UNREMITTING FAILURE

We Wish We Could Attract Some Good Hate Mail

Like all the good hate mail we pulled in after writing that Fugazi article for the City Paper.  It seems it's impossible to outrage anybody in the blogosphere these days.  Or maybe we've stopped trying.  More's the pity, because there's nothing quite so entertaining as a blistering and obscenity-laded diatribe directed at your person.  We thrived on that "Eat a bag of dicks and die" shit.  It gave us a thrill woody.  To know that somebody out there hated us so much they just had to put it down in words and put it in the mail really made us feel loved.  Like the Delgados sing, "Hate Is All You Need."

Who knows, maybe we're maturing.  We haven't attracted a single sustained piece of written loathing since we don't remember when.  Truth is, hate, except for politicians, pigs and poltroons of their like, is hardly worth the bother.  And if you don't send any hate out, you're unlikely to get any back. 

Still, we can fondly remember.  The days when our very name was anethema to large segments of the DC hipster population.  They've all forgotten us now.  But we'll never forget them.  We owe them a large portion of gratitude.  Thanks, haters. 

Here Whitney Houston Died, and We Didn't Have a Thing to Say About It

Shame on us.  Nobody could smoke crack in an evening gown the way she could. 

all of our friends think they're film critics

They say things like, "Such and such sucked, the plot resolution blah blah blah."  They're all such idiots.  There are two things people don't want to hear from other people in this life, and that's their dreams and their opinions about movies.  When a friend tells us what they thought about a movie, we drive them to the Pine Barrens in New Jersey, shoot them, and bury them in an unmarked grave.  The most that you're allowed to say about a film is that you liked it or you didn't like it.  If you try to elaborate by saying, "Oh, I simply adored it," it's a drive to the Pine Barrens for you. 

People shouldn't even go to the movies, they eat too much popcorn and ruin their dinner.  We used to go to this porn theater and it didn't serve popcorn so that was all right.  For some reason, porn and popcorn don't really go together.  Probably because you put your hand on your dick, then your hand in the box of popcorn, and you get the idea.  It's unedifying. 

Porn is the only genre that matters, because there's always a happy ending.  That and you never get sick of seeing the trailers on television.  We always like to watch the credits at the end of a porn film and see who did costume design.  We have our favorites.  You would think that clothing would be superfluous in a film where most everybody is naked, but that is where you're wrong.  In a sense, the clothing are the movie, because they're what gets lost.  Every movie is in a sense about something getting lost, and in porn it's the clothing.  And unlike in a regular movie, they never get found again.  Nobody ever puts their clothes back on in a porn movie, if they did you'd think the film was moving in reverse and demand your money back. 

On Living Alone

It's in our future, but we're not sure we can handle it.  We don't exist unless there's someone there to laugh at our jokes.  People say get a pet, they're good company.  But pets don't laugh at jokes.  They just stare at you because the only thing a pet really finds funny, and worth laughing about, is your death. And you're not around to see it.

Why We Haven't Been Writing

First of all, and this is something you may have noticed yourself, it's difficult to write when you've been taken hostage by pandas.  We spend most of our free time eating bamboo, and they deeply resent our wanting to take time out to write blog entries. Pandas don't blog, ever, and they distrust animals that do. 

Our being taken hostage by pandas makes for a mildly interesting story.  We were walking down the street, a panel van pulled to the curb beside us, and two pandas emerged from the side door and hustled us inside.  They then blindfolded us, threw us on the floor, and drove us to an undisclosed location, we believe in the Catskills, where panda separatists and Jewish borscht belt comedians keep an uneasy peace.  Some of the ideas of the comedians have penetrated panda culture, though not in the way you might expect.  For example, the pandas have adopted the concept of the celebrity "roast." On those nights everyone gathers in their finest garb and the smell of roasting celebrity suffuses the forest.  Then the next day the police come around, and ask the pandas if they've seen so and so, the second-rate celebrity, and all the pandas shake their head no. 

Why they've taken us hostage remains a mystery.  We surmise that at least one of our panda hostage-takers can read, and that he ran across our blog and was so outraged by it that he decided to put an end to it then and there.  But why then haven't they killed us?  The answer is that pandas are peaceful beasts, and would just as soon sit around eating bamboo as finish us off with a burst of one of the AK-47s they carry around.   

