All About the Bling*

A couple years ago I befriended a co-worker, a 21-year-old "woman" who was married to a 40-year-old "man". The quotes are an implication about their maturity levels, rather than their genders.

After I picked the wife up from the side of the road at 3am one night, she asked me to drive her to the hospital. She felt like the only way to get away from her physically and mentally abusive husband was by killing herself. She wanted to be admitted to the hospital to be put on suicide watch. I stayed with her there until her husband figured out where she was and texted that he was coming to get her. At that point, she told me to leave, "so he won't get angry that I'm spreading our business all over the place".

This was the start of my involvement in their dysfunctional relationship. She'd call me crying about once a week, stoned out of her gourd on opiates, to bitch about some new shit he'd pulled. I'd tell her to leave his ass and move back home to her parents. But she wouldn't leave him. "It's different when you're married," she told me. "You wouldn't know what that's like."

Several weeks later she called me in tears, because her husband had stolen the inheritance money she'd received from her late uncle for her education. She didn't know what he'd spent it on until several weeks after that, when he ended up in jail for possession of crack cocaine and solicitation of a prostitute. She still didn't leave him.

After the crack and whores bit (possibly crackwhores), I was done. I couldn't invest any more of myself in the situation without wanting to smack her around myself. I avoided her calls and avoided talking to her at work. In the end, she showed up to work (with a black eye) to tell the managers that she was finally moving back to her parents.

Am I a bad friend because I refused to enable her dysfunction and self-destruction? Am I hyper-judgmental and overly opinionated, to the detriment of most of my friendships?

Possibly yes, but that's also probably why I was asked to review for this site.

The Blog O' the Day is "Long Distance Love Affair". Do not click this link if your computer is more than a year old -OR- you're using internet that is slower than fiber optic. It's not worth crashing your computer.

I say that because I counted no less than 13 widgets and doodads. It's like accidentally stumbling onto someone's Myspace profile circa 2004, complete with that fucking music player smack dab in the middle of the blog, those awful flashing blingy things people used to leave as comments and an extensive use of text and chat speak, with different font colors and sizes.

How many fucking times do we have to bitch about people not reading the FAQ before submitting? Shit.

I'm not even gonna get into the grammar and spelling because "Miss Innocent's" first language is not English. If you've gambled and clicked the link, you can see a blatant affront in the sub-title.

Now onto the content. Miss Innocent is a spoiled Filipina princess, "on vacation" in California because she's followed her boyfriend from Manila. She's still not living in the same town as "her future husband", hence "a long distance love affair".

She spends the majority of her blogging time obsessing about her controlling boyfriend who's most likely cheating on her, and throwing temper tantrums over trivial matters. Randomly interspersed blog entries include her repeated use of her daddy's credit card to go on shopping sprees, and her adoption of desirable American traits, like eating shitty, unhealthy food.

I've already told a story about how I give the fuck up on people who bitch about their dysfunctional and abusive relationships but don't do anything to change the situation. Why the hell would I read a blog about one?

There's only one post in the whole blog where Miss Innocent gets down to the nitty gritty and actually does SOME self-reflection. I don't know if I kind of liked this post because of my current situation and the fact I've been having a quarter-life crisis for the past 5 years, but I did. I would have liked to see more of this.

My suggestion for Miss Innocent is to start a whole new blog, where the main focus ISN'T her fucked up relationship with her boyfriend. She says she's on a mission to find herself. That would be WAY more interesting to her readers than the shit going on now.

But for a co-dependent person, finding oneself sometimes requires one to be single. Unfortunately, I think that's easier said than done for Little Miss Innocent.

For the WORST blog template I've ever seen and the asinine blog subject:







For wanting to be reviewed, even after the site admin asked you if you were being serious:







* Since we'd already traveled back in time to 2004 and all.

I Reviewed A Blog.

Editor’s Note: Billy Apathy is in the middle of elucidating his thoughts on joblessness when Nutjobber apparently loses his shit, tears up his notes, and begins chatting directly with Billy’s tedious single-thought/single-sentence paragraph structure. Luckily, Jobber has equipped his house with a bevy of audio-visual recording devices in anticipation of these not-uncommon breakdowns, and we were able to piece together this review from both these recordings and the remnants of whatever notes he managed to take before the frontal-lobe of his brain prolapsed. It is after Billy has confessed to twice-experiencing 'batshititis' that the dialogue, such as it is, begins.

Billy: The second time was worst than the first, and both times I hadn’t noticed until it was too late. Let me expound.

Jobber: [rolling eyes] Please do.

Billy: It didn’t help that I was a teenager.

Jobber: No, I don’t suppose so.

Billy: There were no bills to pay.

Jobber: Right.

Billy: No mortgage.

Jobber: Gotcha.

Billy: Just the shallow inspirations of getting the next video game immediately when it came out.

Jobber: I know what you mean: I harbour my own shallow inspirations, though mine have more to do with somehow rectifying your aversion to commas.

Billy: Of all the jobs I that I could have tried to get,

Jobber: [interrupting] I’m sorry - say again? [sounding it out] That-I-could-have-tried-to-get… okay. Continue.

Billy: I got a housekeeping job for a small college nearby.

Jobber: Awesome.

Billy: It was a summer job.

Jobber: Oh, it was a summer job, you say? Stunning.

Billy: There was a large group of us and we would spend all day cleaning the dorm rooms, class rooms, bath rooms, offices, hallways,

Jobber: [interrupting again] All right, just give me a second to make sure I’ve really wrapped my head around this extraordinarily complex scenario: you got a housekeeping job in which you were required to keep house? Wow - what a curveball! Same thing happened to me: I got this bartending job one time, and the next thing I know I’m tending bar! I know, right? I was like, 'what the fuck?' As you can imagine, I wrote this incredibly inane post about it years later in which I wasn’t content to just state my profession and move on, choosing instead to really grind out those minor details that are readily-apparent in the title of the job itself. But I’m getting off-track. Sorry. Please continue.

Billy: And on particularly unfortunate days the miscellaneous stuff like window washing.

