I. Depression TV: Emerald Lawns of Paradise & Glowing Pylons & Peeps Surveilled From On High
(I was gonna title this “chapterette” Fierce Single Kids Home From Hot Climates in honor of Tom Robbins. I’ve read Even Cowgirls Get the Blues & Still Life With Woodpecker & and I loved ‘em both. But not enough to make this post title a homage to Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates. I haven’t read the book. I don’t wanna be a smartass just for the sake of being a smartass.
ANYWAY, 4 days over this past weekend I couldn’t get out of bed. Way too depressed.
I cannot believe I am never going to see her again.
The train will simply not get through the station. It’s a mental amputation…
…I’ve got permanent phantom fucking limb.
It’s not like I think I’ll turn around and see her at any moment. It’s more of a fear I will see her while I’m all frazzled one day, covered in sweat and looking terrible, carrying bags of heavy items to faraway destinations as she steps into the College Streetcar looking angelic, wearing a green top and black sunglasses and hair that frames those pale, perfect fucking cheekbones.
They are cheekbones that don’t advertise so much an announce that beautiful set of eyes she carries around with her. Bluegreen. Emeraldsapphire.
Eyes that sometimes seem to laugh good-naturedly, never those shady, gatekeeping, furrowed who the fuck are you? kinda eyes that she, and plenty of different “we” groups, know all to well from the battle they’ve undertaken for years now. A battle just to be taken seriously as writers and thinkers and creators in their chosen genres.
Battle consists of movement. Movements requires consistent planning and routine and backup plans upon backup plans from Plan B to Plan Z.
____’s routines were always such so that she would have the energy for given tasks. And she worked a lot. She works a lot. She works hard because she cares and she means it.
She moves forward through life, rarely nostalgic, far more interested in what’s coming up next. And she moves with the sleek fluidity of a panther.
There was something I touched on in my extremely depressing “The Days In Between” post, the sense of non-movement to one’s life in recovery. You are waiting for your life to begin again. I quoted a line from Memento:
“How am I supposed to heal…if I can’t feel time?”
I have no idea how far back in her life I feel to her. How far back did 2011 feel in 2016?
I cannot remember.
Nothing much happened to me in those five years. I graduated. I got into Washed Out. Did my Masters. Graduated that. Moved back to Toronto.
II. Reality TV v. TV that shows reality
Spent most of very early yesterday morning, late morning, and early afternoon watching two whole seasons of a VERY bad reality show where a blinking computer shaped like a pylon tells people what to do. The cast members arrive on the island expecting a bacchanal. The first 24 hours are just that. After that, the glowing pylon, named Lana, tells each contestant that they were chosen because of their propensities to seek shallow, one-night-stand relationships, and that this month-long retreat is going to teach them how to forge meaningful non-sexual relationships - or, more accurately I guess, a non-sexual component to a relationship. Talking, communicating, taking care of each other’s needs, picking up on visual clues, body language, hearing the unsaid needs of your partner.
The contestants are not allowed to touch each other. At all. I mean, cuddling is okay. But no kissing or sexual activity of any kind is okay. And Lana isn’t just a glowing pylon with increasingly bossy requests. She has cameras everywhere and everybody is miked up. So while contestants of opposite sex often share the same bed, they can try to quietest sex in the world. Lana hears it. It costs the entire group 20k. And resentment breeds.
Because you start seeing so-called “couples” claiming to be boyfriend and girlfriend when they haven’t seem to share an emotional connection aside for a kindred affection for strawberries.
So the show is trying to turn players, or “playaz?” I dunno…I never got on with the term “playa.” Or “partay,” especially when Sandra Bullock says it in the Speed 2 trailer. Or when Bart says it during the Smashing Pumpkins Simpsons episode where Homer’s concerned manager sends him to a veterinarian.
“First of all Homer, it’s par-tay…not party.”
”Who’s ready to par-tay on the big boat?”
Because self improvement on its own is never enough, there is a $100 000 prize given to the contestants @ the start of each season. The reason for this is because physical interactions cost contestants money. The glowing cone, named “Lana” for some reason, has cameras and drones an microphones everywhere. Every second of yours is accounted for. You can’t just sneak off into the ocean for a kiss. Infractions of any kind take away from the six-figure prize-pot.
So I spent most of Sunday watching this crap.
Seeing such wildly differing attitudes toward money is how you begin to learn what the contestants are like. Each kiss takes 3k away from the pot. Sex costs 20k. Sex with kissing, 23k. And there are cameras everywhere. Lana, the glowing pylon, sees all.
The idea of the show isn’t terrible, despite the vacuous characters who star in it.
We all know that lust can die very quickly, like the Seinfeld episode where Jerry’s girlfriend walks arounds naked constantly. Oddly enough, this turn Jerry off. Because Jerry is an exacting stickler, he believes there’s “good naked” and “bad naked.”
Remember the one time Family Guy made Seinfeld and the joke actually wasn’t bad?
Good naked: The person you have lustful feelings for, waiting for you in your bed, not wearing anything. Suddenly being joined in the shower by your giggling, playful, hot as molten lava partner.
Bad naked: Bending over to grab a pear from the fruit/vegetable crisper. Some positions just don’t make us look good when we are naked. And a glimpse of one of these can put the breaks, full stop, on a lust-based relationship.
