Tigr Dumb

As a favor to the interim dept head I took on another class this semester. It got lost in the beaurocratic shuffle between chairs. No one noticed until after the first class session. The class meets at 8 am four times a week :(

To paraphrase a wise ninja master, I hate 8 am classes with my whole body, including my pee pee.
::::falls over and dies::::

Intervention for the sober

Yesterday, I woke to the sound of my mother yelling at the babykicker.

I was looking at the huffingtonpost with a toothbrush sticking out of my mouth. There was generic classical music blaring from the den. Papi stood in the doorway “You’re really addicted to all this technology stuff, aren’t you?” He had this smile, this glassy I’m seeing you for the first time even though I’ve said it a thousand times smile. Brown eyes projecting—disbelief? pity? smugness?—an alien vision of reality. He was positively beatific! Was there a USB cord running from my temple to the hard drive? Was I bound up in wires? Were my eyes cracked and dry from spending an entire week playing WOW only to break for pizza and piss? Were there little piles of shit in my room?

I had to suck my cheeks together as so not to spit toothpaste everywhere. I swallowed the red flush creeping up my cheeks. I didn’t know which made me angrier: his condescension, his genuine belief that I really was addicted to technology, or his blindness.

With a pop I yanked the toothbrush out of my mouth, “Really, then why are you the one insistent on blaring the stereo?” That’s what I meant to say. What came out of my mouth sounded more like “muff glufff bigooph!” on account of the foamy soup between teeth and tongue, but the meaning was clear, and he left. He turned off the stereo.

Let me back up. I need to elaborate on my emotional response. As a rule any form of condescension makes me angry, particularly when it comes from a parent or friend. My father is an M.D. an infectious disease specialist. Back in’85 when AIDS ascended to arch-fiend in humanity’s never ending battle against nature, he was one of three doctors in ::censored:::, who didn’t run away from gay men dying the slow death of wasting syndrome; he never freaked out, he never turned a patient away from being HIV positive.

He’s very good at being a doctor, but he’s a luddite, and on top of that he ‘s got that great white ego that comes from being a doctor, so already we have an irritating concoction in the works. All my life he has been saying I watch too much tv or spend too much time on the computer or waste my time reading comic books (yeah, I know not technology per se, but the pattern here is obvious). He’s even gone so far as to call the t.v. my best friend. (that was insulting and it hurt)

Growing up I did watch my share of t.v, but even then he over exaggerated. Soccer and Football didn’t matter. All the studying, the extra time I put in on my honors courses. Getting the lead in the school play didn’t matter. Have you read Neil Simon’s Fools? The lead is in every scene, lines on every page. In order to know the part you have to know the whole script! Here I am, with a Master’s degree in English, I devote about 20 hours a week to the martial arts and conditioning, another 5-8 hours on writing and blogging, and I spend some time with my friends on the weekend. When it comes to my father, I have no life outside of the predetermined narrative he’s constructed for me. Nothing I have ever done has squashed this belief and nothing I do ever will, and I stopped trying a long time ago but hot damn it pisses me off somethin’ fierce, like someone shoved a bottle of Tabasco sauce up my nose.

Then there is the issue of my sister. A person with real addiction issues, who has waged a war of emotional abuse that has left my parents’ marriage entropic. Speaking of the babykicker, I’d say her only accomplishment to date is sucking up well over 100,00 dollars of my parent’s money, forcing them to take out another mortgage and dip into their retirement savings which has resulted in nothing but a shallow, directionless parasite, and papi keeps letting her get away with it. She’s a real Rolo Tomasi. Have I mentioned that I hate and despise her? I really shouldn’t. It should be clear from everything I write.

And yet the term addiction is slung at me carelessly as a way to criticize nonexistent behavior. I wonder though....

Oh, and for the record I've never played WOW (World of Warcraft)

The Best thing about my girlfriend

If I clean a room, or do dishes, the very first words out of her mouth are "that's great! thank you!" I didn't know people like this existed. Sometimes, well most of the time, I'm still not sure how to act when she says it.

