The other day my wife Rachelle Maynard posted this on a Buy, Sell and Trade Facebook group she belongs to:
LIKE NEW BLUNDSTONES 7.5 Mens or 9.5 Womens
$150
Don’t spend $250 on a new pair of Blundstones your husband will never wear because they’re just a little bit hard to slip on. No. Don’t be angry he’s only worn them 3 times and doesn’t truly appreciate the kindness of your gift. So just buy these instead. They are in near perfect shape. They come with a box and everything. Pick up near Bloor and Spadina.
Comments:
Sahara: Forgive me, but your husband sounds like a bit of an asshole.
Anne: Nice colours!
Emily: I agree with Sahara, your husband sounds like a real piece of work. He better look like Daniel Craig is all I can say! LOL!!
Sahara: I once heard about a husband who took his wife to a Lord of the Rings movie marathon on their wedding anniversary! He thought if she saw them all at once, in order, then she would love them like he did. CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE?
Dina: I would cut a bastard if he did that to me on our anniversary.
Betty: My husband is also an asshole. #MeToo
Stephanie: Sounds like he has pretty small feet! LOL!!
Emily: Men are trash.
Jen: You know, I have absolutely no doubt of my innate superiority to my husband, and pretty much all men, in fact, yet I still end up feeling oppressed. How the hell does that end up happening?
Nicki: Smash the Patriarchy!
Robynne: Would it be possible to come by on Tuesday around 4:00 to have a look?
Elena: My husband is also a jerk. #MeToo
Misha: I started to notice that whenever I walked into the room my husband would slam his laptop shut. He said it was fantasy hockey. Turns out he meant porn. Dirty, disgusting porn #MeToo
Treena: I would dump his small-footed ass. You can do better Rachelle. You deserve better. We all do.
Lisa: I swear to God, my husband can’t even figure out how to work the remote. Why are they all so fucking incompetent??? Why do we have to do EVERYTHING??? #MeToo
Beth: The fucker doesn’t deserve boots.
Maria: Make him walk barefoot in the snow. #MeToo
]]>As I am a very well-connected person, I was able to secure a statement from the White House Intern who was caught in the power struggle between President Donald Trump and CNN reporter Jim Acosta last week. As you may recall, Trump thought that Acosta was taking too long with his questions and asked the Intern to take the mic away. She tried, but could not complete the task.
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“It’s embarrassing to me that this distraction has taken the focus off of Antibiotic Awareness Week where it should rightly be placed. Antibiotics save lives, and are one of the great tools that America can use to ensure her security.
Nevertheless, “Micgate” has become a central story in our news cycle, and I realize I need to address it. This is the one statement I will make regarding the incident.
Many of you have been asking how this has been effecting me. Well, it has certainly brought me an awful lot of unwanted attention and a vast number of offers from various porn sites. Obviously, most of them involve microphones, as has been widely speculated, but the rumour that Pornhub offered me $300, 000 to star in a video called, “Enemy of the People,” is true. In spite of a more complex, layered plot, one in which I was to be driving alone on a rural road in Mexico when my car breaks down in the midst of a migrant caravan that’s just been refused entry in the US, I will in no way be connected to this venture, as it is not reflective of my values.
I think the most impactful thing that I have felt in being a part of this spectacle, is experiencing celebrity, of being reduced to a symbol. When most people watched the clip of me trying to get the microphone from Mr. Acosta, they saw a poor, helpless Intern caught between two powerful men. There was the President, commanding me to perform a humiliating and difficult task, while Mr. Acosta made sure that the world saw, vividly and clearly, that I could not not complete this difficult and humiliating task because, of course, he would’t let me!
If it wasn’t so mortifying, it might actually have been funny!
I feel I must also point out the irony of me, a young woman, reaching out for a microphone, as if maybe I had something valuable and worthwhile to say in this temple of performative masculinity. But of course, like so many other women, I was ignored and then mocked.
Many of you have also wanted to know if I was a member of the KKK, a nazi or a racist. I am not, nor have I ever been, even if my local Starbuck’s barista has now taken to writing RACIST SCUM on my coffee cup.
That will be all I have to say on the matter. Thank you for your time.”
]]>It was a cheap, addictive entertainment.
Like Netflix.
Like porn.
Like the buildup to the Super Bowl.
The big event, as far as most media was concerned, was the landfall in Florida. This, it seemed, was the point to which all of our lives were leading, the apocalypse that was sure to prove whatever it was we needed proved. Days, perhaps even weeks before this happened, there was wall to wall coverage promising cataclysm. I learned to fear the “Cone of Uncertainty” and “Life Threatening Winds,” I listened to talking heads as if they were debating some sport, and I watched relentless loops of footage of nature destroying any puny mortal concerns that stood in its path.