Anyway, it's a relatively sedentary lifestyle up here, and in a way we left Washington at a good time.  Our ex-wife, for example, is currently dating a hill staffer.  We asked her why she couldn't at least have the decency to date a human being, and the two of us didn't talk for two days after that.  Also, our failure to quit smoking left us depressed, and all we wanted to do was lie around and sleep.  Up here everybody lies around and sleeps, and smokes like a chimney, so we feel right at home.  It also puts our complicated housing situation on hold.  The ex-Mrs. UF and yours truly were ready to rent a two-bedroom apartment but Mrs. UF backed out at the last minute, costing us our $500 deposit but probably saving us a year of bloodshed and chaos.  So now we have to look for a one-bedroom apartment for ourselves, but it has to be big enough for a bunch of pandas to crash in when they come to town.

Besides, we haven't had a writable thought in weeks.  So the pandas picked an auspicious time to kidnap us, and we've been grateful for the respite.  And now we have to climb down from this tree where we've hidden our computer and join our new panda friends in a chummy game of hacky sack. Don't let the AK-47s fool you; pandas are hippies at heart. 

A Thought on Politics

We say a candidate "runs" for office, but in the best of all possible worlds, that is what he would have to do.  Lest the outraged mob behind him catch and lynch him. 

Crunkles the Dog, Aftermath

It was Valentine's Day and we didn't have a Valentine.  So we called up Crunkles, who was now living in upstate Pennsylvania under the assumed name Oscar.  "You've got a lot of nerve, asking me to be your Valentine.  After the way you sabotaged my sweet Dupont Circle gig.  But things aren't bad here.  The owner leaves, I got a little bookie operation up and running.  It's lucrative.  High school basketball, they take that shit seriously up here.  Anyway, I would be your Valentine, but if there's one thing I've learned, it's that the interspecies thing never works.  Ditto long-distance relationships."

Crunkles the Dog, Part II

Crunkles the Dog came by our apartment last night, looking agitated.  He got right down to brass tacks.  He said, "Look pal, I don't know who you think you are, but you came close today to fucking up a righteous gig.  You've got my owner suspicious.  He's doing a background check.  If I come up as a Crunkles, he'll know I got caught passing back checks back in '09.  Why do you think I changed my name to Buttercup?"

We offered him a cigarette.

"Nows??" he said.  "What, do you own a vagina?"  He tore off the filter and lit up.  "This isn't the first time this has happened.  I was down in Arkansas in '06, living under the alias Tinkerbell, when some guy named Dave, right out of the blue, passes me with my owner in the street and says, "Hi Crunkles."  I had to go on the lam, head north.  Now it looks like I might have to blow town again."

"We don't know what to say," we said.  "We're sorry. It's just so obvious you're a Crunkles.  This Dave guy, did he happen to be wearing a water bottle that strapped to his hand?  And that he obviously didn't like very much?"

"That's the hombre," said Crunkles.  "Anyway, if this whole thing blows up in my face, I may need to lie low here for a while.  Go to the mattresses, as it were, until the heat dies down."  "How do you feel about chihuahuas?" we asked.

"They're a breed," he said.  "Not my favorite breed, but not my least favorite breed either.  That would go to the King Charles spaniel.  Those dogs are so cute it makes me puke."

 

Crunkles the Dog

We knew that sooner or later our habit of spontaneously renaming strange dogs on the street would get us in trouble.  It finally happened yesterday.  We were coming home from work when a couple approached with a fine example of man's best friend, a rotund border collie mix with stick legs and a long beak, by their side. 

"Hello Crunkles!" we called to the dog, which we'd never seen before.  Instead of giving us a smile, the man frowned and barked, "His name isn't Crunkles."

What a guy grumpus! Of course this was a Crunkles, a Crunkles down to the bone.  A dog can only have one name, and this dog's name was Crunkles or our name was Willis D. McGillicutty.

"Have a good day, Crunkles," we said, passing.

"His name is Buttercup!" shouted the man, actually outraged.  If you ask us it's the dog who should have been outraged, to be stuck with a moniker like Buttercup when his true name was none other than Crunkles.

"Fight the power, Crunkles!" we called, the couple now to our backside.  "Buttercup!" shouted the man again.  "Crunkles!" we repeated over our shoulder.  "We served with that dog in the 'Nam and his name was Crunkles!"

