The Wall Is What You Make It

The Wall is What You Make It - Just Ask Trump Supporters, Zionists, Palestinians, Women in Their 40's and Me

               I followed my usual routine of wistfully browsing all the hot food I couldn’t afford, the whiskies I vowed not to drink, and the colorful vegetables at the salad bar.  I grabbed a pair of tongs and sifted through the garbanzo beans, salivating.  I laid the tongs back down and gulped before I headed across the store to collect some overpriced veggies in the produce section.  I grabbed some angel hair, red pasta sauce and a loaf of bread.  My date was going to get a nice, home-cooked Italian meal.

               I answered the door when she knocked and she immediately threw herself upon me.  Her hands were on my chest and her tongue was in my mouth.  I felt my cock begin to shrivel up, a bit disgusted.

               I pushed her off me and said, “Dinner’s almost ready.”

               “Good,” she said, and tried to smile seductively.

               She was forty-two and I was twenty-seven.

               She couldn’t keep her hands off me while I attempted to finish fixing the meal.  It was horrible.  It was all I could do to keep my pants on.  Her tongue flicked in and out of my mouth like she was a snake as I stirred the pasta sauce with a wooden spoon.  She grabbed my ass and pinched me, hard.

               I cried out, “I spent eighteen bucks on this meal!”

               “No, you didn’t,” she said, and kissed my neck.  “There’s going to be leftovers.”

               I broke free of her grasp and managed to dish out her food.  She calmed down and we talked as we ate and did the dishes together.  As soon as the last dish was clean and air-drying in the dish rack, she threw me up against the fridge.  I pulled her off of me and got out of the corner, off the ropes.  She wasn’t going to knock me out that easily.  But she threw a few more jabs, got inside with her tongue, and sent me reeling toward the ropes at the other end of the ring with an upper-cut.  I was backed up against my bedroom door and the referee called the fight.  I opened the door and threw her down onto my futon mattress.

               “Take your fucking shoes off,” I ordered.  “That’s my only rule.  No shoes in bed.”

               She complied.  I unlaced and removed my chucks and went to work.  Her cunt wasn’t as loose as I prefer, but we found a decent fit after awhile.  I looked down at her beautiful hood and back up at her face as I pumped.  She kept her legs tight.

               “Let me,” I commanded and narrowed my eyes.

               She looked at me, giddy.  She kept it tight, wouldn’t let me in all the way.  I got my retracted foreskin to smooth out completely, but I still couldn’t get it in all the way.  Her legs were preventing me.  It was rock-solid, a wall Donald Trump could only dream of building: a right-wing, Israeli apartheid border violating countless United Nations resolutions, illegally annexing the head of my cock.  I was swollen and fat like the stomachs of starving Palestinian children.

               “Let me,” I ordered her.

               Finally, her legs opened a bit and I got the rest of me in, firing rocket after rocket into Zion.  I lowered my lips to hers, and she smiled after I kissed her.  The rapture finally came.  I looked at my cell phone as she cleaned herself up with one of my sex towels.  Six minutes – not bad.  I was shooting for inside of five, but you can’t win them all.  I collapsed onto my back and spread myself out.  I closed my eyes.  She fell down beside me, resting her head on my chest.

               “I liked it,” she whispered, trying to reassure me, as if I was insecure.  I tried not to laugh but half a smile escaped.  I guess she imagined I was telling her to “let me” get my cock all the way in.

               I was telling her to let me come.

Poor, Forsaken ’96 Hondas

Poor, Forsaken ’96 Hondas

               Things aren’t going so great in my hometown.  There were fires and some people died and a bunch of people lost their homes.  I thought the homeless problem was bad toward the end of the Bush years what with the housing crisis.  Things got steadily and increasingly worse as Obama sat back and did absolutely nothing productive to help anyone, at least not in my hometown.  Fuck man, you’d think bombing the shit out of the Libyan people to keep Gaddafi from going off the dollar standard and investing in gold would’ve helped out a bit but no dice.  And now what with the combination of things basically staying the same (aside from the price increase in canned goods and other food under Trump, the fuckin’ prick) and the fires, there are more homeless people than ever before.  Gentrification and natural disasters are a recipe for, well . . . disaster.  I can’t tell you how many homeless people I’ve recently shared kind words with, thrown a couple bucks to, or given the hug they so desperately need.

