A Blog About Pooping

I have in my possession a book that I gave Grandpapa not too long before he died; it is called the Outhouse Papers, by Wayne Erbsen. It is much less dirty than it sounds; it is just a book of facts and Trivia, presumably calculated to the reading speed of the average pooper. I'm not really a toilet reader myself; to me it makes more sense to get in, poop, and then get away from the place where the poop was. (Like Spider Jerusalem, sometimes my poops have to be killed with a shovel) But the book is a good read regardless; I kind of want to read some of the guy's other books. He's just a random banjo playing folklorist that writes touristy drivel but his collection looks impressive.

Here's my favorite joke from this book.

After a long trial the judge came to a decision in a case between a farmer and a railroad company who had hit one of his prize bulls earlier in the week. (Presumably in that America it was actually possible to see the inside of a courtrom in a week. -Your Beloved Editor) The settlement came to half the value of the bull.

In the elevator after the trial the railroad company lawyer and the farmer shared an elevator. The lawyer gloated "Old man, you've just been had. The engineer was asleep at the wheel and the fireman was drunk in the caboose. I just bluffed you."

The farmer grinned and said "Well, sonny, I had my doubts about winnin' this case too, when that bull come wanderin' up to the house this mornin."
Not a bad book on the whole although I think he might have been running out of material at some point; the book advertises itself as country humor and trivia, but then it has an animal facts section that includes camels and elephants and dung beetles and shit. And I mean animal facts are great, but I don't get the connection. There are two kinds of animals to a redneck-light meat and dark meat. All other facts are, indeed, too trivial to be trivia.
Trivial musings aside...

POOP

Hey, the title says a blog about pooping. You clicked it, you sick fuck.

Heh heh heh. Poop.

Father's Day Thoughts

So today is Father's Day.

I've had three of these now. I'm officially old as fuck.

My grandfather was the father figure in my life, enough so that when offered the opportunity to learn who my (biological) father was I turned it down. Part of it is a horrible suspicion that there is some VC Andrews bullshit going on. But mostly it was knowing that, whoever this hypothetical dude is, he has a pair of shoes that he cannot possibly fill, and it would be unfair to even hold them in the same light.

My grandfather was sardonic and perverted, tireless in his devotion, and a master tetris player. My friends all loved him and feared him, as natives love and fear a totally badass volcano. He played IU Football when that wasn't a sad joke, and dropped out when Dick Butkus broke his back. Every time he saw that dog faced blowhard on tv he would curse. I never inherited his skill with tools; frankly Amanda runs circles around me in that regard. In some ways I know it disappointed him, and I hate that. I hate that I dropped out of IU like a fucking tard, knowing how important it was to him that I graduate, even with a useless sociology degree that I was like four classes away from attaining. I hate that he will never see his great granddaughter, and that she will never know him.

I will do my best to make up for those failings, by applying the lessons of his life to my own family, and making sure that the things that he taught me shine through in my actions. And I will make sure that my daughter knows of us, our heritage, the good and the bad, and that she can learn those lessons and pass them on.

Sample Case: I am wearing one of the silk shirts I inherited from Grandpapa today, to honor his memory. It is a panama shirt; you never see those anymore, in a tan / cream color. All my friends know that my clothes are theirs, even the rest of grandpapa's clothes-but they never wear this shirt. It is in good shape still-it was made to last-but when it is too ragged to wear I will cut this motherfucker into rags, and honor his memory by getting one last fucking use out of the thing, to scrub my sink or patch my BDUs or blow my fucking nose on. Because when the hard times come-and lord, they are a comin'-you waste nothing or you find yourself falling behind.

I miss you every day Grandpapa. I'm sorry for the things that I failed you at. But my family will always have food and a place to sleep, and I'll never pick the wrong mushroom, and if I have to cut a motherfucker I'll only do it three ways-deep, wide and continuous.

A Small Thing, but Funny

So with my nifty internetz devices, I can see the search engine strings that lead people here, to the creepy soiled basement at the bottom of the internet. I just thought I'd share my favorite.

babylon japan gay porn part chunk

So to you, weird motherfucker who adds "chunk" to his gay asian porn, wherever you are (Spain) welcome to Babylon. I'm sorry I don't have any chunky asian dudes porking one another; that's a couple blogs over in the Sammo Hung Slash Fiction Society. But know that you brightened my day.

Threads from an Unraveling Tapestry

So you know when I talk about how I was going to have recurring sections of this blog that I repeated every once in awhile? Well this is another one, the only other one I've done of this type. I'm not prepared for it, but I saw one "We're all fucked" illustrating story I want to blurb on and I bet I can find two more without looking too hard. It's 7:54am and I just smoked a giant bowl and I have 36 minutes before I have to get Gracie up to eat breakfast. Let's mother fucking do this.

Telling Your Child About The Oil Spill - This one isn't so much about the oil spill as about the state of this nation's pigtail-whipped, oh-my-gawd-the-children parenting. What is funniest about this article is the wistful longing for a Ferngully type movie depicting the event-and then they headline with "Children Need the Straight Talk About the Oil Spill." I can see that shit now. The Slobbering BP Monster in grey and that god awful lime green sensually raping Mother Ocean and covering her in black oily muck while Barry O and his team of pixies work cleverly with the poor slime covered Seabirds to thwart it's terrible sodomizing Sludge Cock with a cap of Environmental Conciousness. This is the straight talk our children need. Fuck.