For his part, the dog seemed unconcerned by the whole affair.  He knew his name was Crunkles, but he also knew who put the food in his bowl, and if that person wanted to call him Buttercup, well so be it.  He would be Buttercup. 

But he knew who he really was.  And we're sure he was appreciative of the fact that at least one other human knew it too. 

Well, Valentine's Day is Tomorrow

And boy, are we depressed.  Young lovers, rejoice, but as for us we've had our heart ripped beating from our ribcage and thrown to the hyenas in the wilderness.  We shouldn't take it so hard, no less than Tina Turner called Love a "secondhand emotion," but speaking just for ourselves we've been to plenty of secondhand emotion shops and we've never seen Love on sale there.  We picked up a box of nice lukewarm resentments once, for a steal, but Love, never. 

When you're in Love it's the greatest thing in the world, but when that Love dies, a country song is born and makes you cry.  There's only so much Love to go around, and it's not enough or the world would be a very different place.  When you fall in Love what you are in effect doing is stealing somebody else's Love, their loss is your gain.  So what we recommend is that when your Love disappears you go out and find who took it, and give them a good swift kick in the ass.

Spending Valentine's Day alone is painful, last year we crept into the bear enclosure at the zoo to do some snuggling.  But bears have a very different idea of love than we do, and they wound up almost ripping us limb from limb.  Maybe a baby bear would have been different, they lack the homicidal impulses of their elders, they're soft and cuddly and in their little brain a thought rolls around and that thought is, "When I get older, I'm going to fuck you up." 

We don't think we're jaded although it's possible we're jaded, we could be jaded, but we don't think so.  We want Love as much as the next marsupial, but first we have to meet a woman and make a good impression upon her which isn't easy, seeing as how in our advanced years we're beginning to look more and more like a crustacean.  And a crustacean that smokes is not an easy sell on the dating circuit.  We've tried speed dating but we didn't like the way the speed made us feel. 

There must be a woman out there for us, there must be, there must be.  And her name must be Wanda.  And she must drive an El Camino and swear like a sailor and smoke extralong Kools and throw her empty beer cans into the bed of the El Camino as she drives.  Out the window and into the bed, which is just the opposite of what will happen when Wanda's husband arrives home to find us in bed with Wanda, who has a cheating heart, how did we ever end up with Wanda in the first place?  That's the way Love is, it chooses you and you can't say no even though you know it's going to end in disaster, it always does.  Except in the movies and even there too, sometimes, though not often enough, we watched Drive last night and boy does Ryan Gosling have a cool jacket. 

On Quitting Smoking (AGAIN)

This is the story of another one of our failures.  We got up Friday intending to quit smoking, drew some fresh air into our lungs and went "Ugh," laid down on the couch to get our strength to face the day.  This was at 1 in the afternoon, we'd taken the day off work, figuring there was no way we could stop smoking there, and lying on the couch we saw pass by us cigarette after cigarette in the many disguises of Maya.  Thought, "This is going to be harder than we figured," finally got up, made it to Bethesda Bagel for a whitefish salad on bagel which tasted weird without the cigarette smoke flavoring it, almost cracked on our way to the gym but didn't. Didn't crack afterwards either.   All in all we made it the whole day without smoking a single cigarette but by the end of the day everything was black and we were comatose and we knew we'd made a terrible mistake, quitting.

We figured the second day would be slightly easier but no, it was harder, we laid on the sofa again muttering in a fever dream of nicotine desire.  The Marlboro Man sat down on the chair next to the sofa and said, "This doesn't have to be so difficult, son.  Just run next door to the gas station, buy a pack, smoke two, and throw the rest away.  It'll be our little secret, yours and mine."  So we did that then headed to the gym and by the time we got back things were worse than ever and Mrs. UF (ex) asked how the quitting was going and we said, "Pretty badly, considering we smoked two this afternoon."  And she blew up and said, "I'll be damned if I'm going to put up with this, you've been comatose for a day and a half and now you're telling me you're going to have to start over? Not on my watch.  Quit some other time, like when you're living alone and I don't have to watch you quiver with self-pity."  And it was true we were quivering with self-pity, it's one of those things we're good at, we could teach a master's class on the subject.  So we raced next door to the gas station, bought another pack, and this time started smoking in earnest.  And immediately we felt happy joyous and free.  Sure we felt a twinge of guilt but that was about it, a tiny prick of guilt that the smoke quickly tamped down as we stood on the patio with Rudi running around our legs and inhaled, and inhaled, and inhaled. 

