Thursday, August 25, 2005

Hugo Chavez Roolz!

Well another week passes and another 2 loony Christians fly across my radar. The first one on the subway on the way to work last Sunday and then my old favorite Pat Robertson reared his ugly head. The first one on the subway was definitely the more harmless of the two but the more physically annoying.

I’m off to work on a quick turn-around (get off work midnight, home at 2AM, back up 6AM, work at 8AM) so I’m knackered and in a cranky mood. Next thing I know this guy is standing in front of me screaming about “Jesus is coming”, not only that, he is doing it into an empty paper coffee cup that he thinks is amplifying his voice - it’s not, he’s holding it the wrong way round with his voice bouncing right back at him. To him, yes he is louder, to us, it’s making him sound like he is a drowning sea lion!

Anyway he asks me to repent and as always I say “I’m sorry… for you” and he tells me again “Jesus is coming” and I say “I wish He’d fucking hurry up yer patter‘s nippin ma hied! If he gets here in the next 10 minutes do I still have to go to work?”. I always revert to broad Glaswegian in these situations as it puts people on the defensive. Needless to say I get to work before Jesus.

Now Pat Robertson is back. The 700 Club (his organization) has been one of my least favorite Christian groups for a while. In the UK you might not be aware of who Pat Robertson is but if you cast your mind back, this is the same Pat Robertson who wanted to buy into the Royal Bank Of Scotland a few years back and then when people protested made a TV show that called Scotland “a small dark country of homosexuals”.

Also, in case you weren’t aware, Pat thinks that feminism makes women become lesbians, kill their children, practice witchcraft and oppose capitalism; homosexuality is practically equivalent to Satanism and Nazism, and the State Department is so far to the left that it should be blown up with a nuclear device.

Now He is calling for my favorite democratically elected Latin American leader, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, to be assassinated so we can get our hands on a few cheap barrels of oil! Goddamn! How Christian is that????

You can read an expose that Greg Palast did on Robertson here. You can also read his bit on Hugo Chavez here. Also see what Chavez is up to now that must be making Dick Cheney’s pacemaker work overtime.

Hugo Chavez Roolz. Please don't shoot him!!!

Monday, August 22, 2005

Summer and Reading

The heat index hit a blistering 105 degrees today and even my own heat-loving self felt the need to state the obvious:

"It's like a fucking oven out here!"

It was so damn hot and humid last night it was hard to breathe sometimes and the Amazonian wetness soaked through your clothes in 10 seconds flat. It was for this reason that I was somewhat surprised to find myself being persuaded to attend the fireworks that they have at Coney Island every
Friday night in the Summer.

"Why THIS Friday???? Even my boxer shorts are crawling up my arse to get
inside and escape the heat!".

It was THIS Friday because Alma and I have lived 20 minutes away from Coney
Island for the last 5 years but have never managed to get there for the
fireworks for some unknown reason - well, not an exactly unknown reason, the
truth is I love Coney Island in the winter when the amusement parks are
closed and a cold wind howls through the boardwalk but in the summer it is
crowded and stressful for a blind guy

I’m finding myself doing more and more stuff like this - a kind of reaction to feeling like your time is limited. I’m reading about 3 books a week (no, I’m not kidding!!) as I know that 10 years from now (but maybe sooner) reading will be a chore and not a pleasure.

Last week I finished a travelogue and history lesson about the Great Plains of America by Ian Frazier called The Great Plains. He writes wonderfully and humorously about some of the more peculiar things that happened in the days of the old West. He also has a strong affinity for Native American culture which made the book a good companion piece to one of my all time favorite books Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee by Dee Brown.

I also finished an interesting but poorly written biography of the Dalai Lama, actually it wasn’t that poorly written, it just fell into the trap the some biography’s fall into, it read like a university dissertation and not a good book.

Finally, I finished Women by Charles Bukowski. This is the second Bukowski novel I’ve read (Post Office is the other one), and I gotta say that though I enjoy this guy, it’ll be a while before I read anymore of his stuff. This book was basically 95 chapters of drinking, women, cunnilingus and vomiting. The whole thing was like going on a five day bender, it’s fun but by the end you run out of steam and need a break.

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Gulls

Strange thoughts can go through your mind when you are really tired. This morning I'm on my way to work after only four hours sleep, it is already 85 degrees (at 6am!) and a familiar smell meets my nostrils - the smell of recently deposited dogshit wafting in the warm currents of air.

Am I repulsed by this? Yes, because sometimes my street is like running the 110 meter dogshit hurdle - a dogshit demilitarized zone where dogshitreplaces landmines -nostils inflamed instead of lost limbs.

Anyway, you get my point right? Well, I'm running the hurdles and I notice something out the corner of my eye - seagulls, lots of them picking, at an open bag of garbage on the street outside the bakery.

I find my self wondering - why do seagulls eat crap out the garbage but they don't appear to eat dogshit? Surely they are not that fussy, I mean everytime you go to a rubbish dump anywhere in the world you find seagulls, hundreds of them eating all manner of crap but apparently not dogshit! Can't we train seagulls to eat dogshit? The world would be a much nicer place for it!