Rape Trees - With a tip of the tinfoil hat to my #2 heathen. (My number one heathen will always be this motherfucker) Damn, I'm stoned and kind of buzzing with the power of hyperlinking. What was I talking about? Ah. Keeping with the whole "Rape" theme that I applied for no real reason above, apparently there is evidence that coyotes are making it a point to create shrines to their constant gang rapes of the women who are attempting to cross illegally. To me it seems like insanity-marking their path clearly for all to see. But the MS in Indiana are getting more brazen too, and it wouldn't surprise me if the border has it ten times worse. I'm not 100% convinced, but I wouldn't be surprised. As I said in Parabarbarian's thread, the rape trophy is an ugly and primitive form of sympathetic magic. Rape has been tied to power and dominance over women for centuries, used as an institutionalized means to degrade them and keep them under control. And there is no doubt that institutionalized rape is going on for these women every day, as a savage means of ensuring their compliance, of expressing complete dehumanizing dominance.

To be honest, I don't know what the solution for the border is, unless it is perhaps to help Mexico become a place that people aren't so fucking desperate to escape. Or maybe, hey, stop making drugs so goddamn profitable that they can operate with impunity in a system so corrupt that money talks and ideals (IE BULLSHIT) walks.

Hm, that kind of dovetailed into it's own entry there, didn't it? Probably a subject deserving of more attention than I'm giving it. Kind of odd to hear a guy who makes gags about rape express such vehemence about those that perpetuate the act, but let me tell you-everything is funny if your head is bent enough. I have a friend who told me what I am sure was the first 9/11 joke. I'm sure it was because it was still smouldering.

I laughed until I cried.

Hm, might have just lost some friends there with that truth bomb. I love you guys!

No, fuck you. I'm cookin' breakfast.

Professor and Me

So this isn't actually the story of me and Professor Remy Presas, founder of Modern Arnis. I never had the chance to meet him; he died before I discovered the style in college. This is more the story of arnis and how it changed my training methodology, my survival preps, and my life in general.

Before Arnis I had dabbled in a few other styles, including that god awful Shaolin-Do nonsense (a sort of nonauthentic, japanese uniformed hybrid kung fu), judo at the boy's club, olympic style and freestyle wrestling, and even a little professional wrestling. I was into martial arts, as many nerds who are picked on quickly become, and I was a (and still am) a user, not a collector. I don't take nonsense ideas into the classroom with me, and I sure as hell never took them home. So I had a robust background in martial arts, minus the bird sweeps, and a bit of practical experience in street fighting to boot, by the time I left for college.

IU has a great martial arts department, and I had the chance to dabble in a lot of other styles there, but the one that really captivated me was Arnis, taught by Jason Gearheart in a once a week friday class. The first day there I told him I was going to cut the class because I didn't want it conflicting with another stick arts class I was taking. I ended up taking the class every semester for three fucking years-and rarely missing a day. Why? There are several reasons.

First, the techniques were right up my alley-they were simple, but with endless variations. A few basic principles for attack and defense, all of which can be applied universally and yet are infinitely tailorable to the exact situation at hand. It is amazing how you can apply every weapon and every technique to the same pattern of effective footwork. And of course, because the legacy of Arnis is ugly jungle guerrilla warfare, there were plenty of nasty tricks, cheap shots, deceptions and treacheries lurking there for the guy who cares to look. But it didn't require an insane level of athletic ability to pull off these techniques-or a high level of dexterity or speed. Because they are so quick, simple and dirty, you can pull them off in a wheelchair or even when you are 90 years old with your cane.

Second, and this is really more important, was the people. Arnisadors as a group are universally laid back; they don't do the stone faced, hands in front of you, pretend like you aren't having a single morsel of fun thing that some martial arts schools do. Everybody tells the story of Professor Presas walking up and down a row of students practicing with their canes, and he would stop the class and say "Look here, you are smiling..." and then let them dread the inevitable discipline before grinning that easy Filipino grin that they cultivate out there, and say "It's a good thing." And it is, because frankly, training you enjoy and go to every week is a lot more effective than training you hate and let go to rust. It is especially important for me because I can't hold back my constant stream of jackass commentary (that's why I have this blog) but in Arnis you don't have to; everybody cracks jokes and has a good time while they are training.

I have mentioned several times before that flow is a very important part of my life. Flow is an important concept in Arnis, both philosophical and practical, of moving around any blocking obstacle with constant aggressive motion. If an obstacle halts your path, you redirect your energy around it and continue toward your objective. The cadence of the canes, then, produced a steady backbeat that kept my life on track for those three years of failed college. It begins to affect your thinking in other ways-too much Arnis and you start thinking in triangles. It is a ruthless jungle trigonometry that rewards innovation and cleverness as much as following accepted technique-with a solid grasp of the fundamentals you can innovate endlessly, even from a rather intermediate level. You can apply these lessons to your life, if you choose. I have, and it has kept me going so far.

I am personally of the opinion that any martial art is better than no martial art-just as any plan is better than no plan. No plan, for the average mortal, usually equals Freeze in Place and Piss Quietly. But let me tell you, I've studied martial arts from every continent in my useless, college wastrel days, and I never found one that applies, both in fighting and in life, across the board so universally as Arnis.

And I'll cane any motherfucker that says otherwise.