A Rant

I get the distinct feeling I’m viewed as a parasite by my mother. This is not a groundless claim. I live at home. I eat her food. She still takes care of my car insurance. She screams at me, that or reminding me that “you’re not a college student anymore, stop acting like you live in a dorm” by which she means I’m messy, even though I confine the mess to my room. Any fight between my sister and mother will inevitably make a turn at “Why does he do the dishes?” She demands with her tuneless southern twang. “Well yeah, your brother’s no better, he’s next on my list.”
Or it is about a car, or something the babykicker said. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not mom always agrees with her, and I’m in my own room stunned, feeling sold out, angry that mom would accept such reductive infantile logic, instantly put me on par with that piece of shit who harms people carelessly and without regard. We’re not people to the babykicker, merely things, obstructions to her grand quest of loafing 14 hours a day while everyone else works—unless she needs something from us.
So that’s that then. Her crimes are my crimes; she should be allowed to hurt as many people as possible.
How did this become the status quo? I work. I pay my own credit card bill. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. The only bad habit I really have is jerking off to porn, yet I am struggling for a satisfactory counter-argument. No, I don’t want a satisfactory one, I’m searching for one without peer. I want a coup de grace: a simple retort that says “that settles it, he’s a self sufficient adult who takes care of himself. There’s only one parasite in this family.”
I can’t. Is there a difference between being a loser who lives with his parents and an adult with a different set of priorities? Right now, in the age of the idiot king, the economy is in the shitter, more people are getting more jobs that pay less, working longer and longer hours, achieving nothing. Seriously, what do they have to show for it? It hasn’t lowered the price of gas, or repaired our relationship with the world writ large or given our children a better education. Hell, most people are easily controlled authoritarian puppets, they’re just waiting for the right leader to tell them what to do.
This excuses nothing though. I’m not talking about everyone else. I’m talking about me. When I was 19 I remember the first night I was in my dorm room. I had this revelation “I’m a man now!” I’ve doubted that epiphany ever since.
Look where I am. My girlfriend was raped and I was powerless to stop it. My track history in relation to grad school is piss poor. I chose the wrong program, and I was miserable, now I can’t get into MFA program because you can read the misery in my grades.
My girlfriend is hundreds of miles away. I moved because I thought I was sparing her. I was afraid I’d lose it and knock her brown eyes right off her face. The only thing the decision engendered were feelings of betrayal and nervous breakdowns. When was the last time I made the right decision about anything? Hell when was the last time someone offered me advice that didn’t bite me in the ass?
Joseph Campbell wrote about the call. See before the hero’s journey begins he hears the call. He is summoned by light or the powers that be or George Lucas or whoever. But there are heroes who resist the call, and they are punished. Jonah and the whale: man is called by God to do his work, man runs away in fear, man is eaten by whale. Only when Jonah repents and accepts his ministry is he released.
What if you’re tone deaf though? What if you can’t hear the call? It might as well be static, covered in noise pollution, trampled over by car stereos with bass five miles high, a giant arrogant robot, straight from the big-eyes-small-mouth fantasy world of Japan, making the rest of us shake and vibrate against our will. We don’t even get to enjoy the song. You can’t hear it! There is only bass, and a smug asshole at the eye of the storm, king of his chrome world.

I wrote this and I haven’t inched to clarity, not one bit.
I doubt, and it scares me. I doubt, and it tires me, wears me down.

Just a bit of dialogue

Gave Radar a shower. "Why?" My mother asked. I said, "he smells like dookey." "Don't say that, say feces, you have a Master's degree in english" "Yes, and in my professional opinion this dog smells like dookey, not feces."

That smarts

I was hit in the ear during judo practice, take note boys and girls, getting hit in the ear causes headaches.

