Please read this. All I can say is that for whatever good it does, follow the advice at the end of the article. Just to explain why I’m posting this, Daren is the brother of an old friend. Daren and his family are good people. I can’t imagine what they’re going through and it upsets me to try to imagine.
Tragedies like this happen hundreds of times a year to hundreds of families in Philadelphia. It’s been said so many times by so many people, but it’s got to stop.
So this weekend I decided to kick back and relax out in Amish country. The whole trip was precipitated by a craving for sliced ham, pickled eggs and tapioca pudding. Sometimes there’s nothing better.
Once I was full though, my thoughts turned to sex.
I did the usual, cruising the streets of Paradise, PA, whistling at Amish girls and looking all flashy in my motorized vehicle, but for some reason I wasn’t having any luck. Cruising for Mennonites can be rough. Full on Amish girls are even harder. In a change in strategy, I drove down to Route 23. I’d had some success there in the past. One time I met this inbred dairy wench that could churn butter back to cream.
But anyway, after being struck down in Churchtown and neighboring Goodville I drove over to Blue Ball. I hadn’t run into Blue Ball since high school. I’d even forgotten the uncomfortable feeling I used to get from Blue Ball. But there I was. Even though it was a little unpleasant, it was the biggest town around. Getting through Blue Ball was my best chance at scoring so I stopped at the corner bar and ordered a drink. They had Bud, Bud Light and Miller High Life, so I ordered whiskey.
The Blue Ball bar was a desperate place full of desperate men. It didn’t take long to see that life in Blue Ball weighed these people down. The men shifted uncomfortably on their stools, looks of frustration on their faces, nursing their shitty beers in some horrible Blue Ball limbo.
By contrast, the women were surprisingly upbeat. Whatever caused the throbbing, gut wrenching anxiety in Blue Ball, it only affected the men. I chatted with a nice brunette named Cindy. We talked about her hopes, dreams and some other crap. Things were going great and when we hit the dance floor, I thought I’d be busting through that Blue Ball barrier in no time.
Cindy told me to meet her later that night at her house in Intercourse. She promised me apples from her garden and fresh baked corn muffins. She slipped her number and address into my back pocket and told me to meet her at 9PM.
And that’s when things went wrong.
After finishing my last whiskey, I slipped out to my car, ready to hit the road. I felt fine, but for some reason my court ordered breathalizer said that I was too “drunk” to drive. It was bullshit, but I couldn’t start my car without a clean readout. I slammed the dashboard with both fists and fell out of the car into the gravel parking lot.
That’s when I realized that it was 8:30PM and I was stuck in Blue Ball with no way to Intercourse. My map told me that the trip was an agonizing 9.5 miles. I decided to run it. The last time I’d been to Blue Ball was for a statewide track meet. I’d run my way out of Blue Ball before and I could do it again. Unfortunately for me, I was a decade out of condition. With the promise of Cindy’s farm grown apples and the assumption that I would have sex with her also, I didn’t care how out of shape I was.
I hit the pavement. With every step, I drew closer to Intercourse, leaving Blue Ball far behind. But unfortunately, with every dry, pounding motion the pain and cramping just got worse. I started to doubt myself. Could I really get from Blue Ball to Intercourse? As I ran, I called Cindy on my cell and told her the problem. It was so hard I said, and I really, really wanted to come. She gave me a deadline of 10PM. After that, she was feeding her muffin to the dog and going to bed.
At 9:40, just 2 miles from Intercourse I buckled over, a cramp freezing my groin. I couldn’t move. That was it and I knew it. I wouldn’t make it to Intercourse. I lay in the shoulder all night, frustration and pain holding me down. Eventually I masturbated and went home.
Taken directly from the Nasa pic of the day site:
Giant jets of subatomic particles moving at nearly the speed of light have been found coming from thousands of galaxies across the universe, but always from elliptical galaxies or galaxies in the process of merging — until now. Using the combined power of the Hubble Space Telescope and other telescopes, astronomers have discovered a huge jet coming from a spiral galaxy similar to our own Milky Way.
