Monday, September 1, 2008
what did you do this summer?
I had brain surgery to remove a giant benign tumor. It was fun!
I had a colonoscopy and a heart-catheter procedure. My colon is clean and my heart was revealed to be free of arterial blockage. The colon drugs knocked me out, but I really enjoyed the heart-procedure doping.
I lost 20 pounds—not all of it brain tumor—and started pumping iron again.
I began growing my hair back, although I still shave my balls.
I deliberately Swiffered my life clean of every asshole I'd tolerated for far too long.
I walked away from two paid writing gigs and an unpaid one because none of them were right for me.
I enjoyed Vladimir's company for not nearly long enough.
I yanked my active myspace profile.
I realized once again that Shannon is as solid as they come.
Her family is, too.
I witnessed my son's birth and have been a complete doting fag with him ever since.
I gave extra attention to Cookie because she's been sulking about the baby.
I finally, after over a dozen years of threats, began serious work on the Race book.
Like the gay Olympic diver who bit into his Gold Medal, I dove deep into self-imposed study about XHTML and CSS so I can make this crusty old site a lot better than it is.
What about you?
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
i am jim's colon...
...and what a happy, pink, shiny, cancer-and-crater-free colon I am!
My closest associates and anyone who's had to spend more than six uninterrupted hours with me knows that since splatting out of my mom's va-joo-joo nearly five decades ago, I've struggled with what are known in polite company as "digestive problems."
I was unfortunate enough to be enter this tear-soaked existence in the early 1960s, when Beatlemania swept the nation with the same fervor as Enema Mania and Prune Juice Mania, and the cold sac of skin-around-a-womb that was my mother didn't like The Beatles.
Being plied with enemas and prune juice during infancy inevitably led to teenaged experimentation with wheat bran and Ex-Lax. Later in life I turned to the "harder stuff"—senna, psyllium, and, five years ago, the self-imposed rote humiliation of a high colonic—the dyspeptic's version of shooting heroin.
Dad shriveled into a dried sea horse a couple months before reaching sixty. A lifetime of alcoholism, cigarette-smoking, and fairly being bathed nonstop in carcinogens due to his dual jobs as oil-refinery foreman and journeyman plumber were not what killed him. Meat and potatoes, three times a day for fifty-nine years, sent him to a somewhat early grave. Colon cancer was the culprit—he had the big "C" in the big "C."
A dedicated Gentile hypochondriac, I was certain I would suffer the same fate, especially two or three years ago when I began issuing a charming series of pencil-thin stools, which one online site said "strongly suggests carcinoma."
Earlier this month I scheduled a colonoscopy with a tall, sweet-spirited gastroenterologist of African ancestry who claims to have performed 15,000 such procedures, making him the Wilt Chamberlain of colonoscopies.
Yesterday I consumed roughly three calories' worth of chicken broth and a gallon of laxative-laced Gatorade, squirting warm brown soup into the commode until the wee hours.
This morning Sha-na-noony left our infant son in the capable arms of her parents and drove me to the hospital. The intravenous anesthetic knocked me out roughly three seconds after I felt it warmly flowing into my veins. A half-hour or so later, I awoke to be informed that my colon was hearty, robust, and disease-free.
Celebrate with me, friends and enemies alike! I am Jim's colon, and I'll be issuing feces for a long, long time to come!
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
eugenics
As autumn's cool winds blow through Dixie, I'm lacing up my boots and planning a multi-pronged attack on my upcoming RACE project.
One of the main themes will be an examination and (it seems likely) systematic refutation of this silly religious belief known as EQUALITY.
Which brings us, naturally, to EUGENICS.
Do you believe that breeding has any effect on the following human traits?
...Physiology
...Intellectual Ability
...Temperament
While you're chewing on that and baking your souffle of witty answers, I'm going to dredge up segments of an old post to unmask a GIANT logical fallacy which seems ubiquitous these days. One of the mantras endlessly hummed by the anti-racists goes something almost identical to this:
That statement is always used as some blanket proof of equality.
