Focus

The Beneficiary was looking over the blog and noted that the last entry was, to quote her, "obstructively cynical". I told her I didn't give a shit, which probably WAS obstructively cynical. Then she said it wandered, lacked focus, and generally seemed to be a word association test given to a right-wing flake under the influence of too many cold meds. Well, I don't fucking THINK so. I mean, wander? Unfocused? C'mon. So, I decided to write another entry, both to acknowledge her input (Hi, Babe! Be home late tonight! Smooches!) and because I just noted that the "hit counter" on this page has pole-vaulted a notch, which was, frankly, something of a shock. Even counting the fact that I check it about every 15 minutes to make sure my stuff is actually posting, this still leaves plenty of room to account for at least a couple of y'all checking in here periodically. Or alternately, for a shitpot full of y'all to have checked in once,then gone away.



At any rate, never being one to miss the opportunity to celebrate even the most mundane Event, I'm tossing back another Jack to acknowledge my somewhere between one and a hundred or so readers: Saaaaa-LUTE!



Speaking of which, if you are in fact my only reader and you've managed to push the ol' counter that high all by your lonesome, you are in desperate trouble, and are one lonely, lonely human. I'd recommend a long stretch under aggressive psychiatric care, possibly involving powerful anti-psychotics and frightening equipment attached to your naughty bits, but not till you double the current hit counter. Well, y'know as long as you can do it without having a breakdown, or sticking a pistol in your mouth or something. After all, I'm not a COMPLETE asshole.



OK, look, here's the deal. If there's a better than 50/50 shot that you're head isn't going to fry for a few hours, go ahead and hit the page again, but if you start feeling a little shaky, step away from the keyboard till reality again begins to intrude.



In the meantime, the Sting video which just showed up on the telly (early "just-out-of-Police" era) is in black and white and involves lots of strong-jawed profile shots, ocean waves, rivers, running through grassy fields, stone buildings, mysterious people dressed in black wandering through the shots with no apparent purpose, one out of focus girl, and a sheep.



I'm a bit worried about the sheep.



The rest of the weirdness is just your average masturbatory "rock and roll dickhead attempting relevance" Bravo Sierra (or "BS" if you prefer your acronyms without phonetics), primarily designed to impress the ah- tists and other dipshits impressed by this sort of thing. You know, the type of people who think Mona Hatoum has something to say or that Björk is anything other than a passing strange little bit of weirdness.



As an example, I saw one review early on in which some moron stated that Björk (who was at that time the lead singer for The Sugarcubes,) was "sex on a stick".



Maybe YOUR stick, buddy, but she'd better stay clear of mine unless she just NEEDS the beating. Now, why would I know anything about Björk's old band, much less a critic's take on them? Because the female lawyer I knew back then who thought the Sugarcubes were just the bee's knees was hot, hot, hot. You want "sex on a stick," well, there ya' go.



No, don't be silly, I wasn't tapping any of that. I'm happy at home, thanks. However, there's no reason to NOT get along with someone who is hot, hot, hot, even if it's just in something as simple as what kind of music she likes. As a result, I spent a stretch listening to the Sugarcubes in spite of my better judgement.



Freakin' women -- are they a pain in the ass or what? Women have convinced me to cut my hair, hold jobs, listen to The Sugarcubes, and watch Clint and Meryl play "Hide the Loofa". There's just no end to it.



Where was I? Oh, yes. Sting. Video. Sheep. Uhmmm...ah, there it is: Why the sheep? Does Sting have a secret he's been trying to get across to his fans all these years? Now, the next vid is Neil Diamond, heavily back-lit till his collar-length hair is a glowing reddish halo, doing a straight stand-up rendition of "Heart Light".



OK, fine, so the sheep's not that big a deal. Sorry, Sting, buddy. Lost my head there.



Ah, Eric Clapton -- best guitarist in history. Hey, it's VH1, give me a break. Besides, I LIKE Eric Clapton.



"Layla, you got me on my knees
Layla, I'm begging, darling please
Layla, darling won't you ease my worried mind?"



Yeah, buddy. What else do you need to know about women, huh? (I know, I know, Derek and the Dominos did it first -- Clapton did the one that counts.)



I guess if I were a complete fucking loser, I could instead be watching Marilyn Manson on MTV. Yeah, that will be happening REAL soon. Talk about someone who needs to stick a pistol in his mouth. [Y'see how that tied into the above? "Unfocused" my pimply butt.] Get Manson and Michael Jackson to play drop-dead five-card stud to see who gets to suck the .40 cal dick first, and put it live on pay-per-view -- you'd make some serious money. I'd watch it.



Anyhow, whoever's on, MTV is totally un-fucking-watchable lately. Not surprising -- I've heard that the MTV corporate organization is in something of an uproar. Apparently there has been a Company-wide search in an attempt to find anyone over there who remembers what the "M" stood for.



So there I was, maybe a hundred years ago, in a dark downstairs apartment living room making one of those critical, "buncha folk gonna get killed if anything goes wrong" kinda deals in South Salt Lake, just below I-80, lots of guns, lots of distrust, lots of very large, grim- looking fuckers wired to the tits on coke and stranger things, some of whom spoke English, and they had early MTV on, one of the first times I'd ever seen it, making a kind of disjointed Miami Vice backgroud, all very surreal -- you know; you've been there, right? Ah, that Joan Jett -- was she hot back in the day or what? Still is, if it gets to that, but hey, back then I was ten feet tall and bulletproof and nasty enough and adrenaline rushed enough to hang out with her, if it ever came up. It never did.



We all agreed that worse things could happen than cuddling up to that dangerous, growling ball of chains and leathers and bad attitude. Mmmm...Yummy.



Suddenly we could all see eye to eye on at least this one thing. The distrust didn't disappear, but it melted a notch. Music soothing the savage breast and all that.



After that intro to MTV, I gotta tell you that whatever those ignorant, whiney dipwads over at the "Real World House" have got going can't seem to much engage me. So what happened to MTV? Them was the days...



Oh, the deal? It went OK. Kind of a nosy fucker, aren't you?



In Our Next Episode: Likely Another Failed Attempt at Coherence.