Jerry: “I thought naked is good?”
Melissa: “This isn’t good naked.”
By the end of the episode, they’ve broken up, both to satisfy the self-regenerating nature of the sitcom - characters locked into time - and to reiterate the essential shallowness of the show’s titular jackass protagonist.
George: “So you broke up?”
Jerry: “Yep. I kept trying to picture her naked. She kept trying to picture me not naked.”
Bonus points for Elaine’s comment:
Jerry: Well, I was walking around naked in front of Melissa the other day-
Elaine: Whoa! Walking around naked? Ahh... that is not a good look for a man.
George: Why not? It's a good look for a woman.
Elaine: Well, the female body is a... work of art. The male body is utilitarian, it's for gettin' around, like a jeep.
Jerry: So you don't think it's attractive?
Elaine: It’s hideous. The hair, the... the lumpiness. It’s simian.
George: Well, some women like it.
Elaine: Mmm. Sickies.
But love? True love can live forever. I know I’ve posted this before. But I just hafta!
Okay maybe something a bit closer to the tropical Balearian nights of Too Hot To Handle?
^ Okay that’s far better. Washed Out chasing his endless summer. And it won’t make you go “hey this is the theme song for Portlandia!”
I mean, sure. But it’s also so much more than that.
This is the cast of Temptation Island, which debuted over 20 years ago on January 10, 2001 on the Fox. Network. (Remember TV stations?) They look identically vain and dull to Netflix’s 2021 show, Too Hot To Handle.
Too Hot to Handle is essentially Temptation Island.
I suppose I betray my age with that comment. I’m 35. Of course I know that show. Of course I watched that show.
Here’s a quote from David Spade in 2001: “Temptation Island is just…another one of those amoral, addictive, shouldn’t-be-on-television shows that I can’t not watch.”
The same could be said for this new Netflix show. There’s no mention of an island in the title, but if the Fyre Fest guy can lie about Great Exhuma being an island, maybe Too Hot To Handle Town is…well, like I said…they make no claims.
The year before, I’d watched Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?, another hugely controversial and successful show for Fox. From the show’s Wikipedia page3:
In the show, which aired as a single two-hour broadcast on February 15, 2000, 50 women competed to be the bride of an unknown millionaire they did not see during the show, except in silhouette. At the end of the show, “millionaire” Rick Rockwell chose Conger to be his wife and married her on the spot. In addition to being wed to Rockwell, Conger also won a 3-carat (600 mg) diamond ring and more than $100,000 in prizes.
But after the honeymoon, it was announced that Conger was seeking an annulment, saying Rockwell had misrepresented himself. The annulment was finalized on April 5, 2000. Conger was the focus of media attention for not only winning the “contest” but also for getting an annulment so quickly after the marriage.
I do not think Ms. Conger’s beef was the money lie. It was the fact that Rick Rockwell (as fake a name as I’ve ever heard. Was John Smith to believable for this moron?) turned out that not only was Rick not a multi-millionaire, he was even a uni-millionaire, I think the guy he had $300 or so in his chequing account, and no savings or assets to speak of, save the Lexus he’d leased. But she was much more angry that this Rick Rockwell man’s criminal past, which consisted solely of assault and domestic charges. Dana Conger was used to being poor, she was not used to being a punching bag. The annulment got Conger and Fox a shitload of press, so much so Fox re-aired the two-hour show several Sundays later.
In 2002, both Conger and Rockwell did an interview with the ABC network (remember networks?):
Rockwell still appeared angered and hurt by Conger's reasons for taking the marriage vows with him. “I don't understand how somebody could go on a show like that…there is nothing ambiguous about the title of the show,” he said.
Conger said that when she became a Millionaire contestant, she thought the network had already arranged for another contestant to marry Rockwell.
“It was a dumb thing to do,” Conger admitted.
Both were still vying for media attention, while lamenting the media frenzy that surrounded them when they returned from their honeymoon last year. Conger was hocking her new Web site, Darvahouse.com, and Rockwell was publicizing his new book, What Was I Thinking?
You’d be surprised too, after seeing Too Hot To Handle, which couples are still together and which ones aren’t. I was shocked myself.
Anyway, I watched and thoroughly enjoyed Temptation Island back in 2001, but after that…I watched no reality TV at all save for a single episode of Monster Garage in 2003 so I could see Fu Manchu, a band I loved when I was 18. After that I didn’t watch reality TV until 2017-2018 my ex and I hooked up and she showed me Vanderpump Rules, which I took an immediately liking to. I can’t find the Fu Manchu Monster Garage episode so here’s the Fu playing the same song from the Monster Garage taping, “Written In Stone,” from their extremely disappointing 2003 album Start the Machine.
If you’re interested in Fu Manchu, I’d say grab The Action Is Go for classics like “Evil Eye,” “Grendel Snowman,” and the immortal “Saturn III” which I got to see them play on my 19th birthday at the Opera House in 2003. There is also the classic In Search Of… which features Fu’s only instance of acoustic guitar in a career that has lasted more than a quarter century, a song written by Eddie Glass, who would soon depart the band for the stranger sounds of Nebula, making his own classic with Atomic Ritual.
ANYWAY this post is about reality TV, which my ex ____ got me back into. We watched Vanderpump Rules religiously and also the Real Housewives franchise…
There are at least ten different RH shows, all based in a different city, but I definitely remember seeing Orange County, New York, Potomac, and maybe one more? New Jersey? Yes, New Jersey!
