoon, don’t you sir? Talk to me later and we’ll see if we can’t rent it to you for a few hours. You’ll be surprised at what it can do for your peace of mind. Mmmmmm-mmmm!

Now if you’ll just look around, you'll see you’re standing in the midst of my world-famous pornographic topiary garden, the glory of all Yardonia. That giant female nude there is perhaps my most matour work to date. Only the rhododendron yields such gentle curvature. [pause a full 15 seconds to admire]

Oh, hello, Gramma! Beautiful day, huh? [whispering confidentially to audience so Gramma won't hear] Gramma’s eyes aren’t what they used to be, so I just tell her these’re all Disney characters, instead of lewdly carved bushes and such like. [winking] Shhhhh. OK! Bye-bye, Gramma! Don’t forget to cut off my crusts!

Now, if you’ll arrange your lawn chairs in a semi-circle, I’ll prepare my one-man reenactment of the War of 1812, as advertised in my brochure, or “pamphlet.” Please allow me to warm up first with my Meezner acting exercises.

[accompany the following with simple stretching excercises as scene fades out]

Huh! Huh! Huh! Huh!
Stanis-slavski! Stanis-sleeve-ski!
Uta Hagen! Uta Heegen!
Vyola Spolin! Vyola Spah-lin!
Mizener! Meezner!
Huh! Huh! Huh! Huh!

I Was Cardboard Robot King of the Pool

2008-04-10T21:43:00.000-07:00

So I had a dream last night and I plan to make it a reality.

In the dream it was morning like always and I was entering the public pool on my summer pass, only this morning my swim suit was a giant robot cardboard suit with air holes cut in the head.

And the lifeguards all stood up in their pool-side guard chairs and saluted my ass when I waltzed in (my cardboard had gotten a little dented and bent going through the turnstile, but I poked it back into shape pretty well). I was like the Cardboard Robot King of the pool.

And all day I got free corndogs and snow cones from the snack bar, and also if fellow swimmers were nice to me instead of jerks like usual I could talk the concessionaire Ryan into giving them a free corndog. And also I got to expel anyone I hate from the pool, which was almost everyone, actually, and was totally fun since they had to watch me from the parking-lot side of the fence, and they couldn't pummel me for expelling them which ordinarily they'd totally do, but had to think of kind deeds to perform toward me and lovely gifts to deliver to me in a pitiful attempt to have me release them from their exile from the pool.

Oh, and the best part was, you know how every hour they have a 10-minute rest period where all humans must leave the pool? (Which is where a lot of trouble usually happens for me, incidentally, since I often sneak a little last-second dive back into the pool and have been known to go for breath-holding records underwater while the lifeguard's scream at me to exit the pool.) In my dream, the rest-period system DOESN'T APPLY TO ME. I'm the only one allowed to swim for that ten minutes.

And that's when I do my cardboard robot tricks, like jumping right off the top of the slide, instead of sliding down it properly, which the slide is WAY high up, since we have a twist slide that's actually really cool and scary and high, which little kids sometimes panic and won't go down even though they've waited in line and climbed the entire ladder to go down it, so then a life guard has to go up there and escort the little wuss-face back down the ladder all slow and backwards, usually to the sounds of me taunting from below, and the young child is disgraced and humiliated and mocked and shamed and shunned, if not outright beaten or made to beat themselves with their own small hands by an older kid playing the ole' "Why are you HITTING yourself?" game.

But for that 10-minute rest period in my dream, all the girl life guards had to come out with floating trays and feed me and ME ALONE my free concession-stand delicacies while I told them stories of my heroism and good grades and popularity until "All Swim" resumes (except for the exiles still looking in jealously through the fence from the parking lot).

So I plan to actualize this dream and make it concrete by crafting a cardboard suit via pizza boxes and other boxes and PCB tubing for the joints and tin foil for a hat. I made a prototype suit this afternoon and plan to test-run it in the bathtub tonight before debuting it tomorrow at the pool.

The only thing I'm scared about is that at the end of my dream the cardboard caught fire when an exile threw a match at me and I ran home screaming in terror and pain.

We got humiliated BAD at Kone Buddies.

2008-04-09T16:55:00.000-07:00

The most disgusting thing happened on our way to the pool today and you won't even believe it.

Me and my friend Darren got sprinkle cones at Kone Buddies right next to the pool and since Darren has a paper route he PAID because no one else will play with him because he's terrible at games and he cries a lot, so I'm the only one who will be seen with him. I'm barely any better off than Darren though because everyone makes fun of and beats me up a lot because I'm a spaz and I have a huge mouth and I'm always running from fights and crying and instigating everyone by falling in love with the most popular girls and trying to kiss them and everything.