Jobber: How awful: you, a housekeeper, having to wash windows only on particularly unfortunate days. I guess it’s little wonder, then, that you’re belabouring the point with a ferocity that makes a ravenous panther look like a smudge of ink.

Billy: In the beginning the job wasn’t so bad.

Jobber: Of course not. You were a housekeeper, not a trainee for the goddamned bomb-squad.

Billy: Then a month went by and I got my paycheck.

Jobber: That’s so incredibly fucking interesting I can‘t believe it. A month after starting your job, you got a paycheck. Holy shit! If there’s one singular piece of information ever uttered that deserves it’s own sentence more, I’d like to read it.

Billy: I was so excited to see that huge number on the check that I almost wet my jeans, but then my heart sank.

Jobber: Uh-oh - did you realize you forgot to wash a window?

Billy: It was one of those moments where you don’t take the time to clearly read the fine print before becoming ecstatic.

Jobber: Like when you skimmed the submission FAQ here at Ask, I presume.

Billy: I saw the number before the greedy little taxman took his cut of my money with his wicked laugh and curly moustache.

Jobber: Mm. Your taxman must have some kind of prehensile facial hair, I guess? Either that or 'wicked' has more of a grabby connotation than I was led to believe.

Billy: After that I wasn’t too pleased.

Jobber: No? Shocking!!! You were displeased because the taxman took some of your money? It’s fucking CRAZY that you felt that way!!!!! UNBELIEVABLE!!!!! HOLY FUCKING SHIT FUCK FUCFK STHISHITT!!!!!!!!!

Billy: My mind suddenly

Jobber: Let me stop you there, Billy, because I don’t care. Not at all. I don’t care what comes next, what your mind 'suddenly' did, whatever gradual point you’re making… I don‘t care. You know why I don’t care, Billy? You’ve given me not one solitary example of original thought to chew on as I painstakingly comb your blog like I’m searching out lice. No, Billy, that’s not a mixed metaphor - I eat lice. Isn’t that interesting, Billy? Doesn’t it at least have the capacity to be engaging? What do you do that’s interesting, Billy? What can you give me that will make me eager to read more? Something? ANYTHING? COME ON

Editor’s note: Here a long silence dominates the recording before an off-key version of PJ Harvey’s 'C’mon Billy' can be heard warbling softly in the background, followed by what sounds like pathetic sobbing. The pertinent criticisms we were able to salvage from Jobber’s 'notes' have been reproduced below, though we were unable to decipher much of his later work due to it being written in what appears (and what we hope) to be smears of balsamic vinaigrette.

Jesus dildo-shitting Christ: If you’re want to say 'fuck', say 'fuck'. F$#% is not 'fuck' - it’s chump-change from a five-dollar fuck-bill, and it’s the most gutless form of self-censorship imaginable. You’re writing a blog, Billy, not a thank-you note to your grandmother. If you don’t want to swear, fine, don’t, but don’t obfuscate the word. Do you think the people who are offended by 'fuck' are going to be less offended by F$#%? You do? No you don’t. Of course you don’t; you’re just being silly.

This couldn’t be lamer if it had three twisted ankles and a broken pelvis. I’ve seen blogs that recap episodes of The Real World that were less lame. If skywriters spoke in lame, Billy, you’d have this post floating over your house in an elaborate web of hotdog-shaped clouds. You can’t spell 'Me Billy Apathy' without LAME. If lame was a lame, lamey, I’ve lamed lamer lames lamely lame lame lame

Hell isn’t other people, Billy, it’s other fucking blogs. I asked Sartre what he thought about your philosophy, and he said you’ve got an amazingly cogent grasp of MEHtaphysics. Of course, he followed that up by kicking me in the nutsack and telling me that puns are for assholes, so perhaps we shouldn’t listen to Sartre. Maybe Sartre’s a dick.

Billy and I went on a walk. We passed a Burger King, and he pointed at it. He said, 'they make hamburgers there'. We walked on. 'The sidewalk is cracked,' he said. He looked down. 'Somebody could trip,' he said. He looked up. 'Blue sky today,' he said. 'Maybe a couple of clouds.’ I then strangled fictional Billy for assuming that I was incapable of coming to these conclusions myself.

The underlying principle of MEHtaphysics is still MEH.

Lazy McLifelesspants

I really, really don't want to review this fucking blog.  That whole muted polka dot blogger template thing is easily my least favorite pre-made template. I am a big fan of polka dots but automatically antagonistic towards things that fade away, and all I want to do is draw lit fuses coming out of each dot, like a spread of Martha Stewart's sage round bomb collection, and wait for the fireworks.

Specator Speaks is run by Chandu, a journalist in India.  He...okay, so his grammar is impeccable.  His sentence structure is very safe, trained, and reined in from controversy and excitement, with vocab words of the month splattered appropriately and deliberately throughout his posts.  You remember when you were in college and you walked around asking random students about the easiest major on campus, and it was almost unanimously "Communications" so that's what you chose for your major, and all of your textbooks were like five editions behind because you couldn't afford the newest one?  His blog reads like that.

I hate that I cannot click on the title of a post and have it open as an isolated entry, and I have to click on the comments, and then click the link at the top of the comments page to view the blog, and I just realized that this very thing is also my biggest problem with the AAYSR site, and I should probably fucking remedy that instead of being a goddamn hypocrite.  Crap.  

On the plus side, you titled your blog well.  I can't imagine you doing anything but watching from the sidelines.

I hate that he tells the story of his friend and her willingness to stand up for herself, and instead of being left with a sense of justice, I'm exhausted.  I hate that he uses "clever" name ploys to trick the reader into subconsciously assuming unimportant traits about uninteresting characters.  This isn't Tango and Cash, and you know why?  Because Tango and Cash is a riveting, action-packed cinematic masterpiece* and I can tell:  even you are bored by your blog.  If you weren't, you would feed it regular meals instead of throwing it grizzle and apple cores whenever you remember it's there.