What will we try next? We're thinking acupuncture.  It's chinese and involves needles so we're sure to fail at it. 

It takes a ruthless man

To make a monstrous chicken.

Are We Are Is Dust in the Wind

Which makes us unlucky, although not as unlucky as those people who are allergic to dust.

Wust in the Dind

The first thing you have to understand, if you ever hope to live a life of complete ineffectuality, is that man is a beetle that wanders from truth to truth, otherwise known as dung. He eats his fill, thinks he has reached a state of nirvana, and then moves on, never understanding that the only truth is that he will not find truth in his lifetime.  He follows politics, takes up yoga, reads philosophy, has children, seeking in all of these things the meaning of his existence.  When it would have been better to have done nothing at all, but drink wine, and refrain otherwise from believing in the reality of anything. 

All sentient beings are born to failure, as are all nonsentient beings.  Look over there.  A failed rock.  And a failed tree.  The tree is beautiful, you say?  One day it will fall on you, and its branches will impail you, and its trunk will crush you, and it will have served God well.  How to prove the futility of man?  There is no one there to give the policeman a good kicking.  The Holocaust happened, and yet there are people who will tell you life is good, because they have personally been spared misfortune.  Little good it does to tell them they were merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.  When one man suffers we all suffer, we are merely too numb to know it.  We are all under the corrupting anesthetic of optimism, that loathsome philosophy that posits that just because we are not all being brutally murdered by our fellow man, that life is copacetic.  Luck of birth is no excuse for woeful ignorance, and even the most casual perusal of the daily newspaper should be enough to convince anyone with even an ounce of brains in their noggin that their ability to draw breath is a mere coincidence of geography.    

All life is suffering, and the luckiest man ever born was a stone.  He was buried, by happenstance, beneath a pile of other stones.  There he drew breath, and felt safe, and was blind to everything.  How we envy him. 

Soon to be Toothless

Our dog Rudi is going to the vet soon to have all of his teeth removed.  Whether he will remain the terror of Dupont afterwards remains to be seen.  Maybe the loss of his chompers will alter his disposition, and he will suddenly become a Pooch of Peace, dedicating his twilight years to the furthering of understanding between Man and Dog.  Or, more likely, he'll remain the prick he is, and will continue to froth and lunge at everything that approaches him on the sidewalk. 

Needless to say this forthcoming operation has both Mrs. UF (ex) and yours truly in a dither of nerves.  We need Rudi in our lives because he is impossible, and it is impossible to imagine life without him.  He has always been a problem child, first with his refusal to take walks and then with his sudden decision to attack bodily anybody who was not us.  We should have known he was trouble the minute we showed up at his original home in West Virginia.  Hell, the West Virginia part should have tipped us off.  But we knocked on the door and the couple let us in, and the first thing that happened was one of Rudi's relatives darted across the room and bit us on the ankle.

The man turned to his wife and under his breath muttered, "Dog bit him." 

That dog wasn't (but might as well have been) Rudi himself.  They raise 'em mean in West Virginia, the same way they raise their children.  But we were blinded by love by little Rudi, and ignored all the warning signs that we were doting upon a furry little psychotic, and the rest, as they say, is a whole shitload of frayed pants legs. 

Vintner Offers Wine Lovers "Fuhrerwein"

Wine expert Alberto Giacomelli described the vintage he tasted as "a conniving Chardonnay, with just a hint of Panzer oil and Auschwitzy afternotes." 

When We Think of All We've Laid Waste to in Our Life

We feel like Nero, fiddling while our conscience burns.

Wild Life

Saw a racoon the other night.  Right in the neighborhood, sauntering the side streets like a boulevardier.  We shouted, "Run, run, it's rabid for sure!"  Leaving Mrs. UF (who had Rudi, we had Maddie) in the dust.  The whole thing is an outrage because we live in the city expressly to avoid wild life, like those giant rodents known as cows.  But they somehow manage to penetrate the cordon sanitaire erected to prevent their entry into what we think of as the "protected zone." 