George Carlin is Dead

:(




A brilliant comedian, a frustrating defeatist. He, more than anyone, shaped my view of religion. I'm not going to cry, but I feel a sense of real loss here. He was a philosopher, a curmudgeon, a truth-sayer. He has been proven right about a great many things, but his death, it reminds me....
It makes me fear his final judgement of humanity all the more: that we are doomed. I have never hoped more that a person be proven stone cold wrong.

Obama is testing my patience

At 5 am on Saturday morning I wrote a long tirade about the rape, the FISA bill that gives telcos retroactive immunity, and Obama, and then ...I did nothing. I decided not to publish it Part of it is my paranoia, but I wanted to give Obama a chance to rectify his colossal blunder, but it isn't a blunder. It's calculated.

Also, I didn't know if I wanted to tie rape/torture directly to Obama.

But I'm publishing it here. Maybe I'll publish it somewhere else in an altered form...probably not, but I went through the trouble of writing it so I'll just print it here, originally intended for the Dailykos:

Let me preface this diary with a clarification. I don't use "howl" lightly. This is not the work of a D.C.village idiot or a mercenary pundit or even a savvy front pager. My howl is a grunge howl, an Alice In Chains howl, a Lane Staley howl, blisters weeping heroine weeping blood weeping memory, scarred over, disfigured.

Disfigured by torture, real torture. For a solid hour, I was hostage as my girlfriend was raped. My body is fine, but my psyche? It has been cut open, exposed to the dangers of fresh air. There was nothing I could do. The barrel at my temple was cold and light, fate waited on the other side of the trigger. Despite our best efforts the perps have yet to be found, and I fear they never will be. Since then, I've developed a keen interest in terms like justice, gun control, power, you get the idea.

I'm not a vengeful person, despite the agony inflicted, I want justice, a fair trial,nothing more, nothing less, but as I said, we will never get that. And I crave justice, I thirst for it, and it has made me a bit impatient, even a bit critical of victims of sexual abuse.

A funny thing happens to me when I watch Law and Order: SVU. When the victim can identify the attacker and takes his sorry ass to court, I'm with 'em all the way; their bravery pleases my sense of ethics and my need for snack-food escapism, but if that victim should cower, should he or she fail to press charges? I hate them for their cowardice. I hate them because they have the luxury of cowardice; they fear their attackers will identify them or harm them further?? Ha! If only I could reach into their fictional brains and rip out the identity of their assailants, take that precious CHOICE away from them that the writers think make their cliches sympathetic characters. To me they are fools a few words away from vindication, they lack force of will to act. I'm quite willing to have my face plastered on the tv screen, mocked by O'Reilly, the butt of a thousand tv monologues, rejected by my friends, if only I could identify our attackers and drag them into court.

I was a hostage for a solid hour. I watched the act of rape once...twice...three times...I....lost...count......as they moved from room to room.

I will not be a hostage again.

I will not be held hostage by craven psychopaths, nor fear mongers like Roger Ailes, and I damn sure won't be held hostage by the Great Black Hope, his apologists, or the fear of a McCain Administration.

Despite the rabid dogs barking in my head

That's right I called Obama the Great Black Hope, and until he proves otherwise, that's all he is: the manufactured hero-myth of a desperate and abused liberal circle jerk. (I can feel some of you pulling away from me, you don't think I'm being fair, give me just a few more minutes of your time).

Ya see, some of you are held hostage and you don't even realize it. "Obama is our best hope we have to vote for him It's him or else" Or else what? All Obama had to say was "This bill is a farce. The constitution will not be held hostage by Bush and the Telecoms. No one is above the law. I, the democratic nominee, will not vote for it" That is all he had to say, but no, he equivocated. If McCain had been in a similar position he would have done the same thing, and if he would have done the same thing, well then, if they both would do the same thing, why should I fear a McCain Administration more than an Obama one?

They will both cave WHEN IT MATTERS MOST, so don't even try with that supreme court stuff. If Obama falters on Telecom immunity, if he confuses bipartisanship with wisdom, then what makes you think he can get a pro-choice judge on the bench when the heat will really be on?