Anyway, Potomac had this bizarre husband who kept sexually harassing the camera crew, among other people. I wanted to see that get resolved, but my heroin/fentanyl/coke/crack habits and divorce got in the way, I suppose I could just google it right now. I’ll do it later.
Back to Too Hot To Handle. Spending 8 episodes with a bunch of shallow assholes, most of whom were male fell in love with a toxic jerk named Francesca from British Columbia who
1. has duck lips and
2. looks easily 10-15 years older than all the other contestants except Jesus (real name Matthew) in the middle there
That’s Francesca Farago on the far left. Aside from just being a terrible human for doing stuff like hanging at restaurants after testing positive for COVID, I just think she is incredibly vapid and boring.
Here’s a solo shot of her. How could anyone find her the hottest on the whole show? I’m no prize myself, but to me, Francesca is closer to zero than ten.
Now, my pick would have been Chloe Veitch pictured below, who is…just gorgeous. I initially thought she was Irish from her accent, but I was wrong. She’s from Essex in England. There is an Irish contestant and I liked her too. But this is Chloe from Essex County.
Yes, Chloe came off a little dumb on camera. But she did not come of anywhere near as the men on these shows. In fact, the men are far worse because they think they know everything already. The women come into the experience at least wanting to learn. Okay, one more picture of Chloe:
It has not escaped my drug-damaged brain that, of all Season 1’s contestants, Chloe looks the most like my ex (though that’s not the same as saying she looks exactly like my ex).
We all have types. Even those of us who say we don’t, tend to have consecutive partners with very similar somethings, whether those be internal or external.
The Irish girl who got NO SCREEN TIME until episode 4, the one whose attitude was the absolute best, Nicole from Cork, has apparently found love with one of the cast members AFTER THE END OF THE SHOW. Ahhh. Okay. I guess I am a fanboy. This is Nicole. And she hooked up with Bryce, a contestant I initially loathed until he revealed just how much of a front his attitude was.
Bryce was by far the least “buff” of the boys, a fact I’m sure wasn’t lost on him, and both Nicole and Bryce had battled some serious bullying in their lives. In this heartbreaking scene contestants were told to have someone paint on their bodies some of the most hurtful names they’d been called. Across Bryce’s chest the word UGLY was emblazoned. Nicole’s said COW.
Okay, these people are vapid. But…Ugly? Cow? Who says such things to people? Such hurtful, lasting barbs that…seem to never go away?
I remember one girl writing stay good stableboy in my Grade 7 yearbook.
My mother was furious, and thought it an insult. Calling me white trash. The inscription had been written by Ashley Hall, who lived on my street, four houses up.
But it turned out Ashley, who wasn’t the sharpest pencil in a box of 200 sharpened pencils, had meant Ponyboy Curtis from S.E. Hinton’s Outsiders.
Ashley was a pretty suave rumour-monger, however, and I’ve never been able to figure out if she was truly calling me a rebel, an complimenting me for that outsider status, or if she was trying to make fun of me and couch the diss in a believable-looking mistake.
Fuck it. I’ll never know. So I’ll take the nicer option. It makes me feel better. And it makes me feel like Mickey Rourke in Body Heat. The eternal outsider in America. Two generations previous, Mickey’s father drank with the beats in Bleecker Street. By the time 1981 rolled around, American rebelliousness had unceremoniously moved to the silver screen. Even if you had the patience for the neo-Joycean hogwash that was J R, William Gaddis; 726 page novel with ZERO dialogue attribution that won the National Book Award.
Postmodern literature had become unreadable. You needed maps, supplementary texts, taciturn interviews in the Paris Review where authors smoked umpteen cigarettes and explained, explicated nothing.
The dangerous characters had to be moved into the movies, where we could see them. Rocky, a great movie, would not have made a better novel. No way. You needed Stallone’s slurred delivery. Ebert even said that Stallone might be the next Brando after viewing Rocky (the man didn’t know Sly was essentially playing himself. Ebert would learn this very soon with the releases of F.IS.T., Paradise Alley and Rocky II.
This is gonna be a heavy post, so here’s Sylvester Stallone singing the theme song to Paradise Alley himself. It’s like Scott Stapp meets Frank Sinatra. I don’t know why Sly couldn’t go to his brother for the one thing his brother did better than he did: singing.
ANYWAY, I was once called “stableboy.” Also “worthless piece of shit junkie faggot.” At least the first insult hinted at gainful employment.
Nicole and Bryce were called names too, and those names hurt too. Ugly? Cow? What the hell is wrong with people? (The Devil Next Door section of this post can’t even find the strength to ask the question, the imagery hits just so hard in its industrial efficiency, amongst mountains of dead Jewish Europeans…
(Let’s move on to the heavy stuff. These vapid people love each other. Some will stay together, most won’t. That’s life. None of them ever had to go through what some people their age did in the regions between Germany and Soviet Russia in WWII.)
Let us wish these two the best in their Transatlantic romance, Nicole living on Bryce’s boat in Marina Del Ray. I just hope she can get used to the bobbing up and down. The ceaseless bobbing up and down of a small watercraft. Ugh. Sea-sickness, I’m told, comes fast.
