UNREMITTING FAILURE

Happy New Year's Everybody

Drive drunk responsibly.

New Year's Eve

We can't remember a single good New Year's Eve.  We've spent them drunk, and we've spent them sober, and we'll be damned if we could tell the difference.  They've all sucked.

When we were 21 and hitting new lows alcoholically speaking we celebrated a New Year's Eve in the UF Family ancestral home (folks were away somewhere) and everybody was there: our sister and all her friends, us and all our friends, our little brother.  And we lured one of our sister's girlfriends upstairs and were well on our way to getting her into bed when our sister burst into the room and liberated her, because (and we'll never forgive our sister, never!) she was (still is, as a matter of fact) a card-carrying lesbian and wanted her (the friend, that is, who we were diabolically trying to seduce) for herself!

Talk about selfish!

That New Year's was ruined!

Somebody out there must have some good New Year's Eve memories.  Hell, maybe we have some even, if we could just remember them.  Because that's the problem with alcohol--if you use it right, you wake up no more memories than a newborn baby.  You bounce out of bed, everything a blank, and go in search of the car.  You know you parked it somewhere.  Hopefully in one piece.  And with no  blood on the fenders. 

Germany

UF readying to hurl a steel axe at a target at Rostock Weihnachtsmarkt

Country roads, take me home, mach schnell

Mrs. UF in bumper car, Rostock Weihnachtsmarkt

Maddie guarding presents, Tessin, Germany

See more photos here.

Rick Allen's Arm

Went solo on this day in 1984.

The new Rick Allen lineup without Rick Allen's arm

On Listening to Elliott Smith Again

So much pain and sadness, man--no wonder he sealed himself up in an envelope and mailed himself back home. 

who can really tell?

Thank Christ Somebody

Had a good year!  Oh, and you too!

Well, We've Come to the End of a Decade

And what a debacle of a decade it was.  Unremitting failure from beginning to end.  A total calamity. 

And we had such high hopes for the 21st Century.

At least the Backstreet Boys didn't reunite.

Oh, right.

Some people will undoubtedly point to the election of Barack Obama as a ray of hope.  These people are, in psychiatric parlance, deluded.  Sure, Obama beats Bush, but in the same way that rickets beats Ebola. 

You don't shout Progress! while pointing at a disease. 

Or maybe you do.  Maybe that's what we've come to.  No doubt about it, we couldn't go any lower than Dick Cheney. 

Some decades you write epitaphs for.  Some you lead into the woods and shoot.  We'll leave it up to you to decide whether we should bury the aughts, or just let the buzzards get at 'em. 

The Year's Not Best List

We have, after much consideration, decided not to compile a year's best list.  Because you know what?  There wasn't one good movie, book, or CD released this year.  We wouldn't go so far as to say everything sucked utterly, but everything pretty much sucked at least in part, every movie, book, and CD pretty much sucked at least in part, and we should know because we saw every movie, read every book, and listened to every CD released this year, give or take the large numbers of movies, books, and CDs we were too lazy to watch, read, or listen to, being at heart a lugubrious and lackluster bastard. 

Oh, we know what you're thinking.  You're thinking, what about The Fantastic Mr. Fox?  Bah. It was only so so, based on the previews we saw.   Kind of like Paris, which we were just in the Paris airport and can say with authority that if Paris is anything like its airport, it's a shitty town. 

Let's face it: movies, books, and CDs aren't what they used to be.  Movie makers have forgotten how to make movies, authors have forgotten how to write books, and musicians have forgotten how to make music.  Not that they've given up, mind you.  No, they're all out there flailing around, with their movies and their books and their CDs that are just so so, at best. 

That said, if we had to pick a musician of the year we might pick Kurt Vile, and if we had to pick a movie of the year we might pick The Informant, and if we had to pick a book of the year we might, and we cannot overstress that might, pick Dexter Filkins' The Forever War.  But what do we know? We read, watch, and listen to so little.  We're an uninformed moron.  Who, like every uninformed moron, doesn't even have the good sense to be ashamed.

Worst movie of the year? Without a doubt, Inglourious Basterds!

We Miss Germany

We especially miss the comforting sense you get from having absolutely no idea what's going on around you.  Everything that comes out of people's mouths is gibberish.  The newspapers are gibberish.  The television, total gibberish.

Over there we're an ignorant man-innocent, suddenly free from the terrible onus of understanding.  We walk around a happy idiot, liberated from the terror of meaning.  An ape in mufti, we mingle with the citizenry, thrilled as a retard at Christmas.