No world, I don't HAVE to vote for the big O. He has to earn my vote by demonstrating exceptional leadership. Why? Because I AM NOT A HOSTAGE TO THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE. The future president of the United States works for US. We invest in his campaign. We cast the votes. Many of you roll up your sleeves and do GOTV. You need to remind him that HE works for YOU, not the other way around. If this is his idea of leadership, then quite frankly it won't matter who is at the helm. We might as well be in the Demeter drifting towards London as Count Cheney sucks the progressive blood right out of our bodies. If he doesn't learn that your vote isn't guaranteed, then you are authorizing him to behave as a coward.

Chalk up another little victory

Dunno how to explain this one.

I'm rolling with Sifu Right-wing

I've shrimped out of side control. We look like a pair of clumsy lovers goofing their way through Kama Sutra positions. My wrongside leg, the left leg, is lifted at a 45 degree angle. I'd be a dog with a fire hydrant, but my right leg is splayed backward sliding underneath the wrongside. I am open palmed, hands at the level of my eyes, waiting for the heaviness. The wrongside shin presses against his pot belly. My right hand reaches deep for the space between my legs; the rest of me follows. I forward roll on an angle--think Pluto's orbit around the sun--and come back to guard. Both of us are impressed. He grins. I grin.

And in two minutes The Tentacle will kick my ass.

Eh.

I've been writing poems that play with superhero iconography...

hmm.

Does martial arts.

Does crazy crossfit workouts.

Writing about superheroes.

Deep down do I aspire to be a superhero? Nothing deep down about it. I've wanted that since the age of five ;)

Whew!

Drilling from various positions, side control, mount, and back, we pulled out an epic 36 minutes of grappling time. I felt gassed at several points, guess I overdid it with my workout (ugh! as much as I hate admitting it, I need to workout in the morning, there are days I really need a solid 6-8 hrs of recovery time). And the workout? 5 sets: row 500m/10 36 lbs DB Swings/30 sit ups for time: 20:43. The prescribed workout called for 30 swings, but I just plain forgot. For the best in the long run, grappling would have been miserable.

Feeling Fine

I feel good. I feel good about jujitsu. I've done it three nights in a row, and will go again tonight.
As I move back to a heavy schedule I've resolved to do jujitsu 4 nights a week as best I can and two hours of JKD a week, and 1 one hour of Judo throws.


In unrelated news, I'm reading Dracula, prepping for my brit lit class that starting monday. Funny, how the department head thought my 4 classes in brit lit qualified me to teach it, when in truth, I know little, my real knowledge base is horror, but I think everything will be fine as I'm dividing the class thusly: half a session devoted to student presentations on poets, the other half devoted to teaching Dracula. Only problem now is figuring out what do we read when Dracula is finished? I've had a few ideas ranging from Alan Moore's Watchmen to Fowles' The Collector. (The closer I got to modern times, the wider my knowledge base).

And where am I gonna find the time to write and blog? Ugh. It's back to good ole will power and elbow grease.

Back on the mat

Went to jujitsu last night, felt really good. Learned there are now classes on tues and thurs too (finally!). Went tonight, had fun. CrossFit workout today was killer. Cindy (5 pull ups, 10 push ups, 15 squats, on a loop, 20 min) I got 27 sets, thought i was gonna puke. I'm gonna be sore in the morning.

Ah, one more thing, "passing the guard is about controlling the hips," said the rubber band.

PM DAWN-PAPER DOLL

I've been storming through YouTube lookin' for my favorite hip hop vids from way back in the "YO! MTV Raps" era. This one came near the end of that period.

Your Ex-Lover Is Dead by Stars

My girlfriend said the lines "live through this and you'll never look back" remind her of me.

Her apartment is cramped

Her apartment is cramped.

I’d leave it at that if I could, but I’m writing a blog, and there is an expectation that I say things. If this were a poem I’d leave it at that really:

Her apartment
is
cramped.