Let's dismantle it carefully.
Here's why the statement is deceptive: Differences between highs and lows WITHIN a group do not discount or magically wash away differences between group AVERAGES.
Let's say the best hitter for the Boston Red Sox bats .350. And, oh, let's say their worst hitter bats .150. And, fuck, let's say the team's batting average is .250.
With me?
And let's say the Yankees' best hitter bats .375, their worst hitter bats .325, and the team averages .350.
So...the difference between the Red Sox's best and worst hitters is a steep 200 points, while there's only 100 points between the teams' averages.
Does this...even for a second...mean the Red Sox and Yankees are equal at batting?
Not if you aren't a moron.
The Yankees, on average, still bat 100 points better than the Red Sox, and you'd be a fool not to put your money on the Yankees. The fact that there's a 200-point difference between the best and worst hitters on the Red Sox is ENTIRELY irrelevant to this fact.
Duh!
I've also noticed a tendency for people who make THIS statement...
"Differences within any group are greater than those between groups."
...to also turn around and point out the differences in AVERAGE income between blacks and whites, while avoiding the fact that the above statement would probably be true ECONOMICALLY.
Let's phrase it this way:
"Economic differences within any group are greater than those between groups."
If Oprah [a billionaire] is compared to a homeless black, then one compares AVERAGE incomes between blacks and whites in America, the above statement is also true.
The same people who use this "differences within groups are greater than those between groups" to somehow discount notions of innate GENETIC differences NEVER—at least, not as far as I've seen—are brave enough to apply the same reasoning to economic differences.
Assholes. That's why I'm doing this project. No one seems honest about race these days.
Saturday, September 15, 2007
a happy day at a local playground...
A happy day at a local playground...
...was ruined upon our discovery that some scofflaw had drawn genitals on the cute cartoon animal display.
People can be so heartless and dirty.
Monday, September 3, 2007
sometimes i don't feel so bad when an ex-friend dies
The above picture is of ex-friend
Lou had been my best friend in journalism school. He was a fat, bearded, farting, filthy-mouthed, passionate punk rocker, and I was a violent, withdrawn rockabilly guy—the only rockabilly guy in Philadelphia in 1982. We also both drove cabs, an avocation he would pursue on and off for the rest of his life.
We had a falling-out in 1985 right after graduation. I was staying over at his house, and he woke me up being all drunk and loud. I hate drunks, and I'm psychotic when my sleep is disturbed. We wouldn't speak for another seven years.
In the late 1980s, an ex-girlfriend from college cattily informed me that while I'd been visiting my brother in Florida during my junior year—while me and the ex had still been living together—Lou came over and fucked her.
Sometime around 1990, I was watching the LA TV news and was intrigued by a story about a cable-access host in Tucson called "The Great Satan At-Large." The host was facing 40 years for obscenity due to his show, and a news clip showed a fat guy in red face paint with a plastic pitchfork and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
Two years later, I received an answering-maching message from Lou. He had seen ANSWER Me! and wanted to get back in touch. During my follow-up phone call, Lou revealed that he'd recently been in trouble for his cable-access show in Tucson.
Lou was the Great Satan I'd seen on TV. And I was doing ANSWER Me!. Without even looking, we'd both caused so much trouble that we found each other again.
We shared hours upon hours of intense, hilarious long-distance calls over the next couple years. When I was charged with obscenity after moving to Portland, it only cemented the bond between me and Lou. We agreed that he would move to Portland and both of us would REALLY give the town a high colonic with our planned Nigger Show, which I once described thusly:
Roughly, it was a tragicomic narrative about two skinheads who lose their girlfriends to black guys. In their spurned rage, they do a cable access show-within-a-show called "The Nigger Show," which is filled with inept sloganeering and the crudest stereotypes. Behind the scenes, still smarting from the romantic rejection, the boys convince themselves that their ex-girlfriends couldn't possibly prefer black guys and thus must have been sold into white slavery. So they boldly forge into the ghetto to rescue the kidnapped white maidens. Though a series of subversive activities such as dropping water balloons on Negroes and taking extra newspapers from newsboxes when they have only paid for one, they spark a global race war which they're powerless to stop. To everyone's surprise, the Puerto Ricans win the race war. The protagonists retire to the Oregon woods to eke out a survivalist existence. After a heated campfire argument as to the racial origins of Bigfoot, one of the boys is brutally raped by a Sasquatch.