And as the hurricane carved out it’s terrible path, each demolished, little island a grim foreshadowing of what was about to happen to over-populated and under-prepared Florida, the hurricane was simultaneously a prophecy of doom and a trailer for a Hollywood disaster film. Almost giddy, each day the broadcasters revealed– in all its punitive majesty– another verse in this Book of Revelations.
The media, of course, profited from our obsessive fear, and turned the volume up as loud as they could. The more clicks the better, and if it was terror and anxiety that ushered in these clicks, so be it. At one point a rain-soaked reporter, bent and staggering against the elements, conducted an urgent interview with a man who had not evacuated. Clearly the reporter was hoping for some Florida Man archetype to emerge from the scrub, a guy who looked like Kid Rock and was armed with a crossbow and some alligator mace, and wasn’t going to let some “lady storm” tell him what to do.
Instead, the reporter got a genius cardiologist, who with astonishing knowledge, detail and reasoning, explained precisely why it was safe to be exactly where he was. He was calm, too, not a trace of panic to him, and he made the reporter look like the very bad actor he was.
That the media manipulates and distorts news events, or even creates disaster porn, is nothing new. When 9/11 took place I literally could not take my eyes off the tv.
It was the most riveting thing I had ever seen, and it was a rating’s sensation. Now, with all our various technologies even further entrenched, this sense of chaos and anxiety has become a permanent, immobilizing fixture of our lives. The media, desperate to make a buck, feed us all the worst case scenarios, whipping us into a frenzy of panicky, dependent consumption.
My level of excitement had reached such heights that when Hurricane Irma finally struck Florida, I was actually disappointed–like I would be if I saw a movie where the trailers were better than the actual product they were selling.
This is completely perverse and backwards, but there you have it.
It is instructive when you’re caught in the swift currents of one of these types of stories to look up beyond your computer screen and out the window.
Remind yourself that we are actually living in the safest time in history.
( https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-10-23/world-actually-safer-ever-and-heres-data-prove )
Go outside, for surely something beautiful will fall to you.
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From @realDonaldTrump:
Ron Glass died! Black guy on Barney Miller. Very fussy and wordy. Maybe gay. Easy to overlook. Just 71. Still in the prime of his life. Sad.
From @realDonaldTrump:
Florence Henderson died! America’s original MILF. Did I? Wouldn’t be classy to tell, but as Flo is dead– yes, many, many times. Once with Marcia, too.
From @realDonaldTrump:
Leonard Cohen died! Think it was a nut allergy. Might have to ban nuts. We’re losing too many of the good ones to them.#WarOnNuts!
From @realDonaldTrump:
I am in perfect health. No nut allergy. Can eat nuts by the handful. Shame about Crooked Hillary’s health. So very sick. Tired all the time. Crooked Hillary next to die?
From @realDonaldTrump:
Jose Fernandez died! Great, great pitcher for Miami. Un hombre sincero. Had box seats for his last start. Great service. Stunning waitresses. They love me in Florida.
From @realDonaldTrump:
Sharon Jones died! Pancreatic cancer. Nasty. I stand with the black people, who love me, love me so much, during this sad, sad time. I will fix your broken inner cities!!
From @realDonaldTrump:
Pat Harrington Jr. died! The janitor guy on One Day at a Time. Decent show. Maybe not the best. Preferred Three’s Company. Chrissy? She was a 9, for sure. Body and face.
From @realDonaldTrump:
Actress Suzanne Somers played Chrissy. Blonde and jiggly. I won’t lie to you, I had sex with her many times. So many times you wouldn’t believe.
From @realDonaldTrump:
One time we did it in the linen closet of a 5 star restaurant. She was a great piece of real estate, that lady. Outstanding. #WomenLoveMe.
From @realDonaldTrump:
Muhammad Ali died! Great showman. Brought lots of people and money into the casinos. Huge amounts. He got so shaky in the end, though. Sad.
From @realDonaldTrump:
Former Miss New Jersey Cara McCollum has died! Saw her naked more than once in the change room at the pageant. Body a solid 9. Face? Maybe a 7 on a good day. We mourn her passing.
From @realDonaldTrump:
Prince has died! He was never my thing. Straight or gay? Hard to tell. Always changing his brand. Very confusing for the consumer. Made him a bad businessman. #BuyTrumpBrandWater
From @realDonaldTrump:
David Bowie died! Had a glass eye. Was married to a Somalian supermodel. Guy was way out there. Tried to get him on Celebrity Apprentice but there were scheduling problems.