I’d give it a pithy smart-ass title, something excessively longer than the content like “Waiting for My Girlfriend of Five Years to Dump Me after a seven hour drive” M. lived on the second floor of a two story building at 215 Lovelace drive. I like that name, Lovelace, very provocative. I hear Lovelace I think super-spy with red hair, a tight blue shirt hugging a pair of DD breasts the envy of every mainstream comic book artist and pornstar. No matter what she wears, shorts, jeans, a skirt, she’s got a garter belt just above the see line, hence her code name.

What I don’t think is three cats, an ice cream maker, a long distance boyfriend, and a wooden staircase that is begging to be THAT staircase in Psycho, where every step carries the risk of a knife, the inevitable fall burned in celluloid, THAT staircase in Abigail, vibrating with King Diamond’s thrashing falsetto, dualing guitars fight for the scraps of your soul, THAT staircase on the 6 o clock news that sent little Timmy tumbling down into the afterlife when he broke his neck on the third step from the top. He just forgot to tie his shoe!

Fuck Abstinence Ed.

Abstinence Ed is a bad idea. It doesn't work. It's been proven again and again not to work, but still it persists. As the country begins a long swing to the left, I hope the damned thing will be taken to the shed. Until then, I've tried not to let it get to me, but this article really pisses me off.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=5054210&page=1

RAINN is one of those websites I was talking about earlier. They help victims of rape and abuse, but might as well say women only. Again, that's the vibe most survivor outfits send. Nevertheless, they deserve a million dollar grant a hell of a lot more than a ridiculous D.C. outfit dedicated to abstinence ed. To paraphrase one of the commenters, they prolly have a zero percent dropout rate because they kick 'em out!

It disgusts me that an organization dedicated to helping survivors would be summarily dismissed in favor of what? Trying to score a few points with the radical religious right? a blowjob? Any administration will have a little nepotism, and I know how politics is played, but god damn!

Law and Order Conventions

1. There MUST be a smart ass cop on every episode. Sometimes he is a streewise hard ass too.
2. There MUST be a streewise hard ass cop in every episode.
3. Gender of 1 and 2 is irrelevant; but, if female, costuming, make up, haircut will aspire to a
masculine haircut.
4. Female lawyers may be hot, but the true power of their cleavage is never to be revealed.
5. "You're too emotionally involved in this case!"
6. If a guest star is a comedian; he will be unbalanced. He will be the criminal.
7. Old ladies on telephones discover dead bodies.
8. The best episodes will have the careening plot structure of classic Simpsons.
9. The worst episodes will have the careening plot structure of classic Simpsons.
10. Dick Wolf

Searching for Survivors

In my never ending battle to find other survivors I've learned:

1. Surprise! The overwhelming majority of sexual trauma survivors are female (shock!)

2. I am desperate to connect with more people who've survived, I have this need to
build...a context, a reference point.

3. It seems the vast majority of survivor/victim blogs are one time howls
One, two, three entries tops, then they disappear into the techno ether.

4. Uh, I'm not going to name blogs, but I don't think everyone is working on all thrusters.
I contacted one blogger who compiled stories on rape, it's a worthy goal, but I was a bit put off
by her phrasing of "rapists and their allies" In respect to the United States and Canada this seemed like paranoia. A suspicion that was not alleviated when said blogger, cited a unsourced comment as proof, that level of gullibility is dangerous. There are people who will say anything, lie about rape, pregnancy, even their own last name. (I had an ex who did all three AND lied to me TWICE about where she went to school.)
Challenging such claims is difficult though since you're likely to run into blog rules such as "no denying the experiences of others." Sigh, trauma studies means well, but censoring truth in favor of affirmative speech is not one of it's strong points (also has a bad habit of constructing binary oppositions.

5. If these websites were people, I'd want to choke out 90% of them. Part of it is the Trauma Studies vocabulary, which can sound like a bad self help manual. Also, I find most of the blogs alienating. I think, regretfully, this is because of the target audience: women and the most likely publishers: women. A few of these pages are excruciatingly frilly or a Neil Gaiman cosmo-fart, that's not a knock in and of itself, just a disconnect with me. Maybe it's connected to my experience as a victim maybe it isn't, buuuuuuuuuuuuttttttttttttt I'm thinkin' "I'm a guy, I've been emasculated, effectively feminized, what do I need? A huge dose of girl power!" After all, I did dive headfirst into martial arts.