So I watched 16 episodes of this shit. Let’s just wish them happiness, okay? We know how fast this shit can fall apart.
I’m not even going to go into Season 2, I was so sick of it by then. On Saturday afternoon I’d taken 4 sleeping pills at 230pm and went to sleep, hoping to stay under til 6AM or so Sunday morning.
Nope. Woke up WIDE AWAKE at 10:30pm Saturday night. Hence watching two seasons of Too Hot to Handle, after which I was still feeling sorry for myself and listening to The Ataris. In ‘02 this was my JAM. I still did not know lead singer/songwriter Kris Roe was singing about me and mine and MY life.
Being grown up isn’t half as fun as growing up
these are the best days of our lives…
But The Ataris and the ersatz-misery of “Saddest Song” just seems so manufactured compared to the shit I saw next, when I watched The Devil Next Door.
It took me so so so far from my own petty problems, that I was completely transported. Warning: If yr gonna watch it, the imagery from the Holocaust is obviously extremely violent but the film also shows extended testimonies from survivors who were certain that the man they saw in that Jerusalem courtroom was a particularly sadistic camp guard called Ivan the Terrible who worked @ Treblinka at some point between, or perhaps all of 1941-1945.
The documentary plot synopsis, minus spoilers, is this: In 1986 a man named John Demjanjuk who has been living in Cleveland for over three decades is arrested after being accused of having been an infamously murderous and sociopathic camp guard at Treblinka. A man who earned the nickname Ivan the Terrible, after the bloody and warlike Russian Tsar.
The man, John, denies all charges. The documentary follows his legal odyssey from Cleveland to Jerusalem, including the extremely surprising decision of a Jewish lawyer from Israel to take on the defendant’s counsel.
This was so not “OMG Chloe is hot but so is Zoe.”
Nor was it “Takeoffs & Landings” by The Ataris.
Nor was it me wondering, for the ten thousandth time, if I might fix things with ____. (The chances of that are…one in ten billion?)
This was…life and death stuff. I was riveted. I cried pretty much non-stop the whole time.
And stopped feeling fucking sorry for myself for the first time in a week or so.
Back in the day when I was cold turkey detoxing from heroin, I used to read tales from the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. I can say from first-hand experience that reading accounts of suffering while you yourself are suffering, reduce the amount of suffering that you feel. Almost like there is a finite amount of pain in the universe and it gets spread around more when you read about some of the things other have been through. Or your brain tells your body, after reading of Treblinka gas chambers: Hey! Cold turkey quitting fentanyl involves mostly sitting, vomiting, shitting, and cursing. It does not involve running from camp guards who want to slash your nose or ears off, or who want you for horrible, unimaginable experiments, etc etc.
That’s not to say opiate withdrawal is a walk-in-the-park. Göring had been regularly injecting himself with morphine during WWII, and when the British captured him, he screamed and vomited so much, that they were afraid he would die of dehydration (especially since he told them he was taking something slightly different from Morphine, something called Oxycodone, that would later haunt the United States just as the spectre of Operation Paperclip). The British decided to taper Göring, to wean him off, rather than just let him go without.
III. Me, Moon & The Graveyard of the Atlantic
Divorce arrangements began on July 19, about a week ago (a year and 4 days after we stopped co-habitating). I agreed to everything and asked my ex one more time if I could see Moon one last time. After that I wouldn’t contact her again until the conclusion of the legal stuff, and even then only as confirmation. She let me she Moon though. Here are SOME pictures of our last five minutes together.
Moon doing the stand-grab-your-hand to eat the candy. Faster than you’d think. Much faster. In fact, she climbed a tree last winter before the fact of her climbing even registered, before I could even react.
Me, turning to ex: How you usually get her down from there?
____: I don’t know. She’s never been up there.
We used a Toronto Garbage Bin to climb up and got the kitty down. All was well.
Cheesiest song title of all-time: “Summer Wind Was Always Our Favourite Song.”
Cheesiest cat hang out move. Moon eating Temptations off my forehead. See below:
And….in case you were curious, here is the catchy little emo and (for the time, dangerously non-punk) song that owns the worst song title of all time:
Maybe I’ll see Moon again one day, who knows. More likely not, though.
Maybe I’ll go see The Ataris again one day, who knows. Very unlikely though.
I’m gonna write a REALLY long post about The Ataris one day too, only for the sheer weirdness of feeling nostalgic for a time in my life when I listened to a band whose entire oeuvre was about feeling nostalgic for their middle teenhood, not my late teenhood of alcohol, cigarettes and playing little shows in Brampton, not my early teenhood of not knowing the meanings of names for sexual positions, not knowing how to navigate a sexual situation if one was initiated by the other party (but just knowing you could not say no, even if you did not feel ready. Many of my early sexual encounters were initiated by girls who themselves were under peer pressure from their female friends to “do” something with a guy. My first four or five sexual encounters were like this. Neither party wanted to do it, we felt pressured by our respective “friend” groups to “do” something. My first encounter with something more than just kissing and hands, I was way too young for and not ready for. I did not want to do it. I am not saying the girls were predators, they were in stressful social predicaments too. One time the both of us realized that we could just say we did something. I’m not sure why this was important, or what kind of social currency it bought us, but we tousled each other’s hair, got out stories straight, and exited the bedroom after a reasonable amount of time had passed (I think like…20 minutes. Long enough that I wouldn’t be teased as a “minute man” but not so long that our “friends” suspected something was off. So these were my 13-15 year old problems. At 13 I was not ready for the blowjob that was forced on me a Grade Nine party where 20-30 kids, all aged 13 or 14, were drinking heavily, making out, and some going even farther. I am still Facebook friend with the girl who…pounced on me, and I don’t really consider it rape, but I was deeply uncomfortable, 18 months previous to that I’d been building treehouses and playing on the train tracks with friends, all of whom were boys. We didn’t even really talk about girls back in Middle School.