We don't know how they do it.  We suspect they bribe the guards at the city gates, whose pay isn't exactly the highest.  Plus they have to stand around in those funny helmets, getting laughed at by the urchins who throw stones at them all day long.  In any event, the occasional wild creature shows up in our neighborhood, and we shake our fist at the heavens and shout, "Where do our tax dollars go?"

We wouldn't mind so much, if we didn't already have to deal with the rats.  DC's rats are a protected species, and as such have every right to walk up to you and take a bite out of your sandwich.  Some of them are as big as Clydesdales, and even walk with the same distinguished gait.  They clop by at night, and you draw the curtains and hope they don't pound on your door, demanding your foie gras. 

We're a small town boy originally but we've adapted to big city life.  We're accustomed to the home bums who hit us up for change, the buses that come within inches of running us down, and the city government whose idea of essential services is sending tiny plows out to the back alleys during snowstorms, to make the morning commute easier for the rats.  The rest of us have to fight our way through drifts that seem to have emigrated from Russia. 

We complain, but at least we haven't seen any coyotes.  Packs of wild dogs, sure.  We personally own a pack of wild dogs, who make life miserable for anyone who has to pass them on the sidewalk.  Rudi charges them head on, barking, while Maddie circles around to the back, hoping to snatch onto a nice achilles tendon.  You can ask how they managed to penetrate the cordon sanitaire.  Easy.  Like we said earlier, the guards are easily bribed.  And even easier to cow. 

Now

Part and parcel of the SmokeEnders program is the weekly stepdown to a weaker cigarette.  Now that we're in the final week, we find ourselves smoking Nows, which have exactly .1 mg of nicotine.  It's like smoking the ghost of a cigarette.  To make matters worse, Now is a brand marketed to women.  We would smoke Carltons, the equally weak male-targeted brand, but we can't find them anywhere.  Oh well.  Things could be worse.  We could be smoking Virginia Slims.

We suspect the SmokeEnders people think that making us smoke cigarettes that taste like heated air will give us the impetus to quit.  How foolish of them.  We would smoke cigarettes that taste like heated shit, if that's all that was available.  Smokers smoke, it's what they live for.  If desperate, we become remarkably unchoosy.  We will stand outside in a blizzard and smoke sticks wrapped in yak hair if they are all that's available. 

Used to be all our friends smoked.  One by one they quit, in the face of the mildly alarming fact that smoking could kill them.  Could!  To quit in the face of a mere possibility strikes us an act of extreme cowardice.  But be that as it may.  Now we smoke on, alone, a pariah.  We alone have the gumption to pursue, even unto death, an ephemeral pleasure that does not satisfy.  All we ask for is a few puffs every few hours to keep us from going crazy. 

Fact is we live closer to the edge than most people.  They require a good push to go flying off the cliff of sanity.  We require the mildest nudge.  Something inside of us is broken, in addition to our moral compass.  Still, we intend to give it our best.  Come Friday, we will try to go on without our greatest source of solace, besides Mrs. UF and our dogs.  Who had better hide under the bed, lest we try to light up their tails. 

 

The Return of Unremitting Failure

Well, it's been a while.  And as the old black guy sang, "Nobody knows the trouble we've seen."  Between our continued feelings of rejection over the date gone bad, yet another lamebrain scheme (SmokeEnders this time)  to give up the smokes, and a new plan to move out of our shared apartment with Mrs. UF in lesbian laden Dupont Circle, we've been in a sustained dither that has left us speechless.  Anxiety and depression have been our constant companions. 

We're happy to see people have been posting comments.  It's nice to know we have a community here of like-minded people who all share a sense of humor.  We only laughed once in the past week, at the suggestion that we listen to meditation tapes.  We don't need meditation, we need a lobotomy. But be that as it may.  Sometimes we're surprised we don't spontaneously combust.  That we don't leave behind anything but some ashes and a pair of charred sneakers. 

If we've been placed on this wretched planet to do anything, it's to write.  We're not very good at it, but it's in our bones.  So this blog is important to us.  It's our job, so to speak.  And we've been falling down at it.  It's hard to write when you're in a brown study, with a black dog on your lap, but we're going to try harder.  We're supposed to give up the smokes on Friday.  We'll see how that goes.  Something tells us we'll last about, oh, six hours.  But what a six hours they'll be!  We plan to spend as many of them as possible asleep, and the rest muttering, "Oh lord no.  Not the heebie jeebies. Not the jim jams.  Hoochie mama, I need a cancer stick!"