               But as with any tragedy, things are much, much worse than they appear.  I was just noticing it as I drove down to the liquor store today.  I had to go to the South end of town to avoid seeing this girl who I think might slit my throat at any second.  This psychopath assaulted me the other day and I’m not in the mood to die just yet, fortunately or unfortunately.

               So there I am, approaching one of those lights that take for fuckin’ forever to change that all the dickweeds run when they’re making left hand turns and I stop for the yellow – I don’t want to take the risk of some desperate mid-50’s loser or some over-privileged, rich, half-white kid who’s still going to school majoring in fucking sociology at the fucking JC to come slamming into me at 28 miles an hour so he or she can try to tell me that it’s my fault.  I could’ve made the yellow light, but who gives a shit?  I was feelin’ alright today.  I wasn’t in the mood to lose it all a week away from the Super Bowl (go Eagles – I know you can do it, Nick!) just because no one in this town has the patience to act as a witness or the moral courage to stand up and do the right thing.

               Right.  So I’m sitting there at the light and I just notice this person in a ’96 Honda waiting in the left hand turn lane opposite from me with the paint peeling off.  And I start to scratch my head and wonder why the hell it is that I see all these goddamn late 90’s Hondas all rusted out with the paint peeling off?  The guy pulls away, and I continue to wait at the light (these fuckin’ stoplights take forever in this town man, I’m telling you) and I start to think about what that poor sucker’s life might be like.

               He’s probably living paycheck to paycheck, working some shitty customer service job.  He stands there and gets treated like shit by his boss, the other employees, and the customers don’t notice or give a shit about him.  Even if he had the strength, the fortitude or the smarts to work in some manufacturing job, all that shit was thrown overboard, literally overseas by Reagan-Bush-Clinton with their fucking free trade policies and union-breaking bullshit back in the 80’s and 90’s.  No wonder fourth-wave feminism exists as it exists today – all the women of my generation have no idea what it’s like for some drunken, violent father to come home and beat them because he just had 6 drinks at the bar in two hours because he’s literally breaking his back for his cheating wife who’s fucking the mailman and making him raise children who aren’t his own, this imaginary father figure who doesn’t exist anymore who was hit by his parents in an era when everyone thought that horrible shit was okay.  I’m not saying the old days were great or even good.  But I guess back in those days that drunken father working a manufacturing job was distracted and tired enough at the end of the day to hopefully pass out before he beat his kids so his wife could go fuck the mild-mannered milk man with the big cock.  Or big balls, take your pick.  And at least that drunken asshole working the manufacturing job had some dignity in the lie he was living, and so he could afford to pay the way of his whore of a wife and feed his kids so the boys could grow up and beat the kids who they didn’t actually father and so the girls could grow up as empowered young women, fuck whoever they want, commit paternity fraud and have free access to birth control and abortions in case anything went wrong or looked somewhat . . . hazy.  And at least back then, if you were the cheating housewife, you got to have a good time.  Society has never been good to men, but now, now!  Now it’s about to get worse, really bad for women, and I’m going to explain why.  And I lament the coming of this societal collapse here.  Society has always been gynocentric but now everyone is fucked, and I mean everyone.

               But first, here’s a symptom of the problem that’s coming for women in this country, in my hometown.  You can see it because of the fires.  There are more homeless women than ever before.  That’s bad.  I think women and men alike should live dignified lives and I feel really bad when I see a poor homeless woman shuffling along with her grocery cart and her bags full of clothes and trash.  There isn’t even some drunken fat guy who wants to take her in anymore.  Because literally what with the lack of good paying jobs anymore, there is no drunken asshole who can afford to take her off the streets.  That douchebag is just gonna sit back right easy and pound a Lagunitas IPA (or six) to his dome while he sits on the couch and watches Jimmy Garoppolo add some meaning to his meaningless life.  Why the fuck should he take in some chick who’s bound to be a squatter and treat him like a slave or falsely accuse him of something he didn’t do?  Even this fat slob pounding beer after beer from a company who used to give away free beer to their racist forklift mechanic has a Twitter account.  He knows what’s going on.  As soon as you don’t act as a woman’s slave, she’s going to say you did something that you didn’t do and everyone knows it.  So men, even the good ones, even the hot ones are just giving up on women, and you can tell now that there are all these homeless women out on the street.  It’s the poor, the homeless, the people driving ’96 Hondas with broken CD players forced to listen to fucking Drake on the radio and can’t even pop in their scratched up Matchbox 20 album – that’s where you’ll see the degradation of society appear first.  Yeah, we’re seeing, and rightfully so, the exposure and illumination of powerful men who have mistreated Hollywood women and others as the scum-sucking slimeballs that these asshole men truly are.  But nothing is really happening to these guys because half of those accusations on Twitter are false, and the rich guys who are guilty just get a slap on the wrist or pay off their victims.  It’s at the bottom of society, that’s where the pain is really felt.