And then of course there are the younger teenhood semi-problems of not knowing which deodorant to buy, whether to or how to gel your hair, not knowing how to communicate with girls other than a tactic that is now called “negging” but which didn’t seem to have a name when I was in H.S. In effect: you would make a negative comment about a girl you liked to her face and hoped that it sorta bugged her enough to…engage with you more? I don’t know what we were thinking. Or what the plan was supposed to be. I jus remember feeling very small when I got to high school, very insignificant and dull and not worth knowing. Therefore it would take shocking tactics to get a girl interested in you.
Negging never works. It just makes young girls feel self-conscious and bad about themselves. So I’m sorry to Melissa, Melanie, and Ainsley. All three of you deserve better men than me. I doubt they’ll read this so I’ll say right now that I know one of these 3 girls is married to a, how shall I put this, fucking alcoholic piece of shit who is emotionally abusive, and probably all other kinds of abusive too.
ANYWAY enough about those days. I was unhappy for a lot of them. The Ataris idealized nostalgia, they sold the feeling of being young and on the cusp of some major breakthrough, on the verge of stepping through a door and seeing a grand vista before you, vast sunlit uplands and “knowing that right now is all that matters.”
Last week I saw on Facebook Kris Roe live streaming acoustic renditions of Ataris songs. The man has to be nearly 50, right? Like…even if he was just 19 when his band got signed to Kung Fu Records in 1996, that would make him at least 45 right now. And he’s still singing these fucking songs. Back in 2008, he recorded a brand new Ataris record called The Graveyard of the Atlantic (love that title, btw), but Ro is old school. He doesn’t feel a release is “legitimate” unless release through official channels. Official channels being record labels. But The Ataris got dropped by Columbia when they turned in their follow-up to So Long, Astoria.
The lyrics were, at first glance, identical to every other Ataris record. Songs about relationships & rituals (like etching each other name’s into a wooden bridge). But on the album’s first song & single “Not Capable of Love” Roe sang “I’m not capable of love of the kind I felt when I was 21.”
Woah. Roe finally admitting he’s no longer a teenager at heart. I think the reason for the tepid reception this album got is the sound. It has riffs! It has different structures than the usual Ataris stuff. “Cardiff-By-The-Sea” has a breakdown that doesn’t sound like anything the band had ever done before. It kinda has a Weakerthans vibe.
But Columbia hated it. Fucking hated it. So much that they didn’t just refuse to release the record (which labels have the right to do). They dropped the band entirely. That seems a little extreme considering how many units So Long, Astoria shifted: 500 000 in the United States alone. I’d guess another 25 000 spread across Canada, Australia, & Europe. If bands like Wheetus & Dynamite Hack were allowed to record & release albums long after their one hit each had faded from the memory of popular consciousness, how the fuck did Welcome the Night get The Ataris dropped?
I have no idea. But it spelled the end of sonic experimentation for Roe. He went back to the old Ataris sound and subject matter: teenage love, feeling stuck in a boring town, hating your parents, feeling the great hum of America somewhere over the horizon, the call of the highway, the urge to see places you haven’t. To leave so you can come back. Because home is always different when you come back.
The slow balladeer feel to songs like “Secret Handshakes” and the synth lines lost The Ataris a lot of long time fans & gained them exactly zero new ones. Which is a shame. Cuz Welcome the Night is not a bad record. In fact, it’s probably in my top 3 Ataris records.
So now we get to watch a nearly 50-years old Kris Roe strum an acoustic from his kitchen and sing, for the thousandth time in his life “Here in this diary/I write you visions of my summer/it was the BEST I ever had!”
For two reasons, I’d expected the pertinent divorce email in my inbox on the 15th, exactly a year after the day we finally crumbled.
I assumed ____ wanted to get this behind her as quickly and painlessly as possible, and
she is the most organized person I know
BUT you always want to ensure a margin of error with this things. For example, if I were an NHL GM, I wouldn’t wait until 40 seconds before the trade deadline to call some other GM with my brilliant trade, trying to pressure him with the lack of time into making a decision in my favour. I assume this is how Brian Burke traded Luke Schenn, an atrocious defenseman, to the Flyers, for James Van Reimsdyk, who is one of my top ten Leafs of all-time. But yeah, don’t wait til the last 30 seconds. What if every other GM has the same idea and the guy you are trying to reach is on the phone with someone else?
Almost every JVR goal on YouTube has a comment below saying something like “you could try that 1000 times in practice and not get it right ONCE.” Now, in my #1 pick for best JVR goal, the broadcaster says as much. JVR is a manufacturer of miracles from the Rust Belt in New Jersey.
IV: Top 5 JVR moments ever.
