Friday, August 16, 2002


jonas - part 4

read parts 1 2 3

He'd managed to pick up a few good back issues of New Teen Titans up at Mr. Paperback. A few of the first issues, where the main villain was Deathstroke aka the Terminator. In later issues, Deathstroke would enlist and have an affair with a psychotic young girl with powers of controlling the earth. Terra. A member of the Titans, but a traitor, who would come close to destroying them. Deathstroke was a professional mercenary and assassin, with enhanced skills and senses. Even though he was blind in one eye, he wore a mask with one side blacked out, he was so good at his trade he could advertise his weakness.

The new issue looked like a shocker, Kid Flash and Robin quitting at the same time? Damn.

Besides the killer art and storyline, Jonas knew it was the adult themes in the book that drew him in as well. Here was a book called Teen Titans, and they were pretty open about sex. Robin and Starfire waking up in bed together, Terra and the Terminator, obviously sexually involved, even though Deathstroke was in his fifties or sixties.

There was a green "walk" flashing across the street and Jonas decided to hit Stop 'n' Go for a soda and some Centipede. He walked in the door and heard the jingle of the electronic bell. The clerk was a twenty-something guy with scraggly sideburns and a receding hairline.

He was on the third level of Centipede when he realized the clerk had disappeared. Had to be in the back.

At the end of the fifth level, Jonas still had two ships left, but still no sign of the clerk. "Hello?" he said loudly.

No answer.

Well fuck that he wasn't going to screw up his game over this guy. He lost his ships pretty fast from there, though, and when he was done, he looked around the store. Everything seemed normal, but no clerk, and really, something just did not feel right. That's right kids, the Superfriends want to remind you to never get in a car with strangers, especially if they've got tights and a complicated belt on.

"Hello? Is anyone back there?" Jonas looked toward the back of the store and the door to the back office, next to the cardboard cutout of the 7 foot indian with rows and rows of beef jerkey, was open. Creeping up to the door, he looked and saw a lit stairway heading down. At the bottom of the stairway, which was stone and grey, no carpeting, no paint, and about twenty steps, was a closed green door. What the fuck?

Jonas started down the stairs, and was about halfway to the door, when he heard the door above him slam closed. Just as he was about to panic, the lights went out.

Somehow the darkness stifled his scream. He felt the fear, but somehow kept his brain up front. "Hello, is someone up there, please open the door!" Ok, he was kind of screaming. Shit he was only ten years old.

No answer. Jonas made his way slowly up the stairs in what had become a pitch dark. He could feel his heart racing.

He reached the landing and felt for the door. Walking forward, forward, and then, seemingly much further from where the door had been, he finally felt a handle. With a hello and a goodbye to God, he turned the handle.

The door opened and the light blinded him momentarily. Stumbling into the room, Jonas realized he was stepping on carpet where before had been linoleum. Cracking his eyes, he saw blue. Blue curtains, blue seat cushions, blue lampshades, and a blue birdcage with a yellow and red parrot inside.

Jonas was not in Stop 'n' Go. Jonas was in someone's living room. There was a picture window in the next room, which had a beige theme going on. He stepped into the adjoining room and took a look out front. Not a sound. Wait, this was his neighborhood, there was the Franklins' house across the street. That meant his house was up the street, that meant

he was in Mrs. Hawthorne's house, home of the one legged talking dog, and about a mile and a half away from Stop 'n' Go.

"Cookie jar, cookie jar," the parrot squawked.



This made me laugh a LOT this morning. I'm not sure if I've ever thought about Yoda's penis, but I guess I probably have, what with all those hours spent with my Star Wars toys. I remember you could take off Yoda's little robe and he had a cane and a snake, actually a pretty kinky action figure now that I really think about it. Amazing the stuff that won't come out in $100 an hour therapy sessions but spills right out on the internet.

Link courtesy of kd.

Promise to post more later today. In the mean time, may I suggest some rusty trumpet?

peace.