So Darren and I are eating sprinkle cones and I start calling this teenage guy with a tattoo of an eagle (though it looked more like a pigeon, which is one of the things I smarted off about) all these mean names like "stupid hunky" and "grit-face" and "scuzz-master," only the scuzzy teenager was standing just far enough away and I wasn't looking at him and was just talking to Darren the whole time, so it took the scuzz-blaster a while to cop on that he was the object of my cutting commentary.

But then the scuzz teen got wise because Darren was laughing too hard and actually I kid you not PEED HIS BEIGE SWIM TRUNKS he was laughing so hard at me mocking this grit just out of the grit's hearing (oh, btw, the grit dude was wearing--get this OVERALLS WITH NO SHIRT UNDERNEATH and NO SHOES OR SOCKS, and there were motor oil stains all over the overalls from having to work to abate his family's poverty).

So the grit man gets wise and turns his gritty, muscled self around and gives us a stare challenge, and he sees that my idiotic friend Darren has peed his trunks laughing, and the grit says "Nice peeing, baby pee man!" And then he walks up to us and says "You weren't makin' fun o' ME perchance, was yis?"

And I barely had time to be surprised that such a caveman could come up with the word "perchance" than he grabbed both mine and Darren's wrists at the same time and smashed our sprinkle cones RIGHT INTO OUR FACES and humiliated us in front of the Kone Buddies staff, one of which is this older girl I totally have a crush on and pass love poems to every day before I go to the pool. She's fat but my love will not die.

And I'm telling you--we were totally so laden with sprinkles and ice cream in our faces that we could barely stand the shame of everyone's laughing and taunting. And then the grit says "Why don't you pee YOUR pants, just like your sprinkle-cone-face butt-buddy, you stupid little big-mouth fat ass!?"

Which was stupid of him, since I'm so skinny you could fit a wristwatch around my waist, and so I take off sprinting toward the pool entrance, where I found out later the grit had been banned from entering because he doesn't have proper swim trunks, only more stupid greasy overalls that he cut off with some crude farming tool, and I'm yelling, during my sprint, to get revenge at him "I'M ABOUT AS FAT AS YOU ARE GREASY AND STUPID, YOU LOW-LIFE, SKEEZY, PIMPLY ASS FACE!"

And my friend Darren's a FAR slower runner than I am, and I'm not even that fast at all, so the grit caught Darren no problem by the scruff of his neck and held him hostage for like a half hour, taunting him to his grit friends and buying ANOTHER sprinkle cone and smashing THAT one all over Darren's face too, even though to the nameless pimply grit's credit, he let Darren choose the flavor and the sprinkle variety for his second cone-smashing humiliation, and Darren said the grit paid for the second cone, which was nice of him.

Eating in the Pool Got Me Banished!

2008-04-07T17:35:00.000-07:00

Part 1 of 2: The Life Guard Sitting Tower and My Banishment

So the lifeguard totally kicked me out of the pool today for (so they SAID) running when I should have been walking, and also for bringing food into the pool with me (a snow-cone and a corn dog) and splashing and de-pantsing this kid Todd.

So now I totally have to not come to the pool at all, or if I do I have to sit in the penalty box which is right by the life guard's seat and just watch other people swim all day, unless it's a nice life guard like Garret or Pam and they let me swim for a little bit each period.

Also they hate when I wear my white swim trunks because apparently you can see EVERYTHING through them, which I think is funny, so I wear them most days, especially when it's a new life guard working that day, like that new guy Tom or that new Swedish girl Teresa.

But I totally learned just before my banishment how to do a corkscrew off the high dive, only the first time I tried it I leaned too far forward and totally belly-flopped, and everyone laughed at me and taunted me cruelly, which made me withdrawn and angry for a few weeks, which is probably what led to my infractions that got me banished.

I think I wouldn't have gotten kicked out except I put too much ketchup on my corn dogs as a rule anyway, and I guess it looked like blood and this one little kid named Gerald started screaming from terror and fainted and almost drowned, so they blamed me and sought to contain my wildness.

Part 2 of 2: I Get a Reprieve and Anger a Horny Scum Bucket

So finally I got unbanished like three days early when I promised to not bring food into the pool and also apparently my mom knows someone in city government who talked to the man who runs the entire public pool system and they got me a reprieve so I got reinstated.

How's that for luck on my part, huh?

Anyhow, this older boy today was slathering sun lotion all over this girl right by the refreshment stand and I mean he was REALLY working it in, and a crowd totally gathered, and my friend Darren dared me to yell an insult like "WHY CAN'T YOUR MOTHER DO THAT FOR YOU, MISS???" or something, and I took Darren up on that, for fear of being called Chicken.