JVR scores by taking a puck to his face. After hitting his face, the puck bounces into the net while JVR hits the ice in considerable pain. He played the remainder of the game because I love him and he’s my Big American JVR Teddy Bear. Okay? Okay. Now just watch it.
JVR’s first ever Leaf goal. Nostalgia. I’m gonna cry.
This is one of those goals where, the celebration has a sense of…”what? you think I would POSSIBLY miss an opportunity like that? Do you know who I am? Do you know how many anonymous henchmen I’ve killed in my day? Why don’t you just lie down? Go on, son. *Henchman lies down* (This is one of the few funny scenes from Austin Powers 3. That’s the one with Goldmember, who is the source of the one other funny scene in the movie when Dr. Evil questions Goldmember’s pronunciation of the word “father.” “I’m sorry, what did you say? Austin Power’s farger? Farger? It’s fa-ther. Fa-ther.” )
Earlier in the game, P.K. Subban had scored on the Leafs and tugged his jersey, which is not a usual move in hockey. You see players remove jerseys and wave them like flags in soccer (or football if you’re that one Welsh heroin addict who SOMEHOW likes hockey, watches it, and finds heroin regularly in Cardiff. They tell him it’s from China. How the FUCK did it get to Cardiff from China? Did it leapfrog North America after a 3-week Pacific Ocean run, then cross the Pond in another two weeks to land in WALES, where we all know EVERYONE does heroin. (I’m not talking about Manchester, Belfast, or Edinburgh, where EVERYONE…um…DOES do heroin.) ANYWAY. JVR didn’t like P.K. Subban’s little jersey tug, meant to show the Canadiens logo better, as in “we’re the best, look at me.” So JVR sinks one, and watch him between 0:25 and 0:30. It’s priceless.
It’s not in the below clip but one broadcaster goes “Talk about staying with it” and the other goes “I don’t think you could do that…if there was NO goalie in the net. And he did it WITH a goalie.”
V. Chinese Roulette, Russian Roulette & WWII
I saw 2 different Overdose scenes on Parliament today, EMT taking off their hats to wipe their sweaty brows, which often means someone has died. In WWII, a soldier who dropped his helmet deliberately was essentially throwing in the towel. Too far gone to plat another game of Russian, or Ukranian, or Belorussian, or Polish Roulette.
Taking fentanyl in these ostensibly waning days of COVID is still more or less a game of Russian Roulette. With a four-chambered pistol, not a six shooter, to that every shot comes with a 25% chance you’ll blow yr own brains out. Russian Roulette demands a six shooter for better odds. Soviet Roulette, despite INSISTING upon a fresh spinning of the chamber between rounds regardless of the number of participants, is the more brutal for that quarter out a loonie chance that you won’t be walking away from that table. I think the Soviet rule of re-spinning the chambers prudent, while others say it’s “for pussies,” because they equate femininity, or the vagina, at least, with cowardice. And because they are idiots. Would they assert so heavy-handedly on Russian Roulette rules, which require a six-shooter gun but only a re-spin after FIVE shots. Meaning the last man, by the very fact that the previous four shooters are not dead, has a fifty/fifty shot of living.We could go through the iterations but that’s not what I’m interested in here. There have been reports from survivors (perhaps the unlikeliest survivors in this history of human genocide) of that most savage version of the game, played for fun by sadistic and sociopathic and evil German Camp Guards, the top echelon typically in charge of running the motor that filled the chambers with deadly gas, with shoving terrified and confused people into those death chambers, stabbing any who ran (both in order to inflict as much pain as possible, and to reduce the amount of ammunition used for the coming Allies, a two-pronged group of whom the Eastern Front, led by the Red Army after their spectacular and spectacularly bloody victories at Stalingrad and at the very gates of Moscow.
More than ten account of German privates marching on Moscow paint a picture of a German infantry regiment paused at a bus station for resupplying and waiting for further logistical support (which usually meant waiting for air support, which was usually long gone, lost in the grey clouds of crumbling Europe), had checked the garbages sitting around the station, and one German soldier after another found bus transfers to downtown Moscow. Wherever they were, it was a bus ride away from the downtown of the enemy’s capital.
Yet still they never got farther than that bus station. The Russian defences were too entrenched. More than two million non-military personnel had helped to dig trenches, stack sandbags, set booby traps, and whatever else they could to slow to German advance.
Mere moments from boarding a plane away from Moscow in order to evade capture, Stalin turned to his men and spat. “I ask you this with pain in my heart. Speak to me like a communist. Can we hold Moscow?”
Every man told Stalin yes.
Stalin either had the most brilliant generals in all of WWII or his yes men just happened to come through on their limp nods.
Stalin, whose sense of history was much keener than Hitler’s, knew what his fleeing the city would look like. Hell, Hitler had run away from his own 1923 Beer Hall Putsch! Running away was what Hitler did.
Stalin, whose most famous order, “not one step back!” to his army, put his rubles where his moustache-obscured mouth was, and stayed in Moscow and watched, with gathering confidence as his men beat the Germans back. “Not one step back!” wasn’t merely an American-style football coach platitude. Battalions marched behind other Red Army battalions, shooting any and all perceived stragglers.
The men of the Red Army had no choice but to march directly into the jaws of the German machine and they lost more lives than the current population of Canada. But, slowly and inexorably, they pushed the Germans all the way back to Berlin. The Red Army raised their flag over the Reichstag on May 2 1945. The Russians liberated Berlin, not the United States, as I’d believed up until I took a Soviet History course when I was 24.