               So finally the arrow turns from red to green and I cut across the intersection, find the liquor store and turn in.  I see another rusted out, late 90’s Honda with the paint peeling off the hood.  And I look around at the people, the old white dude with his truck with a million miles on it but knows how to fix it.  He’s a survivor.  He’ll make it until he collapses in the hospital under the weight of all the beer and processed food and meat loaded with antibiotics and hormones after some dipshit feeds the IV incorrectly.  At least he’ll have lived a somewhat full life.  He raised a couple kids, one of which wasn’t his own, but who’s counting?  They grew up, went to college, got jobs in the tech industry, blamed him for their parents’ divorce and he cruised off into the sunset in ’89 Ford with the rebuilt engine.

               I see a bunch of Hispanics, families of them.  They’re listening to mariachi music, eating, waiting for their laundry to get done spinning.  Their kids all went to school on the poor side of town.  They never had much of a chance at education because W’s No Child Left Behind program cut all of the funding to the West Side schools and encouraged all the kids who could speak English to go to school on the East Side where they were pampered and sent off to other places, other states and other towns with lower costs of living and a chance to live a life of dignity.  But the kids who can’t speak English, the families who can’t, some of them in this shopping center will do okay.  They’ll eat great Mexican food in a community that cares about them and supports their own.  Some of them will get deported by our fucked up evil President and all of his jealous, white, racist toadies – his supporters, however.  A lot of them will be doomed to a life of poverty.  But, like many of the Oakies from FDR’s bullshit economic recovery, some of these people will be happy in their government-imposed impoverishment, and will enjoy passing the time putting in an honest day’s work with the manual labor rich, white people don’t want to do, listening to the local music created by the people in their community, and generally celebrating the culture that this backwards, gentrified, racist, inbred corporate town can never take away.  No matter how much Donald Trump bitches and moans on Twitter, he’s never rounding up all these people, he’s never building his wall.  It’s not politically possible.

               But the other people in this shopping center – the homeless.  They’re going to sleep on the streets until they die, either by overdosing (voluntarily or involuntarily), starving, finally giving in and stabbing themselves with a blunt object, or freezing to death somewhere, here or elsewhere in the winter time.  And now there are women in my hometown doomed to this fate.  And it sucks, man.  It sucks.

Just Put in the Punter

Just Put in the Punter

                I’m not sure why or how someone who chooses to exercise his First Amendment Right then suddenly goes from a good athlete to a bad one.  I’m not sure the difference between a 96 quarterback rating (think of a guy named Young) and 90 is such a huge margin, differing eras aside.  I’m also not sure why a guy with a career 83 quarterback rating is considered preferable to a guy with a career 88 rating during the same era.  Unless up is down and down is up.  Unless a lower quarterback rating is preferable.  I mean, shit, why don’t we just put the punter in there?  I’m sure he’ll do a decent job of pre-snap reads, assuming he knows the Head Coach’s schemes and playbook well enough.  Who cares if he can’t throw or run or break tackles or do anything that a modern quarterback is supposed to be able to do in terms of raw athleticism? If I want to watch an inferior athlete, give me a guy with heart.  At least passion and love for the game is somewhat entertaining, for example:  Shawn Hill was more entertaining to watch than the 49ers’ current second string quarterback they’ve allowed to start.