But what I yelled was, "HEY, SUNTAN LOTION RUBBER-INNER! YOU'RE A SMALL-TOWN LOW-LIFE GOING-NOWHERE GRIT-FACE, AND YOU'LL BE LUCKY TO STAY OUT OF PRISON, LET ALONE GET A JOB IN A MUFFLER SHOP! ALSO, YOU MISSPELLED 'WHITESNAKE' ON THAT TATTOO ON YOUR BACK! FINALLY--BITE ME!"

And I think my words cut too deeply, because he chased me all the way out into the parking lot and all the way into the park. I was FLYING running and hid stealthily under the bridge that's right by the entrance to the park, so the big lotion-rubbing teenager with the muscles and the little leather-strap necklace with wee shells on it didn't find me. But he LOOKED, boy--lemme tell you. He was AFTER my ass.

So I'm questioning now very seriously whether I should show up at the pool tomorrow at all.

Do you think I should?

Thoughts from a Box

2008-04-04T08:29:00.000-07:00

1) I wish my boss would stop asking me to think outside the box. I’m happy in the box. It’s warm in the box. No one can hurt me in the box.

2) They shouldn't call it a search "party." They're no fun at all. Unless you enjoy running around in the woods. Which I actually do. So can I take it back? Invite me! I’ll bring salad! And body bags!

3) Every culture has a shape shifter. I’m ours. See? [*moves belly out and in*]. I have a pornographic version too. Wanna see that? [*starts unzipping fly*]

4) I don’t want Johny Law to come down on me. I want Johny Law to GO down on me. OH NO HE DI'INT!

5) I have a cool job. I authenticate John Madden's underwear for collectors. They’re utterly distinctive: a hint of boysenberry, the faintest musk of wet mule, and a dollop of fresh sour cream.

6) As a young man, I used to pop hymens like plastic bubble wrap.

7) On my mom’s side, I’m Yemeneze-Dutch. On my dad’s, Scotch-Apache.

8) I look into your eyes and I see flocks of geese crapping on my car.

9) My computer’s pretty old. It runs on steam. I have to crank start ‘er in the morning. It has a horn on the side that goes “aOOOOgah.” I have to shovel coal into it all day to keep it running. It doesn’t have a keyboard -- it has a steering wheel. I wear a leather flying helmet when I'm on it. Also goggles and a giant red Amelia Earheart scarf. It’s actually got an original “Emerson, Lake, and Palmer” sticker on the side, so yeah: old.

Why I Done Lefted: A to Z

2008-03-31T11:09:00.000-07:00

Althea stank.

Barbara clung.

Calista went to Indiana.

Deliah bashed my skull with a frying pan, wasting my bacon. Temples heal, but you don’t waste good bacon, baby doll.

Eustice faded away. By the end I could literally see through her.

Faye strayed.

Glenda was more woman than I could handle.

Helen was less woman than I cared to handle.

Irene … did I leave Irene at the mall? Shit.

Jill quit the pill.

Katrina wouldn’t touch my WEINAHHHHH!.

Linda said “TALK to the hand!” constantly, emphasizing TALK, which didn’t make sense. (Like I’d been planning to DANCE to the hand?!?!)

Mandy had impractical kinks. (How was I to secure a cement mixer?!).

Nadine was mean.

Olivia was 50 years my senior, and unable to hop pogo-stick properly.

Prue had huge, ugly Hobbit feet–with chafed, protuberant, angled, knuckly, hairy toes. And she showed the monsters off by wearing flat, sweat-stained, Peppermint Patty Birkenstocks with nasty, rusty buckles. It was nauseatingly erotic and eroding my sexual self-image. I couldn’t get through a movie without unfastening my pants.

Quelle was French and disdained me.

Riona, while romantically boiling, was intellectually tepid. And that’s me being generous.

Sasha found me imbecilic and trifling.

Teresa was too rough, which I was surprised to find was even possible with me. EASY, Teresa!, I’d plead, futilely.

Una wore shapeless smocks, shamefully hiding her fine, sinewy figure.

Vera feared intimacy, though I offered none.

Wanda wandered, plus she slurped her straws LOUD as her ice melted.

Xandra spelled her name pretentiously.

Yolanda moved west, cutting down my wind chimes and breaking my heart.

Zooey was above my station, though my coarse, rutting animalism temporarily intrigued her.

Don't SPEAK the Menu to Me!

2008-03-27T19:19:00.000-07:00

I hate ordering food. I hate it.