Sunday, August 07, 2005

New Ink

Alright Family members reading this - don't freak out! Whatever you do -Don't tell Mum! But Hey! You all know that I've been hiding a dark secret from her for years! Yes, I'm talking about my tattoo! Well now I have anew one and if she saw this it'd probably bring her one step closer to stepping on a rainbow and returning to her Catholic Jesus! Here's some pics:


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Why a Buddha? Well, I've been trying to live my life following some sort ofBuddhist path for years even if I am a bit wishy-washy about it. The four noble truths of Buddhism are: The Noble Truth of Suffering, the Noble Truth of the Causes of Suffering, the Noble Truth of the Cessation ofSuffering and the Noble Truth of the Way that Leads to the Cessation ofSuffering. This is also known as the Eightfold Path of Buddhism, often represented by an eight-spoked wheel in which all spokes lead to the hub.The eight spokes represent: Right Understanding, Right Aspiration, RightSpeech, Right Conduct, Right Vocation, Right Effort, Right Alertness, andRight Concentration. Give me some bevvy and I know you can drop any of theabove from my personality but keep me sober and I at least try to be aware of them. This blog is not called Buddha in the beerglass for nothing you know!

Aye, well! Now I have a bloody big Buddha drawn on my right arm and everytime I feel like killing some fucking fundamentalist idiot I can look at it and try toremember that all sentinent beings should be dealt with compassion andforgiveness - and yes, that does include George W. Bush.

Beats From The Street

When I was 16 or 17 and still living in Cumbernauld, Scotland, I used to listen to a lot of the early hip-hop bands like Public Enemy, Eric B &Rakim, and NWA. Myself, my mate Thomas, and another greasy wee shite named Laird were probably the only 3 guys who listened to music that spoke aboutBlack empowerment and police brutality in far away places like Bensonhurst, Brooklyn (the next neighborhood over from where I now live).

I remember all manner of stuff like the Sean Stussy pants, the Nike Air Jordan's and the leather Africa medallions. I even watched “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” every week in case Will Smith decided to do a rap and I thought it was a good thing when Black people rioted over the Rodney King trial and started burning down L.A. Unfortunately they burned down theor own 'hoods and not Bel-Air.

Not bad for 3 pimply white guys from Vietnauld!

I also remember that every time I picked up a hip-hop magazine the phrase"The Rhythm of the Streets" would jump off the page at me. "Beats From theStreet". "Stories from the Concrete Jungle". It made perfect sense to meat the time, after all, wasn't I living in the concrete jungle as well?

Eh... no... not really!

The other day I heard the phrase "The Rhythm of the streets" again and thecontext could not have been any more different! I now live in Brooklyn andhip-hop blares out of every passing SUV but that was not the context for m yrhythm of the streets. No, I was at cane-training for the blind and my instructor was trying to impress on me the different rhythms in traffic at a red light as opposed to just a stop-sign. It's a hard thing to do as traffic lights in NYC do not have any audio clues to say what color they are. In Britain and Ireland they beep or talk, hereI've discovered that if you put your hand on the "Press to cross" button you can feel it clicking each time the light changes red - orange - green. No-one told me this I just kinda worked it out like everything else up to this point, even my cane instructor had no idea the lights did this, I may have added another clue to her teaching arsenal so for that I am happy.

The rhythm of the streets is a hard thing to pick up. Basically, at a traffic light you can hear a bunch of cars stopping and taking off at thesame time with a fairly regular time-interval between lasts of noise. At stop signs it is usually just one or two cars and the time between stopping and starting is not regular.It's weird to be learning this stuff though I see it as necessary if I am to maintain some sort of independence throughout my life and have an active existence. Who in their lives expects to ever have to deal with the fact that one day you might not be able to walk to the end of the street without someone to help you? It's a fairly big mind-fucker of a thought if you dwell on it too long.

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

We are all Monkeys in our own Zoo!

It’s effin hard to keep up one of these blog things and try to make it at least slightly funny when the world just keeps getting stranger and stranger!

I mean how can I be funny about a tornado blowing through the City of Birmingham? How can I be funny about Karl Rove leaking the name of an undercover CIA agent, but yet the person who goes to jail is a New York Times reporter who was trying to protect a source (presumably NOT Rove in her case but someone Rove would like to get his poisoned claws into!).

Next I find out that they just discovered a new planet that orbits our sun, I find out that Edward Bunker and Oscar Brown Jnr both died.

My Best Man Thomas dropped into town last week with his wife Lucinda and we got off our arses and headed up to the Bronx Zoo. I haven’t set foot inside a zoo since I left England (Six and a half years ago) so it was an interesting experience; one that reconfirmed my love of animals and my dislike of Humans.

The Bronx Zoo is a mind-blowing set-up. The animals are really close and the surroundings are remarkably well designed, so much so that for the first hour we were like “Where’s all the fucking rhinos?”.

Unfortunately the human animals on display were of the lowest caliber - affirmation of the fact that the theory of evolution, as George W. Bush believes (and He should know), is in fact “Just a theory”. Like, Bush, a lot of the people we ran into were more of the 3rd stage in the ascent of man and not the last. In short I was surrounded by knuckle-draggers that made me want to jump into the Gorilla cage for some intelligent company.

For example: one woman was overheard by the Polar Bear enclosure, on a 100 degree day in NYC, to ask wether the Polar Bears pool was heated!! Another woman was overheard saying to the Great Apes, “Oooooo Clever Monkey!”. I swear the ape looked at her like she was the stupidest thing this side of Pauly Shore. He may even have flipped her the bird.

Let's open up a Springer Zoo where we can all go and gawk at White-Trash-Spandex-Wearing Bozos and just stare at 'em... oh wait... that's called Walmart!