Astronomers believe such jets originate at the cores of galaxies, where supermassive black holes provide the tremendous gravitational energy to accelerate particles to nearly the speed of light. Both elliptical and spiral galaxies are believed to harbor supermassive black holes at their cores.
The discovery that the jet was coming from a spiral galaxy dubbed 0313-192 required using a combination of radio, optical and infrared observations to examine the galaxy and its surroundings. Nearly a billion light-years from Earth, 0313-192 proved an elusive target, however. Subsequent observations support the idea that the galaxy might be a spiral but still were inconclusive.
Image Credit: NASA, NRAO/AUI/NSF and W. Keel (University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa)
The other day I got my 10-year high school reunion invite in the mail. That’s a story in itself and I’ll write just a few words about its overwhelming incompetence. Apparently my high school – Philly’s Central High – paid a company called “Reunion Central” to put together this magical evening. RC certainly didn’t dazzle my old school with their cutting edge website. Please, please click this link: [link]
Apparently their graphic design department isn’t so hot either. The flier I got in the mail looks like something put together by a promising group of mentally handicapped 3rd graders with an ‘89 Mac and a B&W Xerox. Actually, it looked a lot like the website: [link]
Obviously RC’s strengths aren’t in marketing, but maybe they put on a good event. Hosted at Dave and Busters for a mere $56, I can go observe just how severely the potential once held by last generations next generation has been crushed under the weight of social conformity.
I won’t be going.
But moving on to the point of this post, the reunion didn’t make me feel old. What made me feel old was looking up a long lost friend on myspace earlier today. While browsing through his friends, I saw another familiar name.
But first a little background.
Middle School isn’t fun for anyone and sometimes kids are mean. My friends were the social outcasts. We were too weird and lazy to be nerds. We were too nerdy and weird to be cool. Even if we didn’t necessarily like each other, we stuck together out of necessity. Eventually we got to high school and became cooler than anyone. I have no idea how that works.
But during middle school we were devastatingly mean. I wholeheartedly admit the shame that I feel for my behavior. As social bottom feeders, we tore others down where we could. As sexual maturity began to cloud our perception we – in our confusion – targeted the outcast girls with our ridicule. For example, even though we became pretty good friends in high school, we proudly put the fat girl on medication. Seems that a 200 lb. 13-year-old can’t take constant, vicious, personal attacks about her appearance. We joked about it years later.
While browsing myspace today, I didn’t run across the fat girl. It was someone else from middle school. It was the flat-chested girl. Back then she was thin, snotty and poorly developed. She always made fun of us, so one day when a tissue may or may have not have fallen out of her bra and we smelled blood and attacked. For the rest of middle school, there were relentless verbal assaults regarding her lack of breasts and the tissue incident.
Being a late bloomer, she eventually filled out to Coors Light commercial standards and through high school, always made a point of having us notice her freshly grown breasts. But unlike the fat girl she never forgave us. Considering that the girls were at least as mean to us as we were to them, that’s a shame… but still perfectly understandable.
My memory of her is still in middle school. In my mind, she hasn’t aged. When I search for an image in my head, middle school is what appears. That’s why today, when I saw her myspace profile pic with her lying back with a newborn infant sleeping on her chest, I felt old.
Of course I’m not old, but seeing a person transform in an instant from prepubescent middle schooler to mature and happy mother is a strange and new experience.
That’s all for now.
(John) Kerry, all the while attempting to continue his address, is drowned out by the man’s screams and the clicking of the electrical gun.
I didn’t make this, but hats off to whoever did.
Today’s tile news comes from a small town just outside of Indianapolis, Noblesville, Indiana. Since at least last December, a copycat Toynbee tiler has been hard at work making and gluing tiles all over town. Here’s to you, copycat tiler. Way to keep the movement going:
38th & Illinois
Location Unknown
For Days I’ve had Jan Terri’s “Losing You” stuck in my head. Who is this person? Brian Levake of Jammed Online can tell you better than me. Read it before watching the videos:
For anyone who has ever feared success, or had your personal dreams cut short by rabid insecurities, needs to take a close, careful look at the career of one Ms. Jan Terri.