Speaking of Ray Tango, this is the worst tribute to Stallone I've ever read. I'm almost impressed. Stallone is the stuff of steroid nightmares: just a giant, hard, veiny penis with buckled flamingo legs and fucking rocket-launcher arms, how the hell do you make a man like that sound so dull and useless?  You couldn't even pay tribute with your own dull words, you had to steal them from someone else.   If you admire someone so much, do them fucking justice, don't just tell us over and over again that your obsession is eccentric, because I don't believe you.  There's no passion in your words, no opinion, no punch. Lazy McLifelesspants, that's what you are.

See this?  I don't even know what this means.

I'm very angry with you. If this was just the blog of a bystander, I'd give you a Meh, but you're a fucking professional journalist. I never want to read your articles. Ever.







* I will fight anyone who says otherwise.  With my fists.

...And Gloom

Just to give everyone a little tickle, a pinch, a breeze of what's to come:




Spectator Speaks

Billy Apathy

Long Distance Love Affair


Word.

Mungo Writes Blah

BLOG: Mungo Says Bah

AUTHOR: Mungo – from Canada, by way of England. Married with one child. Works in IT. But none of this is what Mungo’s “Bah” means. Mungo writes about camping and bushcraft, tramping through the out-of-doors, if you will.

Full disclosure. For me, “camping” means that the hotel doesn’t have HBO. For me, “survival training” means that I know how to navigate inner-city streets without getting trapped in a conversation with a panhandler trying to bum Ripple money off me.

Oh sure, when I was a kid, I’d go into the woods with a sleeping bag and a tent and “camp,” but if I needed to take a crap, I was well within walking distance of indoor plumbing, and anything I ate was brought from home.

So I guess you can imagine that someone who’s blog topic diagram looks like this:



might have precious little to offer me. And in general you’d be right. Especially given the fact that Mungo does very little actual writing. He’ll tweet the shit out of you, and then make sure you didn’t miss any of those tweets by reposting them all as blog posts, but the actual blog writing is few and far between.

And yeah, I’m not interested in any Twitter Posting Round ups, or whatever you call them.

When he does write, it seems to be relegated to one of the following topics:

• This is what this is a picture of
• Here’s some cool resources you ought to know about if you’re interested in bushcraft/camping/nature photography
• Here’s some good survivalist information

The writing is clear and straightforward. He is occasionally witty or self deprecating, but it doesn’t seem that his goal is for this to be a very personal blog. He occasionally talks about his family, but mostly only in the context of “Here’s my son. I want to teach him about all of this nature.”

Bottom line – if you are the type of person who likes bushcraft or camping, or even just enjoys spending hours in front of nature documentaries, you’ll probably really enjoy this blog. When he actually fucking writes something rather than recycling something old. For me, Mungo Says Bah was mostly Mungo is Blah.

With one exception.

The nature photography. Which was stunning. Like coffee-table book good. If you’re into such things. Which I sort of am. The people photos? Not so interesting. The photos of people on his blog lack the depth and vividness of his nature photos. The people don’t stand out from the background – the plants and animals do.

So for the near constant twitter recaps, I am giving you a Short Bus. That's annoying. Please stop doing that.



For the writing you actually do, along with your portrait photography, I am giving you a “Meh.” From another reviewer, or someone into these subjects, you’d probably have faired better. But you got me. Suck it.



And, last but not least, for your nature photography, and your nature photography alone, I am going to hand out my very first ever I Fucking Love You.



Weird, huh?

Unfortunately for you, when you average it all together, all those twitter regurgitations really drag your GPA down leaving you with an OVERALL rating of just one star.

How Dare You?

Dearest Mongolian Girl, would you write a review for us? Because there's all this sex I've been having, and I forgot how to read. Thank you kindly, you are the tele to my vision. LYLAS.

In 1976 I was in 5th grade and my teacher, Mrs. Lowrey, took time to explain how the election of a US President happens. She then broke us up into ‘Camp Carter’ and ‘Camp Ford’ and explained how to campaign for our candidate. I was the ‘Camp Ford’ campaign manager. I organized my team, created posters, talked about the benefits of Candidate Gerald Ford to any elementary school kid who would listen, and did my best to inspire ‘Camp Ford’ to generate a Ford voting frenzy on the day of the election.

Everyone should vote! It’s your right to do so! Exercise your power by casting your vote! I won’t understand it if you don’t vote! I once had a fight with one of my Aunts because she doesn’t vote! Who doesn’t vote!? It’s crazy!

The end!!! (I think this little blurb was confusing, but am posting it anyway. Hope you don’t mind. Sorry about that.)

See how that works? See how I did that?

1. I’ve got a little story I want to tell you
2. The way I write this little story wouldn’t know depth if depth back handed it in the face with a crow bar
3. Since I know the way I’m presenting my story has no depth, I’m going to get all lazy and try to make my point by highlighting the shit out of my point with bold-ness and italic-ness
4. Also, I’m going to highlight my point even more by telling you I’m willing to fight with my Aunt about it
5. And then I’m going to let myself off the hook for posting my little depth-free story by saying I’m confused, saying I’m sorry, and asking for your forgiveness
   

Whatever happened to writing that tells the truth - gets down into the guts of it? The truth is that my 5th grade teacher, Mrs. Lowrey, was a tyrant that often had scotch for breakfast and had exactly 10 polyester pant suits that smelled so deeply of cat piss, scotch and cigarette smoke that, to this day, I can close my eyes and catch a whiff of it. It is also the truth that my rise to campaign manager of ‘Camp Ford’ was one of the first times in my young life that I was fully aware I was degrading myself by doing well at something I did not believe in. The fact is that I was a huge fan of Jimmy Carter but was afraid to say it after having done so once and getting a quick slap in the face from my mother as she yelled the word ‘stupid’ in a way that seemed to stab the four walls of the living room we were standing in.

Cee Kay is the author of “My Two Cents: Take it….. Or Leave It!!”. Even her description of herself leaves me wanting. She calls herself an optimist and opportunist and tries to back her claims by describing life handing her lemons and not only making lemonade, but also selling the lemonade and making air freshener from the lemon peels. Color me utterly unimpressed, uninspired, uniformed about who she is and bored silly.