Every once in a while we vow to learn German, but that would only ruin everything.  Ignorance IS bliss, as we learned every morning when we sat at the kitchen table and stared at a newspaper that was marvelous in its total opacity.  We didn't have to worry about being contaminated by information that we could do nothing about.  All we had to do was stare at the pictures, and the really really long words, one of which we would occasionally, to our horror, recognize.

We like not knowing the German language.  That said, we like knowing this much about the German language.  That the German word for poison, is Gift.

How You Breathe

He wasn't breathing.  Or you could hardly call it breathing.  He was breathing dismally.  Like someone who has forgotten how to breath and is trying to remember how to breath but getting it all wrong. 

We were at this party and a gun appeared and somebody pulled the trigger as a joke and the bullet, jokester that it was, found Larry on the sofa.  Who knew the gun was loaded?  There was too much booze around for anyone to get really hurt or so we thought, so we reasonably thought.

So there was Larry, bleeding on the sofa.  He thought it was as funny as everybody else did, that there was a bullet in the gun and that it had found him.  He didn't even put down his beer.  He just said "Look at that," as the blood spread across his shirt. 

So we got Larry out to the car, Ed's Karmen Ghia, and we were speeding him to the emergency room when he handed Bill his beer and stopped breathing or commenced dying, take your pick.  But first he said, "Feels like there's a wolf in my chest," which was a funny thing to say or would have been a funny thing to say in different circumstances, like if we were all smoking pot out in the woods.

Anyway, Ed, who'd pulled the trigger, took as usual the long view.  He suggested that we just drop Larry off at the emergency room, anonymously as it were, rather than have to go through the whole long story about how the whole thing was a terrible trick played upon Larry by a supposedly unloaded gun. 

Nobody said anything.  Except Bill, who was nudging Larry and saying, not unkindly, "That isn't how you breathe, you dumb motherfucker.  Don't you remember how to breathe?" 

Hug the Great Big World

We know people who aren't people any more.  Which is to say they're dead.  Where they went we haven't a clue, all we know is they used to be here but then they went away, down the long hill through the high grass to the bank of the river, where they disappeared amongst the willow branches. 

We wish we could ask our father, who is one of the people we know who aren't people anymore, where he went.  He would give us the real lowdown.  But when we see him in our dreams he doesn't say anything, he just gives us this amused look like he knows something, something so simple and obvious that we're going to kick ourselves when we find it out too.

Who knows? Maybe it's as simple as this: Nothingness is simply wonderful. 

The Ancient One Speaks

We buried the postman this morning.  He put up quite the fight.  But that's what happens during the lull between Christmas and New Year's.  You dig through the rubble of your formerly immaculate village, looking for the dead. 

Some of them are bound to still have a little life left in them.

We fell through the smog, into a heated gun battle, then they sent the drones and the bunker-busters.  And through it all we kept up our normal life: we slaughtered the goat, we married off our sister, we replaced the shattered glass windows in our electronics store with plywood.

And at night we talk to the village elders.  An ancient grandmother, our grandmother as a matter of fact, who chews her meat and then spits the pulp into a handkerchief, listened placidly to the bombs as they walked through the village, obliterating addresses.  And she said, a glass of hot tea in her hand, this repository of all knowledge, she said, "This is as nothing, o hear me my children, compared to the first Mudhoney single." 

Home at Last

We fell asleep on a sofa on the front lawn of a stranger's house at a lawn sale way out past the lake on the Gallows Road. We were drunk and only stopped (this was sometime in the early afternoon) because our friends wanted to take pictures of the perfect living room set up on the front lawn of a ranch house in the middle of nowhere.  But the sofa was so comfortable and we were so tired having started drinking Jack Daniels at eight in the morning.  And when we woke up on that sofa staring up into the leaves of a magnificent elm spread overhead and the sun coming through the gaps in the leaves of the elm we thought, "It's so good to be home, home at last." 

You Could Be Deader

Everything seems so simple when you're young, when the pot is good and you think you're going to stay high forever.  We hung with our pals and got legless on Bali Hai wine in the Littlestown cemetery and drove blind through the high corn with our pig farmer pal Bill Harrison who's been dead for years now, and we don't even know where he's buried. 

What do you do for kicks when you're dead?  If anybody would know, Billy would.  Occasionally we dream that we'll be walking down the street in Washington DC and Billy will slide soundlessly up to us in his resurrected El Camino (the one we nearly died in) and say, "Climb in."  And when we do he'll hand us a Rolling Rock pony bottle and a placidyl then proceed to blow through every traffic light between us and the nearest country road, where it'll be dark and we'll say, "We're dead, aren't we?"

And Bill will say, "You're damn right you're dead.  But look on the bright side.  You could be deader."    