SVU

Episode is about raped retarded girl. The mother reports gives static won't let Wong test her comprehension. My hatred of the old woman is instant. At least the show is characterizing her as overprotective. Another sentiment I'd never thought I'd articulate.

I want to reach into the show and kick the woman in the head.


Stabler is doing his interview thing.
He is interviewing other retarded folks (PC aside, I'm using retarded for expediency)

oh my god I'm living blog SVU, wtf??

It's the bus driver! That evil lech!
Eew. the more I think about retard sex...forget it,

At the park with crazy mom.

Does the girl understand the concept of no?
I don't blame the girl.
OK I'm gonna stop this.

They got the girl to talk, she cried, mom freaked.
Ok THIS time, I'm stopping

How To Save a Relationship Shaken By Rape and Torture

Super Mario Galaxy.

Didn't even mention...

My crossfit workout was a real killer. 10 sets for time: 12 pull-ups/ 12 burpees. It was a nasty 16 minutes. The yoga class I took afterwards suffered for it.

Further Meditations on Dogs (and humans)

In literature, movies, pop culture as a whole, there is a tradition I like to call the Anachronistic Man, or the man out of time. By out I don't mean "time's up!" rather the figure has existed outside the boundaries of time. Sometimes he ages; sometimes he doesn't. They are hapless time travellers.
Odysseus is the earliest example I can think of. Dragged into battle against his will, he spent ten years fighting the Trojan War and another Ten trying to get back home. In fact, at one point in the Odyssey, the isle of Ithaca is in sight when Poseidon blows him away, adding years to the trip. Rip Van Winkle goes to sleep a youngin' only to wake up an old man. Even though Philip J. Fry doesn't age, he wakes up a thousand years into the future. The hero of I Am Legend (the novella), stands at the very end of human civilization, hopelessly alone. They are living a kind of trauma, not like mine, but a trauma none the less: violent seperation from all they know, disorientation, culture shock.
In most cases the figures share a common episode. They are accompanied by or have an encounter with a dog. When Odysseus finally lands on the shores of his home, the first creature he meets is his dog, who has waited twenty years on a pile of shit and flies just to see his master one more time before he dies. It is heartbreaking, very rarely have I felt palpable anguish from any art form, and this is one of them. Reading the Odyssey for the first time, the scene brought me to tears. Desperate and lonely, the hero of I am Legend, tries and fails to save a dog. In the 20th century, a dog waits, and is still waiting, for a Philip J Fry who will never return (and this from a geeky screwball sci-fi comedy!).

Why does this pattern exist? Well, I'm glad I asked that rhetorical question!

I don't wish to lionize humanity's relationship with dogs, and I admit that the dog could be a symbol for ANY pet, could symbolize our relationships with the animal world as a whole not just canines. Still, I think the dog works in these stories because of something specific about our relationship to them. They wear their hearts on their sleeves, even stubborn rascals like my Scottish Terrier, who wears his postured indifference on his sleeve. A dog is lonely with his whole self, he does nothing half-way. When he suffers, he suffers completely. Maybe it is because we tamed them early in our history, but we see something of ourselves in dogs. They were with us before time mattered, so perhaps they are a reference point, a marker. Regardless, when they suffer, we see our own suffering. Their pain is our pain. We are spiritually linked.