Throughout her blog I found myself consistently thinking, “How dare you?” Honestly, Cee Kay, how dare you? How dare you bring to the fore such intricate, important, deep, and even bewildering topics and then lambast us with some kind of exercise in your ability to use the bold and italic features of your word processor.

From what I can gather (though it’s nearly impossible to be sure), Cee Kay and her husband and two daughters are from India but live in the US. She manages to make it clear that she is consistently negotiating and considering the fact that she is straddling two cultures, two generations and two realities. She describes the worthlessness afforded Indian women here and here, but then dissolves into some sort of finger wagging bravado that carries no weight. She doesn’t even bother to tell us how painful it must have been to realize the seriousness of what she is dealing with; how mind numbing and crushing it must have been when she first realized she was in disagreement with an entire culture.

Did you read that, Cee Kay?

Let me put it into language you seem to understand:

You tell us you are in disagreement with an entire culture, but the way you write about it DOES NOT inspire, inform or impress.

Let’s get to that letter you wrote to your daughters as a place to start – to see if we can’t rattle your cage a little bit. I actually kind of like that letter. It has some good points, but reads like one of those little books of inspiring quotes I pick up at the corner convenience store when I need a birthday present on the quick for someone I don’t know very well. (I swear, by the time I’m 70 I hope I’ve lost enough of this proper shit I go through on birthdays and spend one year buying everyone I know a giant dildo and some lube as a present.)

Your kids are cute as the dickens. And I know you love them and want to do well as a mother. But what is that letter going to actually do for them? What is it doing for you? I propose it does nothing in either case. It’s a bunch of empty, albeit well intentioned, gibberish about ‘Stand up for yourself’ and ‘Don’t take any shit’ and ‘Respect yourself’ that includes nothing about what it’s like to actually do those things when it’s the hardest thing in the world.

What would it be like if you revisited that letter and wrote about each of those things from the perspective of making them happen even when you’ve been alone, filled with rage, just been betrayed by someone you love and want to give up? What if you wrote about respecting and standing up for yourself even when you’re in the middle of an entire culture that completely disagrees with you? And please, if you intend to respond with some more of that tripe about making lemonade out of lemons, don’t bother. Just keep writing in capital letters and practicing being able to use your word processor’s bold and italic features.

I suppose this is a dare, but I’m not sure if I care to really make it. So many bloggers submit to AAYSR and then thank us for encouraging them to dig deeper; making grand statements of turning over a new leaf and then go on blogging with their half-witted, uninspiring drivel as if the whole thing never happened.

Maybe, Cee Kay, you will be different. Goodness knows you have enough grist for the mill.

Whether you do it or not, I promise I will be contemplating being 70 and buying everyone I know a dildo and lube on their birthday.



for knowing what you're dealing with.





for not having the guts to really write about it.

Seasons in the Abyss

There is a part of town I live in that is even more hipster than the rest of elitist central I call my above ground home. This street is home to an Army Surplus, oriental gift stores, coffee shops frequented by the ones of the sapphic persuasion, and bookstores on metaphysics. It comes complete with a bike store, vagrant hippies and lunatic army vets. I once stumbled into a musky bookstore that was only a door on the street, and found that it housed quite the collection on witchcraft, pagan literature and rows upon rows dedicated to the "dark arts". What made things even more weird was that there was not a soul in sight, and the eery silence urged me to exit before some inter-dimensional portal sucked me away.

Not that it has anything to do with the victim of the day - Nikhil Narayanan, author of "Half an autobiography". Nikhil is a copywriter and is into hawking advertising. He says about himself - "The less said the better as familiarity is bound to breed contempt." So much so for an autobiography, and good luck with readers' contempt. The location, blog template screams Indian emo kid, but we'll do what Gandhi did - walk on with the other ass cheek exposed. Or something like that. I personally don't hate the template - it is simple, no bling or widgets. I've always felt that light text on a dark background can be easier on the eyes, as long as the contrast isn't black and white, as it is on Half an. Nikhil would be better served by wider columns and a different text color.

The latest post is somewhat interesting. We love stories here, and we get one right off the bat - about adultery no less. I had half a chuckle at the reveal, but it took far too long to get there - longer than the ride from Frazer town to Langford road. Since there is no formal intro. and I slacked off way too long to spend a long time on the review, you'll have read along as I make shit up.

I guess "autobiography" is one way to describe this blog - he does fuss about things that happened around him - even if it is about a team that hasn't done anything noteworthy in the last decade. There's introspection, isn't that what autobiographies feature? It wouldn't take much to dismiss this as part of the collective depressed lot we get from India, but it's better worded than most of his peers. I really wonder what's eating them, don't they have all our jobs? Still, a point for quoting from The Doors.

There's fiction and interviews, and you can't shake off the feeling that all this is just filler. Nikhil can write, but doesn't seem to be focused on a theme. It's hard to take a blog seriously when there are twopoems about "life" followed by a prank call to a bank. He has loyalties, strong enough to carve on his skin, but shows an unfortunate taste in clubs again (Manchester United? Really??). Nikhil ventures into fiction, and oh bother, it's getting really difficult to tolerate him at this point.

But every now and again, like Rooney playing once a season, he brings things back. I was reading this thinking "oh boy, another dialogue", when bam, there was raw emotion, real feelings, and effort. Nikhil, you can be funny and eloquent. But dammit man, why so serious? Why do I get the feeling you're just being lazy? Whatever brain cells you haven't killed from alcohol and nicotine seem to be capable of imagination and random humour but why serve stale ideas that you might have thought while on the can?

I had to dig through 2 years of writing to get to something linkable, something that caught my eye. You have things to talk about, causes to support and places to visit. So I must ask again, what's up Nikhil? You've been writing for five years now, how about some consistency and quality control?

Pour a drink, turn on some music and light one up. Get that shit out of your system and cheer the fuck up. You can think, you sure can write. Try harder, edit more and write more often. Stop trying to be clever and funny. Don't force it, and good writing will follow.