An Enemy We Cannot Defeat

We've always been optimistic that fundamentalist Islamic extremists had no chance of ever being more than a thorn in the side of our perfect American Way of Life.  That was before they donned  exploding underwear.

Now we are ready to concede defeat.  Because  you can't beat exploding underwear.  It's an idea so insidious, so stupid, and so funny that there is simply no defense against it.  Shoe bombs were dumb, brilliantly dumb.  But exploding underwear? 

They have unleashed a deadly force against which there is no defense, save that of requiring all air travelers to fly commando.  Otherwise, there is simply no knowing who might be wearing the banana thong of destruction.

It's an idea that's impossible to wrap your mind around.  We could never wrap our mind around edible underwear, much less exploding underwear.  From now on we intend to turn to the person flying next to us and ask, "What kind of underwear are you wearing?"  And to leave promptly if they answer, "Fruit of the Doom." 

Briefs of Destruction!

The New Year Is Coming

It can't come too fast for us.  2009 was our annus horribilis, a year when terrible things happened and it's not over yet.  We're not quite ready yet to say we survived.  It's still touch and go and there are what?--still two days or so left on the calendar. 

They could still, those two remaining days, finish us off.   

Life for us has never been a pleasure boat but 2009 was a Viking Death Ship.  We rode it flaming to the bottom where the drowned men groan in their chains.  It was a year that we can honestly say we don't think we could handle another one. 

Seriously--we're ready, totally ready, to find us some religion.  Anything.  We'll try yoga.  Shit, we'll get in touch with our inner child and hug the little bastard until he wails.  We're ready to find Jesus or Elmo.  We're desperate.

Beckett famously wrote, "I can't go on.  I'll go on."

We'd have left it at the first sentence and shut the fuck up.   

We were peacefully eating dinner

At Mrs. UF's family's house in Tessin Germany when a huge argument broke out between Mrs. UF's sister and Mrs. UF and her mom.  Seriously, it was a humongous meltdown-type set-to of epic proportions.  Unfortunately, or fortunately perhaps, it was all in German, and so went completely over our head. 

So we did the only thing we could--we kept eating.

We couldn't help it--we were hungry.  The words were flying fast and furious and all we knew how to do was reach for the smoked fish.  The tears flowed, and we ate bread.  Terrible silences yawned, and we went for the cheese. 

The trick was--and we think we did a pretty good job--to look seriously concerned while stuffing our face.  Someone would say something obviously placating and we would nod in commiseration while shoving bread smeared with liverwurst into our mouth.  Somebody else would say something scathing and we would shake our head sadly while spreading a thick layer of cream cheese across a slice of bread.  We were the world's most understanding nosher. 

In hindsight, it was one of the best meals we've ever eaten.  Nobody else ate anything, thus leaving everything for us.  We went to town on the cheese, the various meats and fishes, and even the leftover venison goulash while all around us the angry words sizzled like whizzing bullets.  We stuffed our face in the middle of World War III.  We knew the whole thing would get straightened out in the end.  We just hoped it happened in time for dessert.   

It's Cold Out There

We'd hoped to return from the frigid bluster of Northern Germany to the generally sane temperatures of December in DC.  Instead we returned to Arctic winds of the sort that make going outside to smoke a cigarette make one feel like an extra in a film about Stalingrad.  We're reduced to stomping our feet on the pavement and saying, "Gott in Himmel! Ist sehr Kalt!" while behind us the director is showing a soldier shooting a horse so as to give the starving men something to eat.

We've given ourselves permission to smoke a little more over the holidays, which is a nice thing to do for oneself, give the gift of Cancer.  We do this whenever we go to Germany because our wife's sister and her boyfriend smoke like chimneys, and it's hard not to smoke a little more in such circumstances.  Then when we return we slowly reduce our intake to our normal five cigarettes per day, which is an exercise in masochism that only barely beats the pain of having to quit altogether.

Anywhere we're smoking up the last of our F6s, which are the East German cigarettes we favor when we're in the Deutschland.  They come in an ugly green and white box and there are 23 of them in there, not just 20 like in your normal American pack of cigarettes.  No, you get 3 extra cigarettes, to smoke while going about your normal German activities like standing guard, examining a suspect individual's identification papers, or being a desk murderer.

We have, let's see, six left.  We're going to smoke them and then we're going to quit smoking for good.  Oh ho, ho, that's a good one.  What we're really going to do is smoke them and then buy some good old American cigarettes, which taste like Freedom.  Because when it comes to the pursuit of happiness, you're best off riding a Camel.

