GOOSED BY CONTENT

[sorry, this is old and i meant to finish it that day, before i got distracted.]
29.07.08:

sheesh. earthquake? *sneeze* legal notice shenaniganery? *covers self in filth*

i mayhap have subjected you to a shrill, possibly drunken diatribe at one point in the past couple years concerning one author of whom i might rather disapprove. like any good Christian conservative, she is completely fucking insane and a proper hypocrite.

well, maybe she has a point, but not in the way she intended.

back in the hoary old days of 2006, i worked for *nameless and soulless digital content company*, and they had a contract to scan, OCR, and upload *publishing company*'s books. a proofreader's job at this company was to check the OCR-produced text file against the scanned page image. not terribly demanding, as evidenced by the intellectual prowess of my co-workers. YA-oriented celebrity-twin horse fiction took up rather too much of my day, or at least the bits that weren't filled with the interminable drivel put out by paulo coelho or the disturbing discovery that isabel allende (GIWLF) passionately believes a cheese log rolled in fucking diced prunes is conducive to, ah, fucking. *wipes self uncontrollably, swears to never eat any food listed in the aphrodisial cookbook ever again*

once we started in on one of the *publishing company*'s imprints (namely the jeebus one), however, the remnants of my bleeding-heart baby-killing pro-civil-liberties homophilic hackles were raised, for i discovered the "life-changing fiction" of a latently racist, closed-minded hateful harridan with skin the color of a carotene-heavy diet's shit.

imagine, if you will: not one, but two novels blatantly exploitative of 9/11, down to their titles; plot twists that include an amnesiac who can pass for a woman's dead WTC-fire-fighting husband TO HER AND THEIR DAUGHTER, for months; claiming marijuana use promotes, nay, instigates violent gang rape on the part of the partakers; mise en scene creation that hangs on killing off (in a fiery mid-ocean plane crash in the first two pages, no less) an innocent flight attendant (pacific islander) because, though saved by jeebus, she had a child out of wedlock with an airline pilot (not saved by jeebus yet - later, natch); all nonwhite characters are painfully of the Magical Black Man sort, even when they are neither black nor men; physical attraction loosely disguised as growing faith in the evangelical flavor of jeebus, heightening at a first chaste kiss more than a hundred pages in; and so forth, all couched in grating, breathless prose that cannot attain the height of craft acheived by the Left Behind series. (i'm not joking here. i read the first six of those.)

so the gall of filing a cease-and-desist order against a blogger who dare use the phrase "life-changing fiction" is near-appalling, save for the fact that she did change my life.

FOR THE WORSE.

fuck you, karen kingsbury.

link

content, the lack thereof

poo.

i've made a decision. i think it's something i can live with for the next year or so, hopefully. maybe not the best choice, but i think as most of my life is not terribly fraught with good choices, this is the best i can expect, and will certainly make me much happier than i've been in that sense for the past months.

things are looking better-ish financially too. i suppose there's something to be said for having hoarded gobs of vinyl for twelve years. i sort of feel bad betraying my record-collector scum self - no giant indie-rock time capsule for YOUR beneficiaries, sucka! - but as it perpetuates the sloughing-off of material goods that was thoughtfully precipitated by the Triangle development and the shoddy wastewater planning courtesy of the city of Austin, i'm not going to get terribly anxious about it. i figure if you're willing to pay that much for the damn sea and cake record i found for four dollars at the houston sound exchange in 1996, you're probably going to give it a good home and maybe some sweet, sweet aural lovin' in the bargain.

there's more, but i don't really feel like talking about it at the moment.

if you don't give a damn, we don't give a fuck ...

however, i do like the way you work it.

*sigh*

i'm depressed. cheering, prease?

you'd think that the new girl talk would make me sufficiently happy.

And yes, i know.

Neighbor kitty!

i forgot

that this existed. how on earth can clicking on topsy taylor not make you feel better about the world's brief shortage of new LOLCATs?

the weather, and assorted scintillation

the wind is right and i can smell donuts in my carport. the air is a gravid weight, full of mosquitoes and yellowjackets and moisture refusing to precipitate, miniscule plant matter and maybe even a bit of california fire. my laptop is still insistent in its belief it is merely a typewriter, spontaneously opening the cd drive as an inappropriate carriage return. it's not as though it's requesting something new to listen to, like a demanding pre-internet teenager who has discovered college radio and zines all at once. it had better not be, at any rate. i would think it wouldn't have much to write about in its journal, but i could be wrong.

my right shoulder has reconfigured its musculature, knotting and protesting against any position deviating from how i move the mouse eight hours a day, cutting and pasting and opening and closing ones and zeroes. i hunch more frequently now, longing for the days of ergonomic government workspaces, while my chin juts forward and my face angles up to a permanent, invisible screen even as i drive.

Can you find my well-dressed neighbor?

are you TOTALLY STOKED?

because i am.

a. party. holla!
b. is this not the early eighties all over again? because i feel like it is. i totally felt teh bite of the S&L failure when i was six, and i'm sure i can feel it comin' in the air tonight again. or if not tonight, then maybe soonish? i mean, come on! wonky gas prices, crazy republican in the white house, i'm regressing to reading YA fiction... what other signifiers do you need? weird slutty madonna (check). retarded poppy dance music? check. cocaine? totes checkers. the dollar making a horribly slurpy sucking sound on global currency markets? check. crazy nonWASPy nonanglo terrorists about to not really do anything to us again because we breed like rats? um, check. insert random fact that is semicorrelated with something that happened 25 years ago? check and AFGHANISTAN check, bitches. how can i not win this argument, omg? OK, yeah, except there wasn't OMG back then. whatever, shut up, go to the B&S show tomorrow (see below) after buying art at end of an ear and then we can stand around at a party being all drunk and deep and shit about how this country is still going to hell and it's still the old people's fault. and maybe we can start our own goddamned newsweekly and make stupid money with it. and on that note, also see below.

"SHEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeyit."

whee!

well, not really. sort of. i had missed knob creek, and now i don't. there's a party tomorrow/tonight! saturday night.

let's make a deal. if you don't already know about it, go to the brothers and (not ampersand) sisters cd release at club deville, and then you'll see me, and i'll tell you about it in between singing along loudly and off-key to "i don't rely" and other gems, which could potentially but probably won't include "september girls/gurls." (because they hate me.) and then we can stand around in a front yard or sit around on a couch or - even! in a back yard and drink and talk nonsense at each other. which is different from what we normally do, with all our glasses-pushed-back-up-our-noses-as-they-slip-down impossibly erudite lofty conversation and whatnot.

is there any way i could possibly not sell this to you more? not even a. me getting drunk and showing you my tiny boobs you've already seen too many times, or b. walking over to concordia for a midnight inspection of the demolition to date? or c. horrors! both? double-you-tee-eff, mate!

text a bitch.

did i mention i'm drunk? also, if you insist (and probably, possibly, if you don't) i'll tell you more than I wanted to know about avocados and drug possession in the netherlands and worldwide "age of onset" drug use. gee, i hope i'm not spoiling next week's alternative newsweekly for you. just wait til you hear what torrid scandals surround the potential development of the lions golf course! the brutal conflict between two former UT-golf-teammates!

oh.

you don't care about any of it. why am i not surprised?

The creepy paper towel dispenser