Lou abandoned his Tucson taxi-dispatcher job and moved to Portland. My wife and I invited him to stay at our house while we worked on The Nigger Show and he looked for a job.
After ten days, it became apparent that Lou neither intended to bathe nor look for a job. All he did was drink, chain-smoke, and look at the sports section of the paper. He was also the worst kind of drunk—the weepy kind. When we came home from work to find him passed out in the summer sun outside our house, we demanded that he leave.
He tried muscling his way past my wife back into the house. I pulled out our Mossberg shotgun and pointed it at him. He hailed a taxi and flew back to Tucson.
I only spoke to him once after that, calling him in 1998 to tell him Debbie was dying of cancer. He was not quite friendly, but we spoke long enough for him to tell me he'd sired a son—Caesar Satan Ludovico Perfidio.
Caesar is now 9. And Lou died of heart disease last fall at age 43.
It gives me the heebie-jeebies to think that of the three players in that little shotgun scene, two of them are now dead, and I didn't even shoot either of them. My own mortality keeps tapping me on the back.
I feel sad remembering the time we trudged through rusty snow in blown-to-shit Philly neighborhoods, high on mushrooms and exaggerating our own Philly accents. I feel sad remembering how we'd riff on the word "nigger" for two hours straight. I feel sad that we never became friends again.
But I don't feel THAT sad. He fucked my girlfriend and he was such a bad houseguest, I pulled a shotgun on him. And the cocksucker never took care of his health. In his twenties, he had the body of a fifty-year-old. Better he goes than me.
Can anyone relate? Is anyone superstitious about speaking ill of the dead? Does anyone have a problem remembering the bad things about the recently deceased?
Let me know if I should feel guilty.
Friday, April 27, 2007
atlanta: the city too busy to hate jim goad
New mailing address:
PO Box 77651
Atlanta, GA 30357
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
dumbest quote about the war yet
As you may have noticed, I've been mostly silent about that war over in Iraq—you know, the one which has now dragged on longer than our own Civil War.
I think it's been misguided, horribly executed, and that the "War on Terror" is a transparent cover to hide obviously predatory oil/economic interests. And it has turned the entire fucking world against us and will bite us hard on the ass in the long run. Duh!
But it took four years until I ran across a statement so fucking stupid that it made me angry.
This was originally printed in the Christian Science Monitor and made its way onto Yahoo! News:
Few Americans share Iraq war's sacrifices
Five years after President Bush declared war on Islamic extremism, the military has lost 3,599 troops and spent $503 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet unlike past wars, even unpopular ones, most Americans have contributed little directly.
Every time someone says "the government spent" or "the military spent," a righteous populist neuron in my brain feels compelled to scream, THE GOVERNMENT NEVER SPENT A FUCKING PENNY ON ANYTHING! THE GOVERNMENT EXTORTS MONEY FROM CITIZENS, TAKES A CUT FOR ITSELF, AND THEN REDISTRIBUTES THE MONEY.
At this point, "most Americans" have been FORCED to pay nearly TWO THOUSAND BUCKS EACH for that counterproductive bloodbath. I could REALLY USE that two thousand bucks right now. And fuck knows what quotient of that two grand goes to bankers' interest and the government payroll.
Hey, Uncle Sam—I realize you have the guns pointed at our heads as well as at the Iraqis, and if we don't give you our lunch money you'll throw us in jail, but can you at least, for once, ADMIT it?
[ notes from undergoad archives ]
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