                And there really is something symbolic about watching, for the second year in a row no less, a second string quarterback play while wearing a jersey bearing the number “2.”  The fact that the irony is somehow lost on Jed York or anybody in the 49ers’ front office makes it even more hilarious.  Oh no, we can’t have the guy who’s protesting racism play, that would be too offensive.  No, let’s go with the second string guy – what’s his name?  Put that guy in.  I just love watching inferior athletes with no moral courage throw four yard passes on third and nine, or better yet, get intercepted while trying to dump the ball off.  I thought it was bad last year when Blaine Gabbert threw a dump off pass three yards down the field straight into the ground.  But now middle linebackers are routinely waiting for Brian Hoyer to look towards a more difficult throw, and then deliver them the ball directly like he drives for fucking UPS.

                To the middle linebacker of the Los Angeles Rams – just wait till Hoyer looks toward a more difficult throw toward the sidelines.  As we all know, a throw down the center of the field is easier.  He’s trying to look you off because he has no arm.

                Good luck, Coach Shanahan.  You are the head coach of a sports team that endorses racism.  Because Colin Kaepernick is better than Brian Hoyer.  But you knew that, you racist piece of shit.  Or did you just pick the guy with the faggy glove on his non-throwing hand because you needed someone to take the blame if your scheme failed and everybody started to realize that you’re not a great offensive mind?  You didn’t win the Super Bowl last year because you called a pass play when you so obviously needed to run.  That’s why Matt Ryan got sacked.  That’s how I know you’re not a good coach.  Because that was the worst play call I’ve ever seen.

                I get it, we aren’t all perfect people.  But can’t the 49ers' decision makers in the front office put their racist tendencies aside and just put the best player on the field?  No?  Okay, fuck it.  I understand.  Jed York, Kyle Shanahan, John Lynch - you guys think the flag is more important than putting the best player on the field, you think the country is more important than the problem of racism.  Well, Stephen A Douglass thought so too and he was also a loser who wound up losing.  Just put the punter in.

Why I Grabbed Taylor's Ass

Why I Grabbed Taylor’s Ass

               I was a moderately successful DJ.  A truly gorgeous pop singer was scheduled to appear on my weekend radio show for an interview and an acoustic performance.  We wanted to portray, as a radio station, a sense of intimacy to our viewers.  The men (and women) upstairs wanted us to facilitate a process by which we would allow our audience to get to know the artist through her responses, her voice and words.  She was as advertised: glamorous, thoughtful.  Not quite the voice of a generation, but a truly magnificent woman.

               She was incredibly simple-minded, however.  I recall listening to her just go on and on about what it means to be a young woman in modern society.  I remember wondering what it must be like to be prettier, more established, richer, and more successful than most other women in the world.  I wondered if it was possible for her to have any perspective at all on what it was like to be the average woman in Western society.  That question struck me especially hard while she played her horrible teeny-bopper anthems.

               “What a cunt,” I almost said right into the microphone after she finished her first song.  Of course I pussed out and composed myself.  Company policy and all.  I’m a professional.  I can contain my inner dialogue.  I’m a radio host.  This is what I do for a living.  I’m a moderately successful DJ!  Or was - before her, before the incident.  I said nothing while other people in the studio including her band and her manager started clapping.

               Finally, I spoke into the microphone, “That was incredible.  Truly fantastic.”

               “Thank you,” she said in a high, soft timbre.

               “No, Ma’am,” I said and laughed.  “Thank you.  This has been such a pleasure.”

               “Oh, yes,” she said and smiled.  She was textbook perfect in terms of her level of gorgeous.  She was the girl all young American girls wanted to look like.  That smile was really something.

               “Please,” I said, begged, “please play us another song.”

               “Of course,” she said.  Her voice was almost a whisper.  It made me wonder if she was high on coke or something.  Then I thought maybe I was just projecting.

               The band interrupted my critical psychological examination of my inner-self and began to play a slow ballad.  I really could use a bump, but I was being paid to stay put, right there in my chair.  I thought about spinning around in it.  I tapped my foot.  It was out of time to the music and I quit tapping upon realizing that.  The music was just so slow.  She started to sing.

It wasn’t my paycheck that was the true issue, however.  I could give a shit about losing a couple minutes of pay.  But of course for such an important interview, I might have been suspended (probably with pay, but still!  It would have come with a warning and you only get one or two of those in radio if you’re lucky) had I just up and booked it for the men’s restroom.  There would be a few bumps of coke in the bathroom, hopefully with a couple of hot secretaries after the interview.  I had to be patient.  I stayed put.