For general doom and gloom you get,

And for somewhat engaging writing two stars.

Slam: This Week In Review

eventually, as reviewers we learn
to accost your fucking perspective
without remorse, we can't adjourn,
apathy is such a wicked burn
and scathing audits might give you motive
to pay attention to your shit,
coalesce your self into your works
however jumbled you transmit
we can smell what you omit
because we're nitty-picky jerks
we read too much and live too hard
to bother with hurting your feelings
when you don't give them much regard
or prove you have an ounce of nard
it's frustrating having these dealings


Half an Autobiography

My Two Cents

Mungo Says Bah


That's not to say this line-up's bad
after all, I haven't read them
so to this up and coming triad:
bare your soul in shades of plaid
or be prepared for mayhem.

(as an aside: I apologize
if this post makes no sense
I've been drinking 'nuff for twice my size
all day, so you should realize
I'm declaring chemical defense)

Misanthropic Drunkenness

The only time I watch reality television is when I visit my parents. There, I am forced to sit through hours of random shows they've saved on their Tivo. Sometimes it's kickass, like "Pawn Stars" (FYI: a kickass Antiques Roadshow, run by assholes and idiots). Sometimes it's mildly watchable and can hold my interest, like "Survivor" or "Dancing With the Stars". Luckily, my parents' tastes don't run towards the the more voyeuristic side of reality television.

I say luckily, because I would gouge my own eyes out from boredom if I was forced to sit down and watch that shit.

And now, I've been asked to review a blog which recaps the latest episodes of "The Real World". Jesus.

First off, I don't understand these shows at all. Why is it entertaining to get sucked into a stranger's fucked-up, self-destructive world? Does it make you feel better about yourself? Because your life isn't as fucked up? Do you think you're better than them?

Funny story. You're not.

My advice to THE WORLD: Maybe spend some long, hard hours thinking about your life (maybe with the help of a therapist). Because seeing fucked up people like those who pimp themselves out on reality television makes me weep for the future of our world and contemplate ever having children. If these are the type of people my precious, genius-babies would have to deal with, it makes me want to schedule a hysterectomy ASAP.

I'm not gonna wait for the unnamed, ungendered blog writer to show up in the comment section and claim they're actually making satirical commentary about the whole show. No, sirree. I'm gonna beat ya to the punch, bucko. You've invested time and effort into watching this show and recapping the events. You actually care about it, otherwise you wouldn't write about it.

Do you realize you can actually put together a sentence, have correct grammar and spelling, and can tell a story fairly well? What the fuck. Why are you wasting your life living vicariously through other people's fucked-up ones? We want to hear about YOUR REAL LIFE. If we wanted to know about the "real lives" of the cast of "The Real World", we'd just watch the fucking show.

That's another thing. Why would someone who is into that godawful show want to read about it online? Didn't they watch it themselves? And if they didn't, why wouldn't they just Tivo it or watch it streaming from some other (not quite legal) source? Or watch the 8 million reruns that MTV airs every day? I don't understand.

Writing this review has made me hate people even more. I didn't think it was possible. Congrats.

I especially hate you, Unnamed-Ungendered-Blog-Writer, because I forgot about writing this review until I was three drinks in at the bar and you've ruined my buzz.

For renewing my misanthropic side and harshing my mellow, you get a:







And now I'm going to pass out.

Why Cultivate on Your Face What Grows Wild on Your Bum?

I am guilty of locational friendships. For the sake of my job I was once stuck in a bleak, sheep and wheat ridden town in the middle of Bumfuck Nowhere. I made friends with people I wouldn’t normally and we all played happy. I even fell into the trap of thinking I wasn’t someone else’s zip-code comrade, which was a karmic kick in the crotch when I returned to the big smoke.

Please don’t misinterpret my intentions. I love making friends. I am a big galumphing puppy dog in that way, minus the leg-humping. Friends that are relegated to the locational, well, they don’t start out that way – I always dearly hope there will be something real there for us. So when I meet a new blog or person, I want to like them, relate with them, laugh with them, and if the hero worship is high, be best buddies them.

Reviewing the blogs of others, I am forced into a locational friendship of sorts. I don’t necessarily want to be there but for all intents and purposes I must. I am a beggar but dammit if I am going to give up being choosy. Sure, a lot of the women in this part of BF Nowhere have breasts that are well acquainted with their navels and the men haven’t seen a brush of the tooth or hair variety in years but I must persist. I have to have someone to drink with.

Weary blogger, I ask you this: When a stranger happens upon your blog, do they want to make friends with you or do they cross to the other side of the street muttering ‘don’t make eye contact, don’t make eye contact - I will drink and die alone before I hang out with you’ ?

When I first met Wildhare, I was harangued with this. Here lies an aura of crazy cat lady at the bus stop who practically sits on your knee, offers you a fluff covered butterscotch sweet and proceeds to tell you about the skin tag she has that bears a resemblance to the Virgin Mary. Like the old lady at the bus stop, Wildhare seems to ignore that the person whose lap she has clambered upon has no vested in her life or her history. She may believe that her readers are mostly beleaguered family and friends but I am here to tell her that regardless, she must tell her stories like the person reading them is a stranger.

Peeking into the archives with pinkie finger delicately raised and nosed wrinkled, I saw that Wildhare is only partially a crazy cat lady; she genuinely seems to be a lovely person who keeps some good company. Her posts consist of random lectures, photos of family, outings, trips, garden projects, crafts, recipes, song lyrics and poems. I don’t get why she includes poems and lyrics, finding it redundant and vaguely insulting.

Just in case you were wondering, this mutual circle jerk and part-time review site is called ‘I Will Fucking Tear You Apart’. This is not scrap-booker hipster code for ‘Here is a lovely pattern for you to tear out and keep – enjoy!’ Some of Wildhare’s stuff is cute and all, but it is for a specific audience and I am at a loss to why she asked for a review from here. Even so, I was impressed with her wares and skills. (And fuck it if I don’t want one of these bunnies now).