Thursday, August 15, 2002


Kool Keith: ok hear hear let this meeting of ultrablogetic enterprises come to order.

Alfred Pennyworth: Would anyone care for coffee or tea?

Kool Keith: Alfred, we already had tea and crumpets and scones you old fart, c'mon we got stuff to go over.

Berkeley Joe: Hey easy guys, let's just do this thing.

ap: ok. Proceed.

kk: Thank You. Now I just want to open up that we are doing pretty good. There's people comin in here reading us, some of whom come back for more. We're getting noticed a little out there in Bloggerville. But ya know what I think? We got to go that otha level style, I mean, we could be large.

bj: I think we should just cruise like we are, we're packin the mack in the back of the ack.

ap: I have to concur with Berkeley Joe. I think we stay the course. We can't let pressure and thinking about things get in the way of expressing ourselves. Excellence is a mind-state, achieved through subconscious wisdom, you can't seek it out, it comes to you.

bj: yeah what he said.

kk: Ya know, Pennyworth, I'm tired of you thinking you run the show all the time, just cuz it's your name on the entries.

ap: Please, Mr. Keith, we set it up like that on purpose. How did Berkeley Joe put it so eloquently?

bj: Confusion as a marketing scheme. Uh, are you guys done getting all dramavilled? cuz I was gonna eat chicken in a biscuit crackers and watch the Beverly Hillbillies.

kk: OK I can hear that. I just want to say, good job everybody, and sorry about that Pennyworth, you aight. I didn't mean to jump on you like that.

ap: no offense taken Mr. Keith, perfectly understandable. You know you really should have another scone, but this time throw some of my sister's marmalade on there.

kk: Yeah thanks Alfred, good lookin' out.

bj: oh hook me up one of those too Alfred.

kk. Hey but back to what I was talking about, are we gonna go for the gusto, start tearing up shit, or are we gonna stay in cruise control?

bj: The thing about getting too gangbusters and purposeful or some shit is you risk losing the funk, the brain farts, the cranium cleansing. Let's just say things must always be at a level of quality in keeping with the ideals and lore of b-town, k-town, and most importantly g-town. I think we can all agree that as long as we do that, we're pretty copacetic.

ap: That is something of which there is no doubt.

kk: You speak the truth.

bj: ok then we're out. Coqui 900 time.



Wednesday, August 14, 2002


"Whoever said hair metal wasn't thought-provoking, must have never met Quiet Riot." - William Shatner

William Shatner, formerly Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise, TJ Hooker, sliding across cars like a madman, lounge singer, price-line ho, and now washed up guest celebrity host of VHI one-hit-wonders.

Quiet Riot "Cum on Feel tha Noize" was the one hit. But it was a big one in 83. A cover version of an old song by a glam rock group called "Slade." This was years after Randy Rhoads, their legendary guitarist out of La Crescenta, CA left their asses and became Ozzy's axe-man. In fact Rhoads had died in a plane crash the previous year, a promising spark extinguished way too soon.

"Cum on Feel tha Noize" was the lead single off of their album Metal Health, which went on to sell 6 million copies.

Metal Health was the first record I ever bought. And I do mean record, vinyl, baby. My parents had a pretty big record collection, Beatles, Neal Diamond, Elton John, among other stuff, so I grew up with records as my music media. I remember the Quiet Riot vinyl was put out by a company called Pasha, and they had a really trippy label on the record itelf, some guy walking through some clouds with a hole through his head through which you could see a like a twig or something.

I rocked that record hard. The two best songs were the afforementioned one hit wonder and the title track. Metal Health. That was the "bang your head" one, "metal health'll drive you mad."

good album. I mean most of the rest was filler, but I was rocking out. I remember we had a Webelo's meeting (last year of cub scouts - never went on to boy scouts) the same night I got the record and I brought the album to show my friends. It was cool cuz my dad and one of my best friend's dad were the scoutmasters for our den. And I remember my buddy's dad checking out the album cover and the back and seeing one song and laughing his ass off.