               The singing was okay.  The lyrics were horrible, but that’s par for the course in pop music.  She really was a beautiful woman.  Nobody could take that away from her.  The way she would sometimes smile to herself, and then look around, almost out into the world with wonder and amazement - she was a true joy.  There’s no such thing as the fountain of youth, but there is that dream of extended adolescence we all are so bitter about not having enough of.  It’s what we want for our kids.  And we want our kids to marry other people’s kids who are in just as privileged of a situation.  In modern society, I thought, my guest was the definition of female perfection, the top of the ladder in terms of the right combination of wealth, status and youth.  Maybe she didn’t have much talent – that was debatable, but she had enough of everything to get by as being what society, corrupt as it might be, would define as the pinnacle of excellence.  It didn’t matter whether she was musically talented or not she was so successful.  What a paradox, what a marvel.  She was so very beautiful in her simple elegance.

               She was the kind of girl who in one context, in one station in life, could be a National Treasure of sorts.  And in another station in life, for example: had she been uglier, she may have just been an unfortunate woman lost in the scuffle: just another unmemorable person.

               The second song ended.  The guitarist, a total dipshit, recommended she sing a third song.  I just stared at him with my mouth hanging open.  Part of me wanted to withhold anger from my glare and I wasn’t sure how much of my feelings came through in the look.  He just looked back at me with a good-natured expression.  Fucking chimp knew like six chords.

               Her voice cracked during the third song.  I tapped my index finger on my laptop keyboard.  Her manager clapped with exaggerated enthusiasm when it ended.  I guess he wanted to cover up the lackluster performance.  Who knows?  Maybe I was the only one in the room who thought the last song had mediocre execution.  I shook my head involuntarily while the manager clapped.  I needed a bump really, really bad.

               The director cut to commercial – the show was ending.  Everyone was all smiles.  The girl gave me a warm gaze.  I took a sip of water.  I was coming down hard.  I needed a bump.  The thought of a bump made me think about what this girl’s ass might look like.  But not once throughout the day, the pre-interview introductions, never did I ever get a chance to look.  I was just never behind her.

               I waited for everyone to decompress, say a few words, that sort of thing.  Finally, when I could get a word in edge wise, I hurried everyone out of the broadcasting booth and into the hallway.  Everyone started to shake hands.  The talking continued.

               “Let’s get that group photo,” I suggested.  I hoped no one noticed me trying to ease the process along.  All I could think about was porcelain.  Porcelain and powder.

               “Of course!” the manager said.

               Some intern produced a camera and everyone huddled together.  Of course with the band and the manager and her family members and the whole crew, we all struggled to fit in the frame.  And as we struggled to compress ourselves into a dense little ball, I suddenly found myself directly behind the girl.  There it was – her ass.  I felt a strange mix of emotions.  Probably because I was surprised at how unmoved I was by it, how unremarkable her butt was.  This girl had nothing going on.

               Jesus, I thought.  If a girl like this can climb to the top of the ladder of American capitalism, the music industry, then what kind of world am I living in?

               She shifted her body a little, and her butt moved toward me an inch of so.  It wasn’t her butt, though.  It was the rigid, wooden board that was her flat backside.  I felt like I was on a pirate ship, like I was being told to walk the plank.  I didn’t know how much more I could stand.

               Jesus, I thought to myself again.  If she so much as backed into me, she could accuse me of sexual assault.

               I felt a wave of heat wash over me.  I was so tired.  Goddamn this stupid, trashy, little pop icon.  I hated her.  I hated her non-existent butt.  How could I be accused of sexual assault for grabbing something that doesn’t exist?

               I watched as my hand tried to grab her butt.  I squeezed but nothing was there.  I tried to feel it, but she was all bone and no fun.

               Later, after they ruined my career, I had a lot of time to sit around and wonder if it was worth it.  Eventually I decided that no, overall it wasn’t.  But from a comedic standpoint, you have to admit, it’s kind of funny to look back at and laugh about.  I was fired for trying to squeeze the girl’s ass, not actually grabbing it.  It’s like when people pray to God.  They’re not praying to God, they’re talking to themselves.  I didn’t grab the girl’s ass.  She doesn’t have one.