If you’ve never heard of Jan Terri, don’t be alarmed, as most of the country hasn’t. But for a couple of years in the late 1990’s/early 2000’s, her star burned the brightest in the world of Outsider music, especially in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
Details of her beginnings in the music business are sketchy at best; all that is known for sure was that she, while working as a limo driver, used to peddle (to her customers no less) VHS tapes containing music videos for several of her songs, including the celestial ‘Journey to Mars’, the country swing of ‘Baby Blues’ and her pants-crappingly terrifying ode to Halloween, ‘Get Down Goblin’. The videos, and especially the songs, in relation to contemporary music, are staggeringly horrible. In fact, the videos were horrible in comparison, artistically and technology-wise, to nearly every video that was available during MTV’s formative years.
Yet, upon viewing them, you begin to become drawn to them in a way that you can’t look away from a messy car accident. Oh, and for the record, Jan Terri is, how shall we say it, umm, not a terribly easy on the eyes. She goes about four feet 10, and let’s just say we aren’t dealing with Ms. America in any way, shape, or form.
So why was I and countless others drawn to her art? I surely cannot tell you, other than they are perfect videos to play at parties, as they are so pathetic and half-assed, that nearly anyone with a camera could make something better. Which was the philosophy that former broadcasting great
Harry Caray used when explaining why he sang ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame’ during the seventh inning—he felt that the crowd could relate easily to him, as nearly everyone in attendance could sing better than him.
VHS tapes of her videos began to spread like wildfire, especially around the advertising/media companies in the aforementioned cities. Any company that had access to tape dubbing machines were running off copies of the Jan Terri video collection, and thus her electric rise to super stardom
began. My first personal encounter was when she agreed to play at the Christmas party for the post-production house that I was interning for. And it was unbelievable. As opposed to going through all the trouble of having a band, Terri essentially sang over her own cd through a PA system,
pausing only to play a ‘guitar solo’ on an inflatable guitar, or to throw miniature candy bars during her rendition of ‘Journey to Mars’, which literally sent this pro-Terri crowd into a maelstrom of dancing, screaming, and many spilled drinks.
Apparently, America was listening, as the next thing I know, I get a phone call from a friend who was a confidant of Terri’s. He called to explain to me that by some fluke, Marilyn Manson had gotten a hold of her tape, and had asked her to play for his birthday party in LA, to which she happily
accepted. Which led to her actually opening up for Marilyn Manson at Chicago’s enormous Aragon Ballroom. During this period, which was roughly 1998, there were at least 2 different documentaries being shot about the amazing rise of Jan Terri, and her full-length debut ‘High Risk’ was also
finally available for public consumption. There were also several bootleg copies of her playing a set of her songs, quasi-karaoke style at her father’s bar in suburban Chicagoland.
The last time that I ever saw Jan Terri in person was at a bar opening in Chicago; apparently, her 15 minutes were up, as where before, people would be screaming along with her, echoing the lyrics to ‘IRS’ or ‘Rock and Roll Santa’. This crowd, however, ranged from unimpressed to downright rude.
It was such a heartbreaking scene to take in, as Jan Terri is surely one of God’s gentlest creatures, and someone who should be admired for pursuing her dreams, despite the lack of looks or talent.
And then, that was it—until I turn on the ‘Daily Show’ one day, where they did a feature on Jan Terri, essentially making her look ridiculous, for which they are terrific at. It’s endearing, at least, when she does it to herself; but when those smarmy cocksuckers at Comedy Central do it, they just look
like bullies. At any rate, the episode went down as one of the highest rated ‘Daily Shows’ ever, no doubt providing Ms. Terri with some level of validation.
These days, any evidence of the existence of Jan Terri is awfully hard to find. Her official website has been missing for some time, and hardly any web pages mention her, except the ‘Dr. Demento’ type sites that list her along with Wesley Willis as ‘funny’ or ‘weird’ musicians that happened to
share a hometown. But I believe that despite her musical shortcomings and lack of any real ‘star qualities’, Jan Terri proved to us all that with steady and heart-felt determination, we really can achieve anything that we as humans set our mind to. And, personally, I like to think that as she’s driving her limo, or doing whatever it is that she does, that she’s planning her next move, a step no doubt aimed at the superstardom that she has fully mapped out in her mind.
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