From @realDonaldTrump:
Gene Wilder died! Alzheimer’s Disease. Couldn’t remember a thing in the end. I am in perfect health. My mind is like a platinum trap. Ivy League educated. So, so very smart. #HighestPresidentialIQOfAllTime
From @realDonaldTrump:
Chyna has died! Drug overdose. I have never taken any drugs in my life. Unlike Crooked Hillary who is on HUGE amounts of meds. She’s all weak and shaky like Ali was before his death. Don’t think she has long.
From @realDonaldTrump:
Chyna was a great lady wrestler. Really tall. Kind of homely, but still able to turn a profit in porn. Gotta admire that.
Always thought Ivanka could dominate the industry if she chose.
]]>That was a bit of a kick in the junk, I tell you, but I’m not the sort of person who will let Big Government keep him down! With this in mind I have started an Adult Entertainment Film Company called Naughty America
and have been writing a series of pornographic scripts for American patriot and sex bomb county clerk Kim Davis, who gained international attention after defying a US federal court order requiring that she issue marriage licenses to same sex couples.
Script #1
(Kim Davis, wearing sweat pants and a sports bra is sitting in the stands at a baseball stadium drinking a beer and watching a young man take batting practice. It is early evening and it appears that Kim and the nubile athlete are the only people there. Sax music plays in the background.)
Kim: You’re just as black as night, aren’t you?
Baseball player: Un día voy a ser rico a través de mis esfuerzos , si Dios quiere.
Kim: (Takes off top and tosses her mullet) I like the way you handle that wood.
Baseball player: (Stops hitting, spits on the ground) I will sex with you once, $100, no lip touches.
Kim: Let it rain, baby, let it rain.
Script #2
(Mug Shot of Kim Davis, background slowly turning into an undulating American flag)
Voiceover: My name is Kim Davis and I’m an American patriot. When God said let there be marriage, he said it was between Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, okay? I am a warrior for God, damn it, and if they put me in prison, well, they’re just putting me closer to God, so it’s really like a promotion. Like the Good Book says, “Then the Philistines seized him and gouged out his eyes; and they brought him down to Gaza and bound him with bronze chains, and he was a grinder in the prison. So there.”
(Fade out and then fade in to scene of Kim Davis naked in the shower. She is very slowly washing herself, and as this progresses, this slow, tender cleansing, she begins to speak to Jesus)
Kim: Clean me, sweet Jesus, clean the hell out of me. There Jesus, there’s a real dirty spot! Clean it, my divine Lord who looks just like Kid Rock, clean it faster!!
That’s it, that’s the purity I’m looking for sweet Lord, that’s it. Oh, you are a good and just Lord, amen, yes, amen!
Script #3
(Kim Davis is in a confessional, Pope Francis is listening on the other side)
Kim: Forgive me father for I have sinned. I am like, crazy turned-on by hot homo guys going at it. (Scene changes to gay sex between two men, while Kim’s voice continues her confession)
Oh, I like them when they’re smooth and when they’re hairy, I like how hard everything is and how they’re as powerful as America or a truck. (A naked Kim Davis is now in the scene with the men) It makes me want to roll around with them, to be their carpet and absorb everything!
Pope Francis: It sounds as if the fever dream a young priest once told unto me in a quiet and dark nook of the Vatican. In his telling, the Rosary beads were for more than just praying, they became a conduit to truly transcendent, Godly feeling. Oh, Brother William, I miss him so.
]]>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5w7FjW3QeiQ
“Only in America,” I’d mutter to myself. The greed, the sales-drunk shoppers camping out in parking lots and then pouring through the front doors of Walmart like some sort of flesh tsunami, all stampeding and thundering down the aisles ripping discounted toasters and Xboxes from one another as if on some demented, nightmare game show, seemed parodic, a bit of cinema constructed for a dystopian movie and not a regular, predictable part of American life. It was the sort of theatre that always made me feel morally superior, cozy and safe in the knowledge that I would never behave in such a desperate, quasi-apocalyptic manner.
Of course, all I was really doing was sneering at poor people. Feasting on a genre of poverty porn, I would pat myself on the back, fashioning some sort of moral virtue out of what was actually snobbery and a glaring lack of empathy.