If it’s an even somewhat fancy place, you can never tell by reading the menu what the freaking dish is, you know? You grow old and defeated by a string of nonsensical words:

“ …goat cheese fleck carrot braise tofu dust pickled mustard seed olive greens dipped coriander fresh spice cabbage … ZZZZZZZZ … stuffed pepper sauce dill onion roasted salt sea cranberry shallot crusted pineapple spring leaf mound …”

Just TELL ME WHAT THE DISH IS.

“It’s a bowl of noodles, but spicy and oily.” That works.

“It’s ribs.” “It’s fish.” Or “You don’t want it. It’s gross vegetables.”

And don’t SPEAK food to me, for God’s sake. Oh my GOD how I hate when Terrence (“Ivan, sir.”) stands there with his crotch in my ear and his eyes scamping joyously about the peaks and valleys of my table-mate's cleavage and says menu items to us, like he’s a freaking singing skylark bird. For starters, they never say the freaking PRICE when they do that, which should be illegal.

That’s how they get you: They make you feel guilty because this little performance may be the only stage work Michael Flatley here (“Ivan. My name is Ivan, sir.”) will get any time soon, so you order from his spoken-word menu just to convey that you’re enjoying his food-reading mellifluence.

What a whimsical word-ride, Peter! (“Ivan, sir.”) You show your support for their poised showmanship by YES ordering that playful f***ing remoulade quail-scrotum pea-snap parsnip berry cake! Bring it! BRING IT, Darrell! (“Ivan, sir.”) Bring it the f*** out!

But you wanted the fried catfish and corn pudding and mashed potatoes and beer, but now you’re stuck with this WHATEVER. You can’t even remember what you TRIED to order because just as that dish was done being recited, Peter ("Ivan! Ivan!") dances onto his NEXT orated dish, his eyes prowling his other tables to make sure the hostess didn’t skip him again. So you’re exposed as an ignoramus when you ask: “I’m sorry, Mikhael-Alesandro (‘Ivan, sir.’), but what did you say that second thing was again? The thing with the … celery-root shavings, did you say?”

And once you’ve forced LeRon’s ass (“Ivan’s ass, sir.”) to recite the damn thing back to you, you HAVE to order it.

And a half hour later, you’re frowning at a single pea leaf that someone wilted by squirting lemon juice at. (“I didn’t even know peas HAD leaves, Mom!” You’re eating with your mom, by the way. Which makes the cleavage-looking that much worse, right?)

And it costs $28.

So you think, I’M GOING TO KFC!!!

Which has its own problems, because HELLO, just because you don’t want us to call it “KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN” anymore, we … you know … REMEMBER.

What the hell do they THINK we think "KFC" stands for?

Kale For Christians? Kronkite Fact Checking? Kangaroo Freeze-Cicles? Karen Fairchild Chilton? (my first girlfriend, who stole—yes, STOLE—my virginity)

It infuriates me.

But at least they have nice biscuits and they don’t trick you into eating a single $28 pea leaf.

Funny-Looking People: TAKE A HIKE!

2008-03-25T18:55:00.000-07:00

My pet peeve today is all these unattractive people.

Doesn’t it annoy you when they want to be friends with you? They come around with their sappy faces all hang-dog, begging to be shined upon by the handsomeness- and beauty-rays that you and your good-looking friends emit.

These Funny-Looking People (“FLP”s, or “Flips”) practically have to wear sunglasses to shade their eyes from our beauty, since they themselves are so unaccustomed to its strength and proximity!

I think it’s God’s will that Flips be aligned with other Flips, so their Flip gene pool doesn’t taint our Studly gene pool.

You know? I’m not trying to be rude, but it’s economic as well. Flips cost me money! I have to have them airbrushed out of photos that I look really good in, if they’re standing next to me! That gets really expensive!

Plus I’m an entertainer, and it doesn’t behoove me professionally to be associated with people who, I’m sorry, but their faces look like donkey butts!

It just makes me furious.

I’m all for mailing them cards and gifts and calling them on the phone when I have free time. (My number would come up “Unknown Sender” on their cells, of course. And when do I have free time?! As IF!).

But God grant me physical distance from such persons! Frickin’ flips! Am I wrong? I think not!

All I’m saying is: Respect my boundaries. I think hanging around me should be treated like trying to get into a really exclusive dance club. If I don’t smile at you, that’s my velvet rope that I’m not opening. That’s me as the tough, smile-free 345-pound door-man with a tattoo of a dead bird on my neck and a super-tight black polo shirt and maybe a Mohawk haircut and definitely a walkie-talkie or, even better, some ear-device I talk to my manager through (even though the thing’s probably not even hooked up!).

I’m not making eye contact with you for a reason, Bub. I’m watching those glamorous people emerge from that black Hummer with the tinted windows across the street.

