2005-12-26 - 8:15 p.m.
Ok: Here is my latest pet peeve, and I am sure that it is something that you can agree with me about. Indeed, this is such wickedness it makes my eyes spin around like pie plates on sticks just to contemplate it. Let me explain: Here is my beautiful blog, which is my one true love, the apple of my eye. How carefully composed it is! How articulate! How clever! Now, suppose you hit the little “read my profile” box down in the corner. This will take you to another screen, on which you will find that little blurb I wrote about myself about two years ago. Fine. Nothing wrong with that. I suppose I ought to update the little blurb, naturally, since time has passed since I wrote it – but no big deal.
But do you see the banner ad at the top of the screen? In previous years, those banner ads were purchased by other blog writers who try to lure you into visiting their blogs. I have no problem with that – I often click those little ads to see what other folks are doing, and even though I am usually disgusted beyond measure by the sheer lack of literary talent of my fellow Diaryland blogwriters – well, what of that? Everyone is allowed to have their say. Their day in the sun, as it were. And how can I mind if a banner ad appears on my site, linking someone to some other blog? If I had more technical skills, I would certainly create my own banner ad to lure folks here. It is only my own computer stupidity that has prevented me from doing this.
No, what I totally mind to the point of sputtering rage is the fact that bona fide “advertisers” have found their way to the overall Diaryland site. They have purchased the so-called Gold Membership and use their 1000 free banner ads to simply put corporate ads all over the site now! And I cannot possibly voice my fury when I click my own little blog and see a hideous ad for Verizon Wireless on the top of my page. What the fuck! And there – if you click it again, there’s an ad for cut rate ink cartridges, shipped directly to you from some place in Pigheadindi, Bangalore. Get the FUCK off my website! How DARE they?
I suppose it was only a matter of time. And, on paper, what a good deal it is for an advertiser. You just pay – what -- 20 bucks and suddenly you have at least a thousand