"Love's a Bitch"

I remember him laughing and laughing at that. I thought nothing of it at the time, but I do remember that it clicked in my mind when I heard years later that my old childhood buddy's parents had split up. I remember having images in my head of my friend's dad going out that same night after being defiled by the Metal Health, and tearing up the bar scene, screamin at the top of his lungs "Love's a Bitch, baby, love's a bitch, makes you crazy, yeeeaaaahhhh."

But it probably wasn't so dramatic.

Damn right fukn Quiet Riot is thought provoking.



my wife and i like to talk about our dreams. not our dreams like we want to live in an igloo on the snowy banks of juno (we like talking about those dreams too) but our dreams that we have at night. both of us are avid dreamers, meaning we usually have some good stories to share in the am over the honey nut corn flakes and devil's juice (coffee).

so this morning i was ready to lay one on her, i had had a trippy damn dream and she was gonna get a real kick out of it. turns out she had had one too, so i said, tell me yours first.

turns out she had a scary dream. it went something like this.

a little background info. ever since september 11, my wife has had a mild phobia of overly tall buildings. she doesn't want to live on the penthouse of the trump tower or anything like that. she prefers to be fairly close to the ground, preferably with a soft hedge in jumping distance for a quick escape.

we've been looking on and off for a new place to live, so she has this dream that we're at this really tall luxury condo building, and this lady is showing us various units that are for rent. we look at some on the fifth floor. too small. the 23rd floor. a little roomier and kind of nice, but still too small. so then she takes us up to the 75th floor, and opens the doors to a beautiful apartment. large with floor-to-ceiling windows all around, a breathtaking view of honolulu and the pacific, and furnished in vintage stained bamboo couches and plush chairs and the whole nine yards. basically my wife's dream house.

then she notices that there's an old lady sitting out on the lanai. a younger man is sitting with her. "who's that" she asks the realtor lady. "oh that's the lady that used to live here. she's dead. that's her son." so anyway, this freakshow son comes in and starts talking about how he's gonna bring his mom back to life. we're like, ok psycho joe, and we go look at the bathroom. there's a dead body in the bathroom. the weird guy is like, "oh i'm gonna use her body and put my mom's head on there"

that's when my wife notices that i have suddenly disappeared and the weird guy's head is on my body. so she's freaking out. she runs into the front room, and i'm out there with my head on the weird guy's body, we like switched heads, she can see the stitches in my neck and everything. and no, i don't think my wife has every seen reanimator. anyway, i'm like "oh honey, i know this place is kind of freaky, but i think we should take it," and she's like hell no.

then the dead mom shows up with her head on the realtor lady's body. only that head isn't working right, as it's already dead. i guess there's certain science to attaching and reattaching heads. anyway, this sends my wife running from the place.

then she finds a large church and thinks she'll go inside and pray and be safe. but then someone comes running saying "watch out the church is gonna explode!!" and sure enough the windows of the church shatter and blow up like a neutron bomb went off in there. so my wife's place of sanctuary from the head-switching gang is out the window.

mercifully, she woke up soon after that.

so i sat there, making the cross in front of myself, muttering a hail-mary, and realized it was my turn to tell my dream.

which was not much compared to that.

i dreamed that i was late to work and my wife had pulled the car into the driveway. i grabbed our little jack russel terrier (which we don't have) and jumped in the back seat. i had to hold on to the dog to make sure he didn't jump out the window. all of a sudden, my wife is gone, and the dog's driving the car. i offer to drive, but the dog says "no problem man, i got it." and that was it. that dog was funny looking, standing on its hind legs on the seat, steering with its front legs. he was all smiles though, and was steering through traffic like a champ.

the only other thing of note is that the dog turned into a white horse about halfway to my office. the horse was a pretty good driver too. in fact, both animals somehow drove from the passenger seat.

so my dream was pretty weak, but i'm glad i went second, because it's nice to have lingering thoughts of a driving dog rather than a head-swapping cult.



