Bloggy Mountin' Breakdown, Part 1

Ever have one of those days? Or weeks? Or months? Or summers?

To whit:

A coupla months ago, I was watching a Cubs game at a friend's apartment. We were playing this drinking game where every time one of our guys gets left stranded at third base, you have to do a shot, chase it with three swigs of beer, and then throw a dart at this life size cardboard cutout of Dusty Baker that he keeps nailed to his living room wall. If you sink a dart into Dusty's face, it's worth ten points and if you nail his crotch, it's worth 25. Whoever gets the lowest number of points has to buy the beer the next time around.

Being as we've been doing this since the 2003 NLCS, you'd think that Dusty would be unrecognizable, but our aim is usually so lousy that we're lucky if we even hit Dusty. My friend's wall is honeycombed with gouges and holes and he has to move a bookcase in front of it every time his landlord stops by to fix something. But that's not important right now.

What is important right now is that we were watching the game, and I wasn't even cursing the Cubs for all their various gaffes and pratfalls. I was just staring disjointedly at a spot of varnish on my friend's coffee table that looks exactly like the head of comedian Louie Anderson and my friend kept having to hit me on the shoulder to remind me to take my shots--both of liquor and at Dusty--and it must've really been getting on his nerves because finally he said, "Hey Steve, what the fuck is wrong with you?"

I was puzzled. I said "Ennhh??"

He said, "You're half-assing his whole thing. Whereza fun in that?"

I said, "Oh."

"You're getting to be sorta lame to hang around with."

"Probably."

"Keep it up and I'm not even gonna call ya when the next game's on."

"OK." There was a spot next to Louie Anderson that looked sorta like 80s comedienne Elaine Boozler. Weird that I'd never noticed it.

"You're starting to piss me off."

"Do ya ever wonder what happened to Elaine Boozler?"

"Who?"

"Elaine Boozler."

"Who's Elaine Boozler?"

"80s. Standup. Mensturation."

"Oh. Who cares?"

"Ida know. Just curious."

I was vaguely aware of the fact that I was pissing him off. He didn't even bother to curse at Aramis Ramirez for swinging at the third straight bad pitch. Out number 3.

So my friend started trying to get some sorta emotional response out of me:

"Hey Steve, I think Comedy Central was right for pulling that South Park episode because Isaac Hayes and Tom Cruise didn't like it."

"Yeah?"

On screen Michael Barrett was beating the shit out of one of the bat boys. With his face mask.

"Hey Steve, John Kerry lost the '04 election 'cuz he was too liberal. The Democrats shoulda run Joe Lieberman."

"Cool."

"Hey Steve, Elizabeth Elmore is a flat-chested skank whore who gives handjobs to crackhead White Sox fans in an alley under the L tracks. For free."

"What the fuck did you just say?!"

"Notice how there are never any guitar solos on her records? (Or at her live shows?) That's cuz while the band is playing the instrumental break after the 2nd chorus of every song , she's busy lapping at the flaccid, hairy asshole of that guy who used to sing in the Spin Doctors. And she hums the melody to 'Little Miss Can't Be Wrong' while she does it."

“I hate that song!”

I swung the bottle of Jack Daniels at him and came close to splintering his jaw, but he brandished the cardboard figure like a shield. Its head folded over like a a Monopoly game board, and splinters of Dusty’s face flew into the air like cardboard toothpicks, and for one timeless moment, it occurred to me that the real Dusty might’ve been happy to chaw on ‘em, as is his wont.

Then I chased my friend around his apartment for about ten minutes before the cops showed up. His landlord had called 'em because of the noise.

The cops lectured us for a while, and we promised to calm things down. By that time, my rage had cooled, and ‘tho my friend was kinda pissed, he explained how he was just trying to induce me to get my head outta my ass.

“No wonder life stinksso much!” said. But I couldn’t raise even a lame, fake laugh.

Nor could he.

Still, I knew he was right. My head was up my ass, and it had been for some time.

(I don’t mean that literally, which is prob. good, cuz I'm not sure how the hell my whole digestive cycle would work.) (More Midgard Serpent imagery! Rad!)

I'd been wandering around, dispatching my duties in the most rudimentary way, consuming and excreting the materials necessary to keep my carcass in an operational state, but I wasn't tasting my food, and I wasn't hearing the music I was listening to. I was feeding my dog cat food and my cat dog food. I'd called up my mother and made lewd suggestions to her and then telephoned this chick I've been trying to get into bed and asked her to sing me that old lullaby because I was having trouble getting to sleep.