Wildhare isn’t just about the crafty stuff. In her ‘about me’ she writes: I am a wife, a daughter, a mother, a grandmother, a pet owner, a nature lover. I enjoy reading and writing, working with my hands, crafting, creating, holding fine papers and marking them with fine inks. I am enamored with science, physics, facts. I love the complex, the mysterious, the simple, and the sublime. I am a reader of hard science fiction, an admirer of chaos theory, a lover of mathematics and art.... and so on.

This all may well be true, however in my thorough archive dive I didn’t see sufficient evidence of this interesting person; it hasn’t translated to her writing. She loves the complex, simple, sublime - to be fair that doesn’t mean she has to BE those things. But happy snaps and birthday wishes to family members does not an appealing blog make. This meme shows us a bit more about her. I want to hear these stories in detail, with nary a dot point to be seen.

Wildhare mentions she is gearing up for her second NaNoWriMo. Why in the name of Charles Dickens does she not use her blog to hone her writing skills? Are they a finite resource to be saved for these future novels rather than her loyal blog readers? Why write about thievery in numerical dot points? Does she lack the writerly wherewithal to meld all of these into a story that has her reader boo-hooing into their banana bread, instead of a staccato, seemingly contradictory lecture? The story about her brother’s death is rife with an undercurrent of disharmony; what is she not telling us? That is what us nosey bastards want to know. And why the ‘egad’? I have respect and sadness for her loss but why not chuck in a ‘gadzooks’ while she’s at it?

I am as full of ego as the next person. I have been guilty of bloggy locational friendships, adding blogs to my roll just because a blogger had paid me a bit of attention. Starved for companionship I clung to the crumbs handed out by the bedraggled and droopy-boobed. I was soon cured of that fool-hardy venture when I realised that I would be judged on the company I keep. (It is okay, I am at peace with my shallow nature.)

When it comes down to it, I was happy to keep the company of Wildhare for the duration of this review. She has a gift for craft, a nice life, a loving, talented family and I am genuinely happy for her. But this, my dear, is where the friendship ends.

A meh because, well, meh.

And this one because I wanted to be part of her family, just a little bit.

And this one? Not for Wildhare but for Blogger, for fucking with the head of this techno-lame Wordpress user. It took me over an hour to figure out how to post the bastard. Editing, what editing?

Brown Paper Poo-kages Tied Up in String

At first glance, I was intrigued with today's reviewee, Stranger in A Strange Town. The title was a good start and though the template is your standard blogger one we all probably started with, at least it wasn't jaundiced, replete with brain-bludgeoning bebop or soul stabbing symphonics, flashing bits and bobs, or fauxwards and badges reminiscent of boy scouts.

I start with the profile, hoping as always to get a little back story on my mark. Legacy 2000, who exactly are you? From the staggering amount of info in the profile, I garner Legacy 2000 is an XY involved with two other blogs. Given the spartan nature of his profile, I peruse the other blogs looking for clues but no such luck. A once over of Stranger in A Strange Town tells me that Legacy 2000 last blogged in August and has logged a total of sixteen posts for 2010. With the busy week of lashings Miss Missives has had, I have to say, I salute the brevity. Still, 92 followers on 16 posts? This Legacy must be a veritable savant. It isn't often that a blog has so few posts that I am allowed the pleasure of reviewing it post by post, picking over its meat and marrow with my sharpened nails until only the carcass remains.

Okay, first post, 1991:
It is barely two paragraphs. I love flash fiction but the mere seventy-five words on the page, perhaps intended to convey a certain ennui, are utterly forgettable. The words are gone faster than a Tic-Tac between my molars and far less memorable.

On to post two, Into the Looking Glass:
Again, it is brief. If it is meant to be symbolic, I don't get it. Miss Missives is beginning to think Legacy 2000 needs to be put over her knee.

Post three, This Old House:
Well, this one is quite a bit longer. This post did elicit some feelings but I am confused as to whether he buried someone in the basement or lost a family home in the widespread mortgage crunch. There is the hint of a narrative here but it is somehow, detached from the writing.

Post four, Stranger in a Strange Town:
Ah, the title post. Perhaps there is a profile buried here.

We are all travellers, our destination the same, the journey itself all that matters.

Feh. This strikes me as Fauxlosophical and Legacy 2000's words are beginning to feel like giant swaths of heavy, beige, velvet weighing down my eyelids.

Post Five, Then and Now:
Here is the sum total of what I took from this post, Cheers is no longer Cheers. Where's Norm? Who's Norm?

Post Six, At the End of the Rainbow:
So it would appear that he is recently divorced. It feels like he is trying to talk himself into something, I don't find it compelling.

Post Seven, Death of a Stranger:
All I can say is what the fuck man, what the fuck?

Post Eight, Old Friends
At the very least, I get this but it still feels removed some how.

Post Nine, Song on the Radio:
Is Legacy 2000 smoking pot or under the haze of a plethora of prescribed painkillers? At this point I am entirely unsure of the point of this blog.

Post Ten, For Crying Out Loud:
I am thinking the same thing. Am I done yet? So he went to a strip club and met a girl who needed him for a few minutes. So what. He should be thankful he wasn't talked in to paying for her breast implants. I know it is meant to be poignant and full of regret but Legacy 2000 still fails to tell a story. I know there is a story in there somewhere, beneath all the packing material but it fails to surface.

Post Eleven The Girl with April in Her Eyes:
My own eyes are glazing over and all I can think is this is what people write when they are thinking too hard about how "writers" "write".

Post One-Hundred and Twelve, oops, Post Twelve, just feels like Post One-Hundred and Twelve, Original Sin:
This is the best post yet and offers a glimmer of hope that this guy can actually write. There is narrative, there are impressions and even one very memorable sentence. This is better, much better.

Post Thirteen, Strange Days:
Poems are not my thing but this is at the very least evocative.

Post Fourteen, Old Man:
Ok, so dad drank him self to death and now I get a visual of our author stuck perhaps, safely encasing little tidbits of emotion in thick kraft paper, wrapping it in loops of twine until the small gift inside is entirely obscured.