Wait! Is that David Spade!? That’s David Spade!! My God!

Do you see what I’m saying? Stuff like that. Spade gets right in without paying the door charge, and you’d better step lively out of his damn way. Get me?

You have to stand there and pretend it doesn’t bother you that I refuse to make eye contact with you.

Just Flip off. Aren’t there clubs for people like you?

All I’m saying is, don’t bring me down to your level, looks-wise, by standing so damn close. You pierce my bubble of being securely surrounded by other good-looking people exclusively. And I resent it more and more with each whiff I’m forced to smell of your bologna-like breath.

And you might want to get that mustard stain on your shirt dry-cleaned.

Made you look!

Elder Witchlings: ARISE!

2008-03-24T19:43:00.000-07:00

Elder witchlings, eye summon thee!
Tis I, the tree dweller, eater of those mosses and lichens that maketh other imbibers wretch!

Witchlings, cometh!
Witchlings, I beseech thee, in the name of the moon!
In the name of Pan! In the name of Diana, moon hunter!

Reveal ye’re bitchly, witchly selves and I to you will give gifts!
A gold-spun horse-hair purse! A metal pig with living fleshly entrails!
A soup made of fresh virgin human meat, cut to cubes!

To thee I will give that which ye demand!
Corn flakes! Elixirs! Silver dust poured o’er goat drool!

Cometh! Cometh!
Midnight is nigh! I am high! You are bi!
Bye the bye and sigh the sigh!

Diggith ye ye’re way out of yer day graves!
Hide not yerselves but show thee! Show thee!
Show thee to me and eye will give ye such pleasures as ye only ha' dreamed on!

We'll dance on each other like hoppin’ trampolines!
I’ll dance around ye like a slow-leapin’ squirrelly,
And give ye a taste o’ me life-blood by bitin' yer lips!

Oooooh come out!
Do! ‘N plee wi’ mee!
PLEE WI' MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

These Young People!

2008-03-18T11:11:00.000-07:00

I'm tired of all these young people and their "hooey"! They listen to their loud tuba music and watch "The Forrest Gump Movie" on triple-repeat and they don't read the bible by tallow-candlelight the way I used to!

And they seem preoccupied with lewd relations.

Why when I was a young 'un, all I thought about was joining the US Senate, and being upright and farming. It was soooooooooo important to me to feed them chickens and water that corn successfully, you see, so that I could get tuh schoolin' 'n' tuh' learnin', so that one day I could be a YOU ESS SENATOR!

None of this hoppin' around on the hoods of fancy pick-'em-up trucks with girls wearin' revealin' bikinis fer me!

In my spare time (I didn't have much!) I'd whittle me'self a toothpick (that was my one vice!) and dream of me-self as a Senator!

Oh, the glory of settin' up thar in the halls o' Congress, readin' the details o' complicated legislation!

And once in a loooooooooooooong while, specially along come the time I started turnin' into a Pubescent ... I'd fantasize about ...

(I blush tuh tell ye.)

About ... maybe wearing an English-style powdered wig, like the venerables did in olden times!

Why then I get the heat-rash comin' on!

None of these young people today and their "Arthur Fonzarellis" and callin' people "jive turkeys" and undulatin' their hips all animalistic-like! None of that for me when I was a whelp!

Reverence for the elders! That's what I had! In their Congressional chambers! Where the fornication was unfettered!

Wait -- oooh -- wait! I said somethin' jest now I dinna mean and should'na said!

I admitted it!

I admitted my desires for LUSTFUL ESCAPADES in the Senate chambers!

With my be-wigged underlings wearin' no underthings no less!

FIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I made it through an entire lifetime not revealin' them deepest, darkest thoughts to no one, and now I stand exposed before man and God in all my horrid lustfulness!

MIGHTY THOR, YE CANNOT BRING YOUR SMITING SWORD DOWN UPON ME SPEEDILY ENOUGH!

I WHILT DO IT ME-SELF!

'Cept I'm too old and infirm to pick up yonder pitchfork and crash it down to impale me daft skull.

Oh well. Another day lookin' at the TV me ears can't hear no more, flashin' pictures of People's Court and me dreamin' o' the lustful things I can't no longer even do to them Rude Rustics on the screen.

"Hamster Schwarzenneger"! Ha ha!

2008-03-15T16:59:00.000-07:00

Ha ha! I was just thinking how funny it would be for a hamster to be a weight lifter and "gym rat"! (I thought that BEFORE I googled this picture, thank-you-very-much.)