Our First Drink in Almost 22 Years

We took it by accident on the Tuesday before Christmas.  We were hanging in Mrs. UF's mom's livingroom drinking glog, a hot Swedish punch.  We picked up the glass in front of us, took a swig. It went down with a warming sensation that immediately made us feel at peace with the world.  We took another swig, and knew we were holding Mrs. UF's glass, which she'd fortified with a Finnish schnapps called Minttu. 

We said, "We think this is your glass."  She went to take it from us, but we wouldn't let go.  We wanted to drink more glog spiked with Minttu, Finland's magnificent gift to the world. 

It's hard to not drink in Germany, where everything is spiked with something and the beers are gigantic and cost about a nickel and you're encouraged to drink in public because a) it's your civic duty and b) it's cold as hell and alcohol is considered necessary to prevent freezing deaths.

After dinner Mrs. UF and her mom would both drink a shot of Jagermeister, which in Germany is deemed an essential aid to digestion.  We've never had Jagermeister, but we wanted some.  We also need help with our digestion, don't we?

It's always a relief to get back from Germany, where teetotallers are looked upon with suspicion.  Nondrinkers in Germany are required to register with the police, and watched closely.  At the Weihnachtsmarkt everyone drinks Gluhwein, a hot wine punch.  We have to look the Gluhwein lady in the eye and order Kindergluhwein, which is generally only consumed by children under the age of six.

We ask for Kindergluhwein and the lady looks around for our nonexistent kid and we have to say, "We don't drink alcohol", to which she invariably responds, "I thought you looked suspicious." 

We Enjoyed Germany

Certain highlights stand out.  One night at the Weihnachtsmarkt (or outdoor Christmas fair) in Rostock we stood by a small fire next to a man with just one finger on his right hand.  He was warming his finger at the fire, just it not the fingers of his other hand if he had another hand, maybe the one hand with one finger was all he had.  But he was luxuriantly warming his one finger at the fire, waggling it occasionally as the feeling came back.  We stared at his one finger and we thought, We're in Germany!

At the Weihnachtsmarkt in Rostock we paid two Euros to throw axes at the target of a man.  Boy did we wish we were drunk.  You have to hand it to a country where you can get all liquored up in public, then throw axes.  In America this could never happen.  Both public drunkenness and public axe throwing are no-nos in America, which tells you everything you need to know about America.  It's a sucky nation, where no one wants anyone to have any fun.

It was -14 below Celsius, which translates to cold as balls in Farenheit, so we took a long walk to the next village and nearly froze to death.  We were way out on this deserted road outside this nowhere village where for all we know such wonderful ancient German traditions as "cut the head off the foreigner" are still practiced and we said to Mrs. UF, "It's freezing, but at least there's no wind."  At which point a fierce wind came up that turned our face to porcelain.  If we'd thwocked it real hard (our face that is) with our finger it would have cracked.  We were lucky to make it back to the house where Mrs. UF's mom had prepared a venison goulash that was delicious.  "Bambi" said Mrs. UF's mom, and she laughed.

Spent an afternoon in a drowsy coma on the yellow sofa in Mrs. UF's mom's livingroom pondering the fact that the German word for glove, Handschuh, translates as "hand shoe."  How cool is that?  On the tv there was a program that kept showing graphic depictions of elephants giving birth.  The last thing we needed to see was a dilated elephant vagina so we kept our eyes closed and thought about Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer who, if we'd been him and had faced unrelenting mockery at the hands of our reindoor brothers, would have responded to Santa's "Rudolf with your nose so bright, won't you guide my sleigh tonight?" by saying, "Sure, on one condition.  That you sack the rest of the reindeer after Christmas." 

On Christmas Eve we fondued, on Christmas Day we ate duck.  At the Weihnachtsmarkt we ate plenty of sausage and mutzen (lumps of fried dough covered in powdered sugar) and a fried banana covered in honey that rocked our Welt.  One thing we didn't eat was Pferdewurst, or horse sausage, which our sister-in-law tells us you can buy at the Weihnachtsmarkt in Hamburg.  Evidently it's popular with the oldsters, who eat it and think nostalgic thoughts of life during and after the war, when horse meat was living it up. 

At the shooting gallery at the Weihnachtsmarkt in Rostock we shot ten out of ten moving elephants and won an Ed Hardy ripoff lighter.  Made us feel like a great white hunter.  We always knew our destiny was to be a manly hunter like Ted Nugent, whose story is told in Ernest Hemingway's great short story, "The Short Happy Life of Ted Nugent."  So we went back to shoot at moving rabbits and missed more than we hit which dashed our great hunting hopes.  For a prize the grizzled guy behind the counter at the gallery gave us a crappy Santa hat, which was topped by two brass bells that refused to ring.  It was like he was saying, "Ho ho ho, loser."