No similar photo op existed for the Yanks. Because although you could argue that Iwo Jima came close, most of the men raising the flag in the below photograph were dead by the end of that same day, whereas Hitler had committed suicide with Eva Braun, in his underground bunker, just 3 days before the above photograph.
They shot down Wermarcht aircraft with cleverly hidden anti-aircraft ordnance. They destroyed entire German battalions with strategic bombing campaigns.
I wonder if some of those, or even just one German aircraft got lost flying through the very columns of smoke produced by the mass burning of Jewish people’s corpses in mass graves at Sobibor or Treblinka.
It is said that the few remaining German officers tried to stay as long as possible, some long enough to feel underfoot the vibrating ground, the tremulous undulations of an imminent and furious and, by now, unstoppable enemy forces in battalions and regiments that ranged from highly organized to totally ad hoc. These men, and a lot of women, had suffered greatly at the hands of the Wermarcht since Operation Barbarossa began, and they were stomping westward, not just to drive the German Army out of the Motherland forever, but to push them back into Germany and take their bloody and murderous revenge.
These few remaining SS officers, who could now hear whole forests crunching, pulverized, under the weight of Stalin’s soldiers, invented a different kind of Roulette. Jewish Roulette in German Extermination Camps consisted of a six-shooter filled with five-bullets. For as long as they could hold out, these fanatical murderers continued to murder until the vert gates of Treblinka were exploded open by the ancient yet still effective ordnance of the Red Army.
All remaining German officers would be killed immediately upon the arrival of the Red Army. The United States was not necessarily better in this respect; Americans who could not believe the conditions they saw upon liberating Dachau are thought to have executed between 35-50 German soldiers. Such action did constitute war crimes for the enemy soldiers had been disarmed and were no longer, in the legal sense, combatants. They were POWs, and therefore, technically, certain rights should have been conferred them.
But I can imagine how hard it would be for any soldier who has just seen the mountains of Jewish corpses, the mass graves made even more packed by some German SS Camp Guards giving to the stronger looking Jewish men the job of pulverizing their fellow Jews bones into dust. For such a soldier, whether Red Army, British, United States, to confer rights, especially the presumption of innocents to SS guards, many of whom cowardly abandoned their posts at the last second and dressed up in the rags of long-dead Jewish men whose size resembled theirs. Almost all of these poorly disguised cowards were finger-pointed by the Jewish people they’d tortured for half a decade and were taken as the the German POWs they were, subject to interrogation both British and American and God who knows who else.
Their summary execution, good as it may have felt to those who were there, especially the Jews who suffered under the sword and yoke of these SS officers for so long, was technically a war crime.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, widely thought to be a kind of pacifist-humanist, given his contribution to world history with The Gulag Archipelago and his seminal work of fiction based on his own experiences, which details a single day in the life of a man serving a ten year sentence at a work camp in Siberia for a crime so vague as to be mere suggestion, not demonstration. Reading A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich when I was 20, and its final sentence, despite everything its titular character had gone through, and his worsening fever: “It had been a good day.”
I thought to myself, “I am so blessed to never had to have endured anything like that.”
But even as respected and genial and almost fatherly as Solzhenitsyn is thought to have taken part in the rape and pillaging as the Red Army chased an exhausted German Army homeward, pursuing a scorched earth policy along the way, just as their enemy had two short years earlier.
Once the Red Army reached the Eastern border of the German “Reich,” loosely translated as “reach” but in a more geographical, not physical body, sense.
Therefore, upon reaching the furthest reach of the now certain-German territory, the men of the Red Army undertook what is now understood to have been the largest incident of mass rape in human history.
Historian Norman M., Naimark wrote in his exhaustively researched The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949, that the exact number of German women and girls raped by Soviet troops during the war and occupation is uncertain, but historians estimate their numbers are likely in the hundreds of thousands, and possibly as many as two million.
When asked about such atrocities, the supposed humanist-pacifist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote a reply that is tantamount to a shrug: “You know very well that [we went] to Germany to take our revenge.”
Stalin himself was similarly dismissive when informed of the mass rapes and pillaging on German soil by an underling named Djilas
We try to regulate the behavior of our soldiers far too much. Does Djilas, who is himself a writer, not know what human suffering and the human heart are? Can't he understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a wench or takes some trifle?
Jesus. A Wench? Some trifle? Stalin though the biggest instance of mass rape in human history merely “trifling” with German “wenches”?
Of course he was dismissive. Stalin was not kidding at Yalta, as Roosevelt was, when he proposed shooting 50 000 German officers at the conclusion of the war, to ensure another world war did not crop up again in twenty years. Roosevelt, thinking Stalin was joking, said, “oh, surely 49 000 will take care of the job, Stalin.”
Churchill, either tired or unused to American sarcasm or Stalin’s cold-blooded purge-first mentality, was horrified, and left the room, refusing to discuss the notion further.
That sounds, unambiguously, like a justification for the same kinds of horrors the SS death squads visited upon the Belorussian and Ukranian and, finally, Russian peasants.
In 1985, the Russian director Elem Klimov released what is, to my mind, the most horrifying horror film (because it is a war film depicting events that actually happened) ever unleashed upon an unsuspecting public. The film is called Come and See.