Something was wrong, and I hadn't even noticed it till my friend snapped me out of it. (I later thanked him by the way.) I started reviewing my life, looking for changes in the way I'd been doing things. My diet was more or less the same. My health was OK. I was keeping weird hours, but I always keep weird hours. No one had died. I was facing no financial crises. My social life was more or less the same as it had been for the last coupla years, which is to say it's not great, but not bad.

Everything was normal.

Then it hit me. It was the internet porn.

Now, usually I'm content to jerk off to the same sorta stuff as any other guy, be it hetero; homo; lesbo; inter-sizal; (including vertically--dwarves can be pretty hot--and horizontally--fat chicks were a fun place to start, but I'd eventually gotten as far as sumo wretlers, who, in turn, had led me into this regressive diaper fetish thing, but I don't wanna talk about that;) interracial; oral, genital,digital and anal; incestual--'tho never pedophiliac in anyway, 'cuz that's just wrong; feco-philial and/or phagial; necro; (but only in cases where the deceased has specified that he/she wants his or her remains to be utilized in this manner, like those cannibal-lover German freaks from the news;) sado; masochisto; w/ or w/o pierced tongues, nipples, anuses or genitals; utilizing (or not) devices like dildoes, vibrators, gloryhole implements, fruits n' veggies, newspapers, electro-shock devices, nipple clamps, chips n’ dips, chains or whips; using costumes like sports mascot uniforms, diapers, (as mentioned above,) vestal garments; etc in groups numbering from 1-23. ('Tho once the number of participants exceeded 18 I found it hard to stay focused.)

I had an active and fulfilling relationship w/ my pornography. Somehow ‘tho, I was becoming kinda jaded. I'd gotten back into this bestiality groove. Hadn’t looked at that shit in a while, and for a second there, it almost felt new again. But I've seen it all, it seems. I've seen people do it with pet dogs. I'd watched one bold soul try to make it w/ a cat. I'd seen all kindsa stuff involving reptiles, arachnids, insects, etc. (The unicellular animals get really, uh, screwed in this area. Some guy really oughta like stick his dick into a bacterial culture or something. Or maybe some chick could mount a paremicium.Just to be fair.)

I'd seen 'em screw aquatic animals--esp. and predictably, eels, but also other sortsa fish--fresh water fish, shellfish, whitefish, one fish two fish red fish blue fish. I'd seen 'em screw 'em on a train, I'd seen 'em screw 'em on a plane, but I wasn't aroused by it, Sam I am.

Like the Verve once said, the porn don't work, it just makes me worse, etc. No wonder I felt so numb & dead.

But then it occured to me: there was one area I hadn't looked into in a while--one of the best ones of all: Grey Porn!

It was the bestiality that put the idea in my head. See, I was introduced to animal and senior porn at exactly the same moment. It's kinda a funny story that goes a little somethin' like this:

Back in my hoary film school daze, I had this work study job assisting the film department's technician. We'd perform maintenance and repairs on the cameras and other equipment. It kept us fairly busy, but his pay was for shit, and mine was even worse.

Fortunately, he ran this other business outta his home. He transferred people's old home movies to video tape. (This was just before the rise of DVD.) They'd drop 'em at a local drugstore or camera shop, which'd then relay 'em to my boss, and he'd thread 'em up in crappy old Super 8 and 16mm projectors--sometimes w/ 4 or 5 of the things going at once like the underground machinery in Fritz Lang's Metropolis. The money was good, but it got a little hectic here and there--with strands of brittle old film jamming and breaking and threatening to ignite, spectacularly, like gonorrhea in Joey Lawrence's shorts.

So he offered me a very part time job. All I hadda do was keep an eye on all these fucking machines, start and end the reels and tapes, label things, etc. It was boring, but we listened to some decent music and passed around the occasional joint or can of beer.

One night when we were more fucked up than we usual, he felt that it would be judicious to close things down before we destroyed somebody's wedding footage or something. Earlier, I'd run across these old stag films from the 1940s that someone had included w/ his/her old home movies—presumably by accident. In ‘em, a lady assumed the missionary position, and a Charles Atlas type climbed on top of her and as Sheena Easton once said, they got ta rammin'. All in grainy black and white.

So I said, "Hey! Look at this shit!"