The little guy would totally use Q-tips to do curls with, and have a TV in front of his hamster wheel where he'd watch pictures of cheese, or whatever it is hamsters eat! (I think sometimes they eat their young, don't they? Seems I remember my sister's hamsters eating their young when we were kids. Not that that would make you question God's existence or anything, right?)

And you could put little sweatbands on the hamster's wrists and head! With little Adidas logos or whatever!

And the hamster's name could be "Hamster Schwarzenegger"! Or "Hamster Lalane" or "Charles Atlas, But a Hamster" or "Richard Sim-hamster-mons"! Or ... "Jane Fonda"!

It would be so cute! You could make it a little towel to wipe up with afterwards and make a little steam room for it, like at our old gym where homosexual trysts were apparently a big problem, since they were always putting a sign up outside it that said something like:

"THIS STEAM ROOM IS FOR ALL PATRONS! PLEASE KEEP A TOWEL AROUND YOU AND RESPECT YOUR FELLOW PATRONS' RIGHT TO USE THE FACILITY! IF WE GET ANY MORE COMPLAINTS WE MAY HAVE TO RESTRICT ITS USE!"

So maybe you could make a miniature version of that sign for outside your hamster's little steam room, you know?

And you could give him little pilates and yoga classes, and make him Zen out to the meditation cool-down afterwards!

And bark at him to do more pull-ups!

Ha! And you could name him "Oprah Winfrey's Personal Trainer, Who You Don't See Around Nearly So Much Now That Oprah's Put The Weight Back On, Do You?"

And -- and -- and ... you could, I dunno. Make him a little gym-rat membership card.

Ah, screw it. This is all getting way too complicated.

I just feel like the fun's gone out of it.

Plus I have to go do my taxes.

I don't blame you. I blame me.

"Are YOU a Dental Chicken?"

2008-03-13T16:23:00.000-07:00

So let's see if I can explain this ad I keep seeing on a bus-stop bench in Venice, California.

It's a guy, around 55 years old, holding a baby of a different race, right? Like a 3-year-old maybe. And the guy doesn't have a dentist's white jacket on. He's just holding this kid who's clearly not his biologically.

(I'm NOT discussing the photo accompanying this blog post. I just like the photo you're looking at, and it's damn thematically related.)

The pitch accompanying the bus-stop bench photo:

"ARE YOU A DENTAL CHICKEN?"

And then the phone number and address of a dentist's office.

Got it?

A 55-year old grinning man, holding a 3-year-old kid who's clearly not his genetically, beneath the slogan "ARE YOU A DENTAL CHICKEN?", accompanied by some dentist's name and address.

So ...

1) Is the man in the photo trying to tell us that the baby is a "dental chicken"?

2) Is the man himself a dentist -- our prospective dentist? Or is he the primary caregiver of this "dental chicken" child?

3) Is the man an out-of-uniform dentist, perhaps, holding up a "dental chicken"? If so, why doesn't he ask, "Is this a dental chicken?" And how do we know, anyway?

4) Do "dental chickens" have teeth? Or ... doesn't it sound like the ENTIRE CHICKEN is "dental," or made of ultra-hard calcium? Like a "steel pot" that's all steel?

5) Is the man perhaps asking the 3-year-old baby ITSELF if it's a "dental chicken"?

6) Why do I keep putting quotation marks around "dental chicken"? Is there a time when I'll stop?

7) Or wait! Is the man demonstrating the cure -- holding up a baby of indeterminate ethnicity -- for HIS OWN "dental chicken-ness"?

8) Is he kind of asking US, ACCUSINGLY, if WE are "dental chickens" and ... threatening to throw the baby at us if we are?

9) Or maybe threatening to enact the dentistry that WE need -- ON the baby? Like threatening to make the baby the scapegoat for our dental cowardice?

10) Where did the man get the baby?

11) Is that man the dentist? I think maybe the man is the dentist. But ... how can I be sure?

12) Maybe WE'RE the askers in the situation, asking the man if HE'S a "dental chicken," since that's what "dental chickens" do -- hold up babies. Is anyone still listening?

13) The man's grinning his ass off. I don't know if that's relevant. But the baby looks confused. I don't like this situation one bit.

14) Maybe the ad's trying to determine which of several varieties of chicken we are, like saying "Are you from New York?", only "Are you a dental chicken?" Maybe I should spray-paint back: "No. I'm a SURGICAL chicken. And I don't appreciate being lumped in with you less-educated DENTAL chickens, OK? So cut it out. And that baby looks like its diaper is full."

15) So in that scenario, I look down on "dental chickens" as lower status. Like I'd accept a "dental chicken's" partial country-club dues for pool-and-court privileges, but no WAY is that "dental chicken" eating in our beloved club's more-exclusive dining quarters.