Post Fifteen, The Prisoner:
Nothing to see here folks, move along. Ok, I am the real prisoner here but I am nearing the end.

Post Sixteen, Lady in Red
Again, a modicum of evocativeness but the mere skeleton of an impression.


I am left feeling like this is a shell of a blog. It's a brown paper package and I know there is something underneath but I don't know what's there and I'm not sure I even care anymore. The brown paper package could be filled with poo, a tween's Halloween prank or it could be a man who is trying to write in earnest but cannot get out of his own way.

From the Miss with the Missives, you get a










because like many before you, you're doin' it wrong

you get one of these for being purposefully enigmatic







but for your brevity, you get a half star.

Once There Was This Discarded Note I Found...

Once, as a wee bairn of maybe 11 or 12 years of age, while walking along an unfamiliar street with my gang of hoodlums, we spied a discarded scrap of paper along the way. Nine hundred and ninety nine times out of a thousand, I leave the scrap where it lies. But for some reason, on this day, something inside me says "pick it up and read it." Having learned the hard way what happens when I ignore the voices in my head, I picked that scrap up and read it.

It wasn't addressed to anyone specific and no individuals were mentioned by name, but this little scrap of paper told a dramatic story of lust, betrayal, greed and larceny. I was transfixed. I clearly knew none of these people, but the anger and hostility leaped off the page in a way that it didn't matter whether I knew them or not. I wanted to know more, what happened next, whether the one "bitch ho" was going to get her due comeuppance for stealing the other "bitch ho"'s boyfriend or not.

Alas, I never did find out, as the note was incomplete.

As I read through Nuts 4 Fruits, I felt some of those same stirrings of having read a lovely story about whom I knew nothing, really. Even after reading hundreds of posts, I still do not really know all that much about our intrepid author. I can infer many things, but these inferences may very well be wrong. I know that the author is female, lives in Toronto, wants to be a hermit, and has had a long-distance relationship for seven years. I suspect that she once lived in Africa, at times lives with or near her mother (referred to in these pages merely as "The Survivor"), and takes vacations with her significant other (referred to in these pages as "The Phantom"). I assume she is in her (early?) thirties. And I believe that she works in statistics or data processing or something.

Oh, and she seems to really like shopping at Ikea. And she's a non-militant vegetarian type. That is, until very recently.

She speaks vaguely of dark times in the past, but aside from mentioning that they were there, and implying somehow that the Survivor is called the Survivor somehow because of the survival of these dark times, she does not speak of them at all. Like 'The One Who Must Not Be Named,' she speaks OF the dark times, but not ABOUT the dark times. (And today I am finding it difficult to locate specific references to these times. Dammit, I should have written this down.)

I am left with merely the impression of a person. A shadow of a human life. And I desperately want to know more. I want to know why she chose to be a vegetarian, or if it was even a choice. I want to know why she lives in Toronto when she clearly despises the cold. I want to know why it makes sense for The Phantom to be living in Texas while she lives in Toronto. I want to know more about the sort of relationship that starts with enough trust that the Phantom allows her to spy on him all the time via a webcam and yet seems to shy away from the label "relationship."

I don't get these answers.

Instead, I get the mundane, day-to-day life of a young woman rendered somewhat sublime through the written word. Many posts, maybe half of them, read like a stream of consciousness William Carlos Williams poem. Accessible, yet perfectly capturing the feelings and essences of a moment. I can almost feel the breezes, smell the scents, taste the foods.

The other half of the posts? Meh. "What I bought at Ikea." Or, "here's the code I used in R to make this graph."

In my last review, I talked about what I look for in the writing that I read. What I said:

Do you expand my mind? Do I find myself longing to read just one more post? Do you turn a phrase in a new and fresh way that causes me to look anew upon the mundane and everyday?

Guess what. This nutty fruit (or should I say fruity nut?) does just that. About half of the time. I started way back at the very beginning, and each post was a short sweet little breath or glimpse of what that particular moment in time felt like and seemed like. She captured the essence artfully. Avoiding cliches. And I just kept reading, more and more, like a good book I just couldn't put down. Until I was done and looking at the most recent post.

And I loved her for it. About half of the time.

This is not to say that she is all that and a bag of crackers. Henry David Thorough once famously stated something about the majority of people living a life of quiet desperation, and it seems at times as though our intrepid hermit is doing just that. And as much as it goes against my grain to suggest that my review of a blog should be taken as a review of someone's life, reading posts about wistful regrets over choices made (mind you, choices that I can't say for sure I ever really understood, as she never lays out what options were really there), brought to mind a line from The Shawshank Redemption: "Get busy living or get busy dying."

I would love for her to get busy living.

And, as much as I love the way she captures a moment, some semblance of a framework to hang those moments on would be useful and helpful as well. I mean, crap, she's even blocked the viewing of her Blogger profile. I just spent the last 5 years with her, and I still don't know what to call her, what race she is, or why she loves to visually chart data.

So quit being so damn coy.

Okay. That's it.

Now here's the real shocker. The rating. Three stars.



Give me some framework and start chasing those dreams, and leave what you bought at Ikea to your Facebook profile, and you'll shoot right up to four stars or even maybe an "I Fucking Love You." Because, I do. In fits and starts. But not consistently enough to earn that as an overall rating.

I was bound to love someone sooner or later

The work week flies by and I’m hardly awake. I have the feeling that my life is being lived; passive tense. By Sunday night I already know exactly where I’ll be at any given moment for the next six days. In fact, not a single decision needs to be made because it’s already all figured out and has very little to do with what I really feel like doing.

My life is a high-speed blender of quasi-obligations of my own creation because I'm trying to resemble the person I used to be convinced that I was going to be someday. You know, the one that actually does shit instead of sitting around moaning about how the years are going by and what the fuck am I doing with my life and since when do I have fat there? This leaves a couple of hours per day to unwind and I’m having to decide if I’d rather sit for a couple more hours per day in front of the pterygium-inducing computer blogging or spend them with the school janitor who is now exclusively working from home and needs human interaction when I get home, even if in the form of a brutal love-beating.