My ex showed me a lot of great horror films that were so hard to watch but whose ultimate message made you understand why the director made you endure what you just endured. Martyrs (2008), for me, was probably had to highest ratio of hard-to-watch v enduring sociopolitical message/moral.
If you know your bible, either testament, you know where the line Come and See comes from. The four beasts (thought to be horses but eyewitness testimony is scant, especially now, two millennia later), come out. And the witnesses see the apocalypse. The pale horse is said to be the last of the four, the fourth bullet in the four bullet Jewish Roulette pistol. The pale horse is ridden by death. Like in Game of Thrones!
Anyway, for me, what’s frightening about Come and See is that everything you see on screen truly happened. And the bleak film card that appears toward the end of the movie, telling viewers that the SS and their kindred death squads ensured that
628 Belorussian villages were destroyed, along with all their inhabitants after Hitler opened the Eastern Front on June 22 1941.
Jesus. 628 villages. Again, to save ammunition, all the villagers would be rounded up and forced/shoved into the church, or into the biggest barn in the village, whichever was larger. Once they were locked in, the building would be set on fire.
To save ammunition, the SS death squads shot only those who tried to escape the flames by smashing through windows and running.
Watch this scene, a few German’s pretend to be innocent Bellorussians, while a fanatical German officer, despite knowing he is moments away from execution, angrily and defiantly explains to villagers why they must all die. I tried to time stamp it at 4:30. Fast forward to 4:30 if you just want to see the scene I’m talking about. You have to double-click and it won’t work if you’re not signed in.
Unlike most Belorussians, who assumed Stalin would protect them instead of using them as human meat shields to protect the real Russians who lay beyond the Pale, these particular villagers has a militia and were ready for the SS death squads. The look on the faces of the villagers, the shock and sadness and utter disgust, is palpable, as the German soldier carries on his horrifying speech justifying his squad’s execution of children.
“Some nations have no right to exist,” he begins. “The trouble starts with kids. Kids spread the microbe of communism.”
“We’ll carry out this mission. If not today…tomorrow!”
The bizarre optimism in this statement.: “Oh you can kill me today, but what I live for and fight for will win tomorrow,” is horrifying in its certitude, in the German officer’s complete certainty of his own biological, ideological and national superiority.
Let’s take a slight break from the horror vibe by just giving you this Johnny Cash song from an album where everybody raved about his cover of “Hurt,” entirely ignoring this masterpiece. “When the Man Comes Down” is the culmination of Cash’s religious beliefs.
Sure, some of the imagery is extremely old-school Catholic, with its premium placed on virginity. I have to say: shouldn’t a woman who had given into temptations of the flesh, admitted as much, became pregnant, and was sent of to work in a monastery be of greater value to the Catholic Church than the idea of immaculate conception? Because the immaculate conception can only mean that this Mary, whatever icon she would later come to be, was a teenage who had unprotected sex and got pregnant.
Why are these exiled nuns supposed to feel shame, 40, 50, even 60 years after having sexual intercourse? When they have given up their child or children if they had twins or more, and given their entire lives to the Catholic Church?
Why aren’t nuns more venerated than this original, human Mary who…if she wasn’t lying, must have been inseminated in some old fashioned and probably dangerous procedure?
VI. Moral of the day/week/month/year/life
Stop dwelling on the bad, Danny.
There’s plenty of good. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. You have a cat.
You have a family that loves you, a Mum you talk to a lot and sisters you talk to a lot and a father you talk to sporadicallty.
You have a band.
You have a new album out.
You made a movie that doesn’t suck. Here’s our fake VH1: Behind the Music style doc for a fake punk band called The Vandelles. The music in the background is mine. MINE!
Here’s the trailer:
Just keep making things, kid.
You’re a construction worker.
Stay away from the Chinese Roulette (the new Chinese fent that seems to kill 1 in 5 users. One potent blend is called “Walking Dead.”)
I remember getting a frantic text from my dealer 3 years ago. “Dude! Call me! Now!”
I owed him $, so I didn’t call him.
2 hours later a new text: “Shit man! Not you too? Please call ASAP! NOT about $!”
So I call him. “Hey dude, what’s up?”
“You know that shit I sold you yesterday?”
Of course I did. “Of course.”
“Was it okay? Didn’t fuck you up?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Ohhh, that’s right, you don’t bang.”
Translation: You don’t inject.
“Right.”
“Sold the same shit to a regular last night and she’s uh…no longer with the company. Which is really sad.”
“Oh my God.”
“Just be careful. You won’t be able to reach me at this number again. I’ll call you in a few days with my new number.”
“Okay.”
And that was it. Another overdose victim. “No longer with the company.”
It happens that fast. And you are spoken of that callously.
“Motherfucker had it comin.”
“What’d he fuckin’ expect?”
Jesus.
Okay. I’m straight right now. Keep going. In a straight line.
Yes, I miss my ex. But I miss the Ataris too. And they come to Toronto once a year on their never-ending tour. And I never go.
Don’t overvalue things from the past just cuz they seem, or are, elusive.
There is a reason you two broke up. Those reasons mostly stem from my behavior, but that doesn’t make them less legit or less potent.
So as soon as I get my paperwork, I sign it, I send it back.
And then we say goodbye again.