16) Don't you half-suspect that the man's trying to distract us with a misleading question and a red-herring baby while he embezzles all the money from the dentist's office in question?

17) It's quite a dare, in any event: "Are you a dental chicken?" Like your very first lover taunting you by asking "Are you afraid of a little poontang?" You know? That's the tone of it anyway.

I'm Guana Enjoy You!

2008-03-12T09:03:00.000-07:00

Hey, guyyyyyyy, just RELAX, ok? Sex is NATURAL. Sex is FUN. The iguanas in my terrarium are just OBEYING NATURE. Why are you making excuses to leave the room and stop watching them? They're not mammals. They're not like us. They experience no shame or embarrassment. They don't realize they're putting on an iguana sex show for us, you dig?

Why don't you slip into something more comfortable? I left you that terrycloth robe on the hook outside the sauna. It's purple, and I know how much you like purple.

Oh, yeah. The female iguana has a sub-abdominal aperture to receive the male's seed. It's completely natural!

Oh wait -- that's my favorite Leonard Cohen song! Sorry it skips in the middle there. But I'm a man of nature that way. I like "natural" things like a skip in a record. I find it so much more free and nude than these technologically "advanced" CDs and MP3 recordings, with their soulless, tinny reverberations.

Could you scratch my back?

Do you find my skin cool and scaly like the back of the male iguana there, as his lizard skin roils and undulates methodically over his impressive back and shoulder muscles?

Would you care to rub some oil into my back? I only use virgin olive oil.

Do you like the picture my shoulder makes with my pink terrycloth robe fallen at an angle half-way down my own back?

I'll bet you do.

I'll bet you do!

Ooh! The tea is ready!

I'll be back -- just let me crush those bay leaves and maybe add splash of burgundy.

Oh, look! The tea kettle is whistling in perfect time to the culmination of the iguanas' coupling!

And to the third verse of Leonard Cohen's best song, the one about the woman down by the water or whatever!

Horse Sense

2008-03-11T15:06:00.000-07:00

I like to start each day with a viewing of a majestic horse.

Then I creatively visualize for 45 minutes about all the stuff I want in life.

Then I exercise for an hour, vigorously

Except before and after that I do warm-up then cool-down yoga, with shivasana at the end where I clear my head.

Also I dream-journal every day, and do my morning pages of free-writing for my Artist's Way course of creative recuperation I'm doing.

Then I chop wood for the evening's fire.

Then I reproduce some Historic Landmark in clay, to gaze at and contemplate while I prepare my Food for the Week, which includes a base of rice, then lots and lots and lots of lunch meat and the occasional cherry tomato and tarragon sauce.

Then I meditate.

Then I soak in the bath with my scented candles all going at maximum levels.

Then I go out and work on my Styrofoam half-unicorn-half-Larry-King sculpture that I'm making in my uncle's garage.

Then I have to be at work for a while putting the handles on buckets and also massaging travelers in the nearby youth hostel.

Then I'll come home in the afternoon for some nice barbecue with my neighbor Jeff, who's an expert on Asian history, so he'll just talk and talk and talk and talk about Japanese woodblock prints and the Ming Dynasty and how it apparently invented latex.

Though I may have dreamed this last detail, since I'm usually asleep in his kids' plastic lawn pool by this time.

I just ... I just have all this ANGER, you know?

*breaks down weeping*
*weeping for the beauty of the horse photo at the top of this blog*
*weeping for the CHILDREN, dammit! for the CHILDREN!*

Robert’s Plants: This Is War

2008-03-10T13:36:00.000-07:00

I feel like ivy is this trick plant. You think you’re raising this nice, stationary, predictable thing, then in the night it strangles all your loved ones.

Plants can be so cruel, and I think cowards are afraid to talk about that. There was that mean plant with the great voice in “Little Shop of Horrors” that Rick Moranis raised, and I think that plant taps into our collective, primal fear of our leafy, photosynthesizing enemies.

Ooh and I recently saw tumbleweeds in the American West, and they were the most lonesome looking things. I felt sorry for … well, not sorry for them, but sorry for me looking at them and feeling so lonesome. I thought to myself:

“Ooooooh, I’m a lonesome cowboy!
Lookin’ at a tumbleweed!
I’m a LONESOME COWBOY!
Ridin’ on a LONESOME STEED!”

Then I went on to think:

“I’m a lonesome cowboy!
Ain’t see’d a woman for MONTHS!
I’m a lonesome cowboy!
Horny as a corner-sittin’ DUNTH!”

“Thought” may be the wrong word there. I kind of sang all that to myself, looking at that goddamn tumbleweed.

Where was I? Ah yes, the venality of plants.