These videos that are so roundly circulated and mocked, may depict the results of greed, but not as personified by the unmediated appetite of the mob on the floor. No, the greed is taking place off-camera, up in the offices and towers of Walmart (which as a corporation makes about 16 billion a year in profit and pays it’s typical full-time employee less than $25,000 a year). The scrabbling peasants rioting beneath, their behaviour is the product of exclusion, of living in an aggressively consumer culture where material ascension must never yield.
Lacking sufficient funds to live the mythic “American Dream,” people who are working really hard just to survive, must wake up each day feeling like they’re missing out. In a nation where it’s said that the average child can identify 1,000 corporate logos and people are constantly bombarded, concussed, really, with messages that the good life is a narrative expressed largely through class, what hope do we truly have of feeling satisfied with what we have? If we get more stuff, we’ll be better off, is the message, and if you’re poor you’re relegated to live in an acutely felt state of deprivation while an inaccessible and teasing world glitters all around.
It’s nothing to laugh at, and as a culture we’re finally starting to understand that.
Dear Bitter Writer:
What are writers really like?
Ansell Pitt
Dear Mister Pitt:
Writers are the worst.
I’d be hard pressed to think of any single grouping of people, be they bound by profession, religion, ethnicity, sexual fetish or disease, that are worse than writers.
Writers are grubby, small, aspirational and hateful people.
The only thing that they loathe more than themselves are other writers. The success of other human beings, even in some cases animals, is toxic to the writer. If you happen to fall into conversation with one about something that is “good,” or something that you “like,” the writer will quickly, as if in a panic, change the topic to something that is “not good,” or something that they “don’t like.” They will do this in the way that a squirrel might scurry off up a tree when it gets startled. Writers feel diminished by light and joy, and will seek to suck as much of it as possible out of any given day. Never, ever ask a writer to make a speech at a wedding.
Think of this way:
If all the writers on the planet were jammed into one insufferable country, it would be torn apart by civil war and terrorism.
And then likely bombed by every other county in the world, too.
It would just be that bad a place.
Dear Bitter Writer:
Hello, love the very helpful blog! My question is book cover designs. What would go on it? Should the character be on the cover or should the cover relate to the content in the story? Thank you.
Samantha Bell
Dear Ms. Bell:
Are you some kind of a moron?
Look, if some other moron is willing to publish your stupid book, you should let them put whatever the fuck they want on the cover!! As a writer it is essential that you learn to be a sycophant. You must shamelessly align yourself with whatever the prevailing tribe is, and ceaselessly, but with as much elegance and perception as you can muster, lather all editors and associated “literati” (gag!) with compliments. Tell them how much you love the little, European scarves they’re always wearing and how cool their frames and tattoos are, and for God’s sake, if they want you nude and fully penetrated on the cover, you let them know how much you love their “edgy vision” and ask how many orifices they want penetrated, damn it!
Brooklyn and Lillian have been thinking about inviting a guy for a threesome!
They live near you and have shown clear interest in meeting and sleeping with you!
To read your messages and see how they look like, visit now
http://t.co/r8Rl48BeWg
And you WILL get laid, it’s a guaranteed fact!
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My response:
Dear Victoria:
Brooklyn, eh? That’s a funny name. I think it got some purchase in the 90’s, although I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe because Brooklyn was becoming a really cool and edgy place then, and that by giving a child that name parents thought they might instill them with the edgy confidence to go out and live a little, perhaps try a threesome with somebody named Lillian, the plain girl who always liked books more than people but now, with the encouragement of Brooklyn, is ready to break out of her shell.
I imagine that three out of five waitresses who work at Coyote Ugly share the name Brooklyn. I would very much like to see a pie chart of waitress names from that place. (Perhaps there’s a web site with such? If you know of one, please send it to me!)
Bu the truth is that I don’t know whether Brooklyn is the name of a guy or a girl. Posh Spice and David Beckham named their son Brooklyn, and there is a supermodel that goes out with a tennis player named Brooklyn, and so it seems to me to be one of those edgy, unpredictable names, like Charlie or Zion, that defy gender categories. You might think me old fashioned, but in the context of a threesome, the gender of the third person makes a difference to me.
The link you provided did not work, but took me to a page where I could buy discounted briefcases. I bought two, so thank you for that. At any rate, please send me a working link, or some other form of gender evidence, so that I might determine the sex of Brooklyn for myself, at which point we might proceed as is appropriate. I will look forward to hearing from you!
Michael Murray
PS: I like guaranteed facts.
PPS: I am married and love my wife very much, but feel that I make my best decisions when I have the greatest amount of information at my disposal.
PPPS: Posh Spice’s first name is Victoria. Coincidence?
PPPPS: I think she’s a natural beauty.
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