Blogging has sort of lost the battle for me. I’ll be honest. It hasn’t only been about finding time. Many of my most inspiring blogging friends have dwindled away from their spaces and finding new bloggers who are just as good is exhausting. I’m hanging in here on the blogosphere by a tattered string and it’s been a long damn time since I’ve found a good new blog that makes me want to spend time in this cyber world, want to somehow fit it into my day, want to dust off the old blogroll which has become an antique collection and add a new link. Finding good blogs regularly had a recursive effect on my own desire to write. I wanted to write for the writers that I thought were amazing. I wanted to see if someone that good thought I was any good. I wanted to share a part of myself with those who were so generously sharing the really naked parts of themselves with me.

This brings us to today and this review that I didn’t want to do; this review that got pushed to the end of the queue in favor of work and yoga classes and exercise videos and stupid fucking French lessons and preparing meals that don't suck.

I had hoped this would take me an hour or less to pump out with a MEH or a GO FUCK YOURSELF. And then I read this and realized it was going to take a lot longer because I was going to need to read it all and in reading I began to remember why I was drawn to blogging to begin with. I remembered the feeling of discovering that there were real people out there living their lives, people I would never otherwise cross paths with: they were nurses and bikini waxers and stay-at-home dads and cancer survivors and ex-addicts and expats that had some kind of communicative gift that made me want to know everything about them, that made me hope that in some way I could be like them too. The ones I was drawn to the most were simultaneously funny yet serious, introspective but only by looking at others, wanting yet altogether grateful, and especially the ones that were prone to sometimes hysterical reflections on their own inherent contradictions.

Michelle is a self-proclaimed work in progress and she puts that work in progress forth for the world to read, totally and utterly unselfishly. Sure, she tends to get a little rambly, and maybe sometimes I want to beat her within an inch of her ability to modify her font sizes and colors. Maybe she has no About Me page for some dumb reason and maybe 90% of what makes up her template confuses me. Maybe she gets all Wordless Wednesday-ie and Friday Fragmenty and maybe sometimes I want to shake her into giving me a real title to a synthesized post. Maybe she's raging against a bunch of machines I'm just not raging against (one of them apparently being the fascism that is punctuation) but for the most part she's able to richly convey her rage and it's all her and so be it.

These easily-fixed annoyances aside, what I love the most about Michelle is that she's whole grain bread, man. She hasn't been processed into just giving us the sweet fluffy palatable side of her. She's heavily textured and is grainy going down and she's replete with all the integral parts that complete a real live person and not a persona: brains, toenails, warts, kidneys, heart, soul, sadness, joy, fears, and frustrations. The great majority of her posts are pieces to the great big yummy pie that I'm always harping on people around here for not fucking giving up and so I'm not holding back now for a few punctuation and font problems. Are you kidding? I have been wanting to do this dirty little deed for a long damn time so here you go, Michelle, here is my IFLY virginity.






An artist is only good to the extent that they are generous with what's inside them; they don't save what they have for another post, another drawing, another project, another day. They give 100 % of what makes them who they are each and every time they start the creative process. And this, My Dear Askers, is what it has taken to drag this old rusty blogger back to the blogosphere, to shake me and take hold of me and say nope your not done here yet.

And now, inspired, with my IFLY cherry popped, I'm off to dust off my poor forgotten blog and see if I can't pump some life into that fucker and visit some of my favorite bloggers who are still writing their hearts out who I have missed so.

Carrying Your Emotional Shit Is Hard

So there's this blog that I'm reviewing right now. Like literally right now. It's called The Semi-Sane Life of The Demigoddess, a title that belongs on the cover of an unpublished novel next to the anonymous slim, starved figure of a woman in scarlet, seen from the shoulders down, crossed arms and manicured nails suggesting "beautiful and successful and looking for love, but stubbornly so!"

Angel is a chronic dater, a 27-year-old divorcee in the Philippines whose boyfriend just up and left for Sweden. And she's...she's growing.

It's always frustrating when someone confuses having a "strong character" with hotheaded arrogance. Strong characters and personalities exercise a great deal of dimensional and emotional weight, and they can be arrogant, of course. But they exist because of that weight, not in spite of it.

With that in mind, I'm debating how to proceed. Angel's blog is a progression of self, and it's not because she's fickle. It's because she's trying very hard to squeeze herself into a Niche, any Niche, but it's not working. She doesn't feel it. At least she hasn't felt it, she hasn't really given us an inkling of actual awareness of self. Not until like last week.

She blogs bullshit for a full year, kind of end-of-the-week-reflect-on-your-reading-assignment essays, and these posts are just completely lame. It's forced, strained, obnoxious self-help liturgy, composed completely in formal cliches, and I hate it.

I discovered my interest and love for writing when I was very young. In many ways, writing has helped me cope through the darkest, most painful chapters and preserved the most beautiful memories of my life.

That sentence is not real. It's processed.

And then she shifts, as if she found some drunken, slutty muse that she wishes she could be, but writes with that faux sassy malarkey that we love so much around here. Suddenly everything is loose and slang and there are all these fucking acronyms and dildo talks. It's better than before, but it still feels contrived.

Sprinkled throughout, though, is THIS:

On my wedding day, while I cried in my daddy's arms, all he ever said to me was, "We never practiced this dance. I'm sorry if I step on your toes."

When she loosens up and stops writing the crap that she thinks people want to hear she's on fire. When she's honest, it's hopelessly compelling. And that's not because there are sexy lesbian stories, it's because she's out of hiding. Her writing becomes bold and true because it feels that way, not because she's telling us about how bold and true she is. I'm a big fan of that.

The first half of her blog was a fucking chore.







The second half was a little cheap, written well enough, and slightly annoying. It lived up to that hypothetical cover of a book about a "strong woman" that I would never want to read.



But for the tasty, shameful spiral she pulls the reader through, I'm giving her more. She made me curious, she made me interested in her story, she made me feel. It just took her awhile to get there, probably because of all that emotional weight she's carrying with her and trying to hide.