Yes, they will kill you as soon as look at you. Make no mistake.

In fact, I remember reading in a book by that histrionic Annie Dillard that in the jungle some damn army or other used to tie its prisoners in place horizontally by their wrists and ankles over some fast-growing bamboo, then carve the tops of the bamboo growing beneath the victims into spikes, and the bamboo grew so fast it would slowly impale your sorry ass.

That’s why when I eat salad I like to imagine it crying. I like to think of it as a cousin of that spiked bamboo who now has to pay for the sins of its bamboo kinsman.

And I find that even just around my apartment an awesome way to jam the central nervous systems of my houseplants is to tell them they look like really good salad material and then just sprinkle some croutons or sunflower seeds or bacon bits onto their leaves, so they think they’re about to be my lunch. Or I’ll leave a small to-go container of creamy ranch on the soil in their pot, so they look down and panic. Just to show them who’s boss.

Me. It’s me who’s boss over them.

If I’m really, REALLY angry at one of my plants (DARRELL, say), I’ll dress as a waiter and grind pepper onto its leaves, and say “Say ‘when,’ sir!”

The plants literally shake with fear.

If I shake its base a little bit anyway it seems like it’s shaking.

Rubbery, Grippy, Nubby, Chewy, Spongy.

2008-03-09T11:23:00.000-07:00

1) eels
2) calamari
3) puffer fish
4) polpetti (Italian for octopus)
5) sun-baked earthworms
6) jellyfish
7) shower mats
8) post-surgical prosthetic breasts
9) spiky rubber backpacks
10) marshmallow circus peanuts
11) soft rubber tentacled yoyo toys
12) Gator Grips
13) caulk
14) sun-dried, graying pineapple skins
15) couch cushion innards
16) brains
17) turgid wieners
18) that sopping Ethiopian dinner bread that's also your plate
19) actual live sponges
20) things of Nerf
21) sponge cake
22) balloons coated in a thin, squeaky layer of latex rubber-dust

Cat Stevens "Knows a Lot of Fancy Dancers," huh?

2008-03-08T19:39:00.000-08:00

So I'm supposed to be ALL IMPRESSED that CAT STEVENS "knows a lot of fancy dancers"?

Why is that such a big deal? He doesn't even say HOW he knows them. And he says it so matter-of-factly, in such a passing manner, like the rest of us will be all impressed and give him things.

Like ... give him things he would like, you know? Like a fancy braidworked leather guitar strap for his acoustic modern-day poet stringed siren-song maker, and the strap has these beautiful inlaid beads and little glinty diamanelles, and even some turquoise so it looks Southwestern.

Just because Cat knows a lot of fancy dancers I'm going to buy him one of those straps? Or commission one of these babies to be made for him? That's gotta be like 150 bucks minimum, to get one fancy enough to please Mr. Acoustic himself, Mr. "Saturday Night and I Ain't Got Nobody!" (except for his gd FANCY DANCERS, huh?)

Which is it, Cat Man? Why "ain't" you got nobody on a Saturday night?

Why don't you just PHONE UP ONE OF YOUR FANCY DANCERS, huh?

What happened to THAT little brag you tried to pawn off on our unsuspecting asses?

One of your fricking fancy dancers is sure to love that glamorous new guitar strap I made for your ass, huh? Probably get you a little peace-nookie out of the deal.

You unappreciative singer-songwriter, sitting there all splayed-legged with your fancy blue matching shirt-and-pants outfit with the BOTTOM of your shirt unbuttoned enough to show off your lame-o peace-sign belt buckle.

Who unbuttons the BOTTOM of his shirt to be sexier? HellLLOOO? Can you unbutton the TOP of your shirt, Cat?

Though I have to admit, your skinnyness and your open body language draws the viewer of your photograph into your dreamy face and aura quite effectively.

THAT'S what you SHOULD have sung, instead of "I know a lot of fancy dancers" -- you should have sung:

"i have a skinny bod and blue suit!

and i know, the rest of my beard is a mess ...

MESS, MESS, MEH-EH-EH-EH-essssss ...."

You know how those lyrics go.

I mean that's mean. Now I'm being unnecessarily mean to the Cat Man. Maybe I've been too hard on Cat this whole post.

I have to admit Cat's face looks super-gentle and poetic here.

His face -- his face has seen so much too, you know? In his life.

How can we meet some of these fancy dancers, Cat?

Suddenly I'm not mad at Cat at all. Suddenly I just love Cat.

THANK YOU. THANK YOU FOR THE MUSIC, CAT STEVENS.

Though he was bragging pretty bad about his damn fancy dancers, you have to admit.

But I'm over it now. We can be friends again now.