Tuesday, August 13, 2002


Maui day 5

If you haven't read em yet, catch days 1 2 3 4

It's always a little bit of a drag waking up on the last day of a vacation. There's mixed emotions because you're remembering all the good times, but you know you have to pack, check out, get to the airport, turn your rental car in, check in at the airport, deal with the airport, deal with the flight, make sure you have a ride home when you land yadda yadda yadda.

Our flight wasn't until like 3:30 though so we had some time to go check out a little more of the island. So we crawled out of bed, shook out the cobwebs, and got ourselves together. Luckily we'd packed most of our stuff the night before. One thing we did have to do was make one more set of sneak attacks to the ice machine to fill up our little styrofoam cooler.

So anyway, this was our day to check out upcountry Maui and cruise through Makawao. The route took us past our favorite K-Mart where we stocked up days ago and onto the same road that keeps going through Paia and the ever-groovy road to Hana. A few miles before Paia, though, we busted a right and headed of the side of Haleakala. Haleakala is a giant dormant volcanic mountain, which from the crater summit is supposedly the phattest sunrise view in the land. The tourist companies offer packages where they pick you up at like 2 in the morning and take you up there, feed you breakfast, show you the sunrise, and then give you a bike, so you can ride the weaving road all the way down, but you can just drive your rental car up there, just keep it in low gear. We didn't make the drive all the way up Haleakala this trip, maybe next time.

So anyway, upcountry Maui refers to all the little towns that are up in the hills along the long slopes of Haleakala. It seems like the main one is Makawao, which is where we went, and even that's just a little cow town, full of art galleries and western style themes and that kind of stuff. There was actually a rodeo in town over the weekend we were there, but we didn't have time to check it out. I would have been down for a nice rodeo, but well, whatever. We did see a bunch of cowboys walking all over the place, though. Supposedly people still ride their horses through town on occasion. Back in the day it was a real deal cowboy town, what with all the ranching along the slopes of the mountain. It all made me really thirst for an old school sasbarilla, but none were to be found. There's lots of cool little stores though for knick-knacks and artsy-fartsy colectibles and stuff like that.

We had a pretty good lunch at a Mexican place called Polli's, which had lots of cool photographs from all over Mexico on the walls. We were wandering around the place checking them out, hovering over people's chile relleno's like "excuse me there bubba, but I'm looking at this, oh can I get a bite of that tamale?" Nah it was mellow. There was one near-altercation, but I handled it with a Vulcan Death Grip in G-minor (non-fatal) and order was restored. The food was GRINDS (that means good) and we were filled up for the journey home. We had just enough time for another walk down main street to digest the vittles, and it was time to head for the ol' airport.

We still had a cooler filled with like 7 sodas, which we gave to the guys working at the rental car place when we returned our faithful Kia, as it was too bulky to take with us on the plane. I was gonna give them to a random person at the gas station before that, but Mrs. P thought I'd freak people out trying to give away stuff. People always seem tense and in a hurry at the gas station and I didn't want anyone to think I was some kind of modern day Jim Jones, so there you go.

The airport was a total and complete shit storm. Maui's tourism has definitely outgrown its rinky-dink airport. But, ya know, that's another story. Let's end the Maui experience on a happy note.

Maui rocked and you should go. I know we'll be back there again.

That's it.

Peace.



I know Jim Treacher wrote this a while ago, but goddam it's funny. There's a whole section of comics with just these two guys bitching back and forth, and you should read all of them, as well as just about everything else over there in his wacky clip-art area.

knock yourself out kids!

I will be back later so don't despair. The boss has the whip out, and not the good kind.



I really like getting e-mail.

I really hated Bandits, that bank robber movie with Bruce Willis and Billy Bob, which I watched about an hour of last night before burning the tape in a wicca ceremony.