(If there is an alternative symbol, it would be the horse. They are the only animal I can think of who shares a history analagous to that of the dog)

Meditation on my dog

I look at my dog and see the person that I am and the person I want to be. Radar is, in his quietest moments, looking at the world, looking through the world, above it, below it, yeah, he transcends it. He is alert, living not as a dog, but a frozen beam of light. He is magnetic, not merely larger than life, but larger than himself. Any martial artist worth his salt would envy this clarity. The Shaolin developed the five animal style of Kung Fu, incorporating the natural motions and rhythms of the animal kingdom into the postures, strikes, and blocks of the human world. When Radar stands on my brown aztec porch, the wind blowing in his brindle fur, I’m convinced within him lies the secret of a Terrier Kung Fu, the ability to harness charisma, presence, majesty, into its own martial style. The style itself, its practice, its execution, imbues the monk with an expanding sense of courage.
He survived that awful night just as we did. He barked before I opened the door. I brushed it off as his usual theatrics, and there was a moment I thought, inexplicably, about not opening that door. He should be dead. Men that vicious should have shot him or beaten him to death, but despite the noise he made Radar lives. In his canine memory is he haunted by that night? Does he ever feel an instinctual irrational pang for a thing greater than his IQ or is it gone, cleaned from his fur by a soft breeze? Does he know that his father sees him as a totem, a myth, an irascible die-hard?

The future

Is uncertain. Very. Not had much luck with grad school. Not exactly enthused about my current financial state. And my girlfriend and I aren't together, literally separated by distance.

I am dissatisfied. Hmph.

Next week is the last recovery week. I'm gonna go coo-coo for cocoa puffs pretty soon.

Life just seems to be in a general state of impotence. I exert effort, but nothing moves.

The Grand Tour 2

I cheated. I used my visit as an opportunity to train at another dojo.
This place was small, real small. Imagine your typical half-strip strip mall, three unrelated offices: a comic book store, a tiny furniture outlet, and an a law office.

We'd turned into this building on the advice of the cluttered signage fifteen yards away, a series of squares, rectangles, and other forgotten four sided shapes. Each promised something: a service, a store, an idea, and three more offices than were visible. With its clashing fonts and competing reds, blacks, and greens, the uniform white background fused into one off kilter asymmetrical meme "Jujitsu-Comics-Furniture-Insurnace!-Attorney-Space for Lease" Somewhere in a tiny cubicle cluttered with Go-bots and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a graphic artist, a twenty something named Bob with a tiny pot belly and a odd devotion to Plan 9 from Outer Space, imagined a world where Jenga was the ultimate form of advertisement, but something went wrong. He fused Jenga, played right to the point of inevitable folly, with a Totem pole. At least, he did so half heartedly. Only he knows why he gave up. Only he knows why someone was nuts enough to purchase his work.

"I don't see it--well, now, check this out"
The blacktop curved down and around the back.. The building had another side, an underneath. There were three more offices in the building, jujitsu among them.

It seemed appropriate that a dojo would be wedged into the lower left hand corner of the building, a violent id for an inanimate object-space. It was the suppressed desire of fanboys dipped in toilets, the sinister urge of lawyers beaten by the excrutiating non- precision of legalese, a sweaty dungeon hidden away from those blinded by the anti-razzle and the anti-dazzle of the signs.

"Bow before you enter."
Girlfriend and I went inside.

The mat was a light brown, a thin tan. I reached down to touch the floor. Hard mats, not a lot of give. It was the first time I'd seen mats with a bamboo pattern. Waves shaped into tiny sticks, criss-crossing the floor. I was amused and disappointed. "I was hoping for something a little softer." I'd driven over 300 miles, and god damnit, I walk into another dojo with hard grooved mats. My toes wiggled and grumbled, one of them ached stupidly. "I must have tortured a burn victim in a former life."

And yet....

I look at that sketch and I wonder.

Accidental Discovery

Sifting through the sands of the net I found this:
Rape Victim Says Attackers Forced Her Husband To Watch - News Story - WFTV Orlando

Very similar to what happened to me and girlfriend, except for the hispanic accomplice and the batshit crazy cousin angle (which I'm not sold on) and the kids! Jesus Christ.

The Grand Tour 1

Visited Girlfriend this weekend. Had to attend to visit. Had to see an IME.

Independent Medical Examiner.

Do you know why you see one of those?

I can't answer that question directly...yet.