"Hmm?" I remember he had some unamalgamated American cheese in his beard--from a sandwich he'd been eating earlier. "Oh. That's nothin'! You get that kinda shit alla time."

With the kinda smugness that is reserved for those who torpedo someone else's naivete, he explained that people were always sending their old porn in, usually buried within a slew of bar or bat mitzvah parties, Xmas morning gift exchanges and family vacation memories.

(Incidentally, it was in one of these family trip reels that I found the most obscene image I saw while I worked there. By far. Shot in the fifties or early sixties, this Estman color strip chronicled the adventures of an archetypal mom, pop, bro and sis as they travelled across the American west. One stop was apparently at the the site of some nuclear explosive tests, as visible beyond mom's shoulder, a distant mushroom cloud did flash against the desert sky. Now that was fucked up.)

He told me about this scholarly thesis he’d formed whereby these inclusions of porn were not generally accidental, but instead were an effort at preserving some beloved stroke material of yonder days. (Sorta like you do w/ an old pair of slippers.) Of course anyone of these nostalgic types whom you approached would still insist that the whole thing was accidental—or worse that they’d never seen it before in their lives, but in the end, I mean, who gives a shit?

Anyhoo, my boss'd told me to remind him to show me something really fucked up when we had a chance. So trying to sober up before I headed home, I mentioned it to him. He smiled evilly, produced a video tape, and set the fucker rolling.

On the screen unfolded a complex montage. Eisenstein woulda been proud of its elaborate but brutally effective construction. Shot on various stocks--color, black and white, reversal and negative, grainy and clear--pornographic images flashed, with an insistant rhythm. 'Twas an even 4/4 sorta beat, timed exactly to New Order's "Strange Love Triangle," the extended dance mix of which did thump thump thump thump from the television speakers.

Clearly this was the work of a man w/ too much time—not to mention maybe too much other stuff—on his hands. My boss had assembled the more bizarre stuff that had crossed his lenses, and a surprising amount of it was oriented toward bestiality. (Usually involving horses, dogs or eels.) I had seen virtually no animal porn, as I said, but I can't claim that the stuff was too shocking. If you have the slightest bit of imagination and haven't seen the stuff before, what you're picturing in yr. head is prob. quite accurate. Sure it's weird, it's fucked up, but it's not exactly unimaginable in and of itself.

The tape was effectively cut, but even so, it quickly got boring. I mean, there are only so many variations on human/canine couplings that you can come up with, and I suspected that would extend to any sort of animal you might come up w/.

But then, in the gloriously saturated color people used to dig, there was this pig. In a barn. And there was this pale, busty naked brunette, walking around behind it, as it trotted away from her. She was attempting to jerk the pig off w/ one hand and carrying a wooden stool in the other. Again, weird and fucked up but what was really striking about it was that it the film stock was of higher quality than most, that the shots were carefully composed, and the editing within the scene was very well done. Somebody had gone to a lotta trouble w/ this one.

And it got even worse/profound/profane. While this chick was chasin' the pig, (weird, the thing had a hard-on, why was it running away? outta some sense of decency?) this old codger, equally naked, appeared nearby. He was distinguished by a wild, unevenly distributed mass of dirty gray hair; a gleeful, semi-toothless leer; and a gargantuan dick. I mean, he was hung like a horse, y'know, which was almost sort of appropriate in a barnyard sorta way, 'cuz now Granpaw was joinin' the chase, all the while yankin' at his endowment w/ the apparent purpose of keepin' it fully endowed.

Whilst the chick pursued her hapless porcine quarry, Grandpaw took to toddlin' along, tryin' to pilot his fleshy vessel into the pig's less-than-wide-open harbor.

He made a few almost-dockings, at whichtimes the woman would slide the stool under his bony ass, w/ the apparent purpose of givin' Gramps some support to aid in his couplin' w/ the pig. And while, true to the well-known nature of a greased member of his species, the pig kept slippin' away, the connection twixt human and animal kinds was inevitably established, leading to an extreme closeup of the oldster's bestubbled cackling face. And this shot was, believe it or not, the most disturbing image found in the entire program.

Buuuuutttttt.... To make a long story short... That's how I discovered porn both zoological and geriatric.

Now. To bring us back to the present, I was lost in this grey ennui. And I'd come to understand that alla that greyness was located at the bottom of the big ol' rut I'd fallen into, pornographically speaking. But then it came to me that the best way outta a grey rut is through grey rutting! So off in search of internet oldster porn did I go.