I got cool e-mails from Sai-Lo and Rusty Trumpet this week. Sai-Lo was actually returning my e-mail, which I sent to tell him keep yo head up kid. I just send e-mails out of the blue sometimes to bloggers I read. You should try it. You should try it now. Rusty Trumpet e-mailed me out of the blue, well not really, cuz I linked him and he noticed but I mean I only linked him yesterday and he was very prompt and polite and thanked me and DAMN that is the proper way to conduct oneself in the blogosphere I think. I think it's downright good stuff.

Bruce Willis and Billy Bob had some truly terrible rugs on their heads, and then they insult us further by having the characters wear wigs over their rugs, because they're incognito, and I don't know if they were winking at themselves or what, but FUK this movie sucks my ass in a major major way.

Sai-Lo is a bummed out deep thinker. He knows a lot about the inside of his own brain and also about golden tee. Rusty Trumpet is a sexed-up movie hound. He's the first one that made me realize I could get aroused watching Bambi and it was OK. Yeah I made that up but are you sure?

Bandits sucked so hard that Mrs. P and I were studying light reflections off the wall before we gave up. This piece of shit tells you what's gonna happen from the start, gives you the two of the top ten worst celebrity singers of the last twenty years, all with some lame love story tied in there with the rich bored housewife that they meet in some cute stupid ass way, and wigs are shining and toupees flopping all over the place and the single most pathetic prison break scene in the history of cinema. Wait, strike that, Bandits does not deserve the term cinema. The crazy thing is I heard somewhere this movie was good. I swear I will spend the rest of my days hunting down that source and making them pay.

Together they could be the new Odd Couple. Holy Shit somebody call NBC.



Monday, August 12, 2002


bustin pearl jam yield and chillin like dylan

saw xxx and the new martin lawrence live movie runteldat. runteldat was super funny. xxx was really action-packed and cool and fun but some of the shit he did was so so impossible it was kind of stupid. but it was good if you get my drift.

damn martin lawrence is a dirty mofo. he gets to the nitty gritty, but literally i was laughing my ass off in certain parts. i mean my ass came off, i had to go find the movie worker guy with the flash light and the funny hat to help me find it. he was really nice and courteous but a little confused i think.

how did we see two movies? why we snuck in of course. i had to really push mrs. p cuz she gets nervous and thinks the secret megaplex spies are watching us, but i convinced her and we were like two unseen and unknown ninjas here there everywhere, we were running that place, only appearing, as if from nowhere for free mr. pibb refills - cough up the cash senor naugles, it's time for a little get back - know what i'm sayin...?

when i was in high school, the year before i got wheels, me and my buddy used to walk somewhere off campus to eat. it was der weinerschnitzel most of the time, cuz that was closest and shit, they only give you like 40 minutes for lunch, so you have to hussle, grab food, and head back. i remember thinking how cool it was to get off campus for lunch. anyway, years later, that weinerschnitzel turned into a senior taco. not senor taco, senior taco. i always wanted to go in there and ask them, did you put senior, as in senior citizen, senior high, senior prom, on purpose?? or were you trying to write senor, like senor jose llalo hernandez?

i never did though.

a couple friends of mine from my high school days that live in new york were out here a couple weeks ago, and mrs. p and i were lucky enough to be able to hang out with them for drinks at the mai-tai bar at the top of ala moana mall. the band was loud, so we had to shout to be heard but the conversation was lively. i was trippin on what they were saying about new york being so expensive, so huge, so hectic, so crazy, so fast. it's weird because living in hawaii, when i go back to la, i think it's this wild frenetic pace, but when they go back to la it's like so mellow yellow. nyc and hi are polar opposites like that, so they were so so so chilllllled out and appreciative of the aloha. which made me happy cuz aloha is fun to spread.

stoked: that tone-dogger may be visiting the island and that hosemonster and meesh are back in bloggo-land.

senseless fear of the day: capitalization



skunky joe's

hello, is pat in?

oh pat's not here right now

well, what time do you expect him back?

uh, she will be back maybe tomorrow.

she? oh... um, well

so i guess i'll try another day


yeah thats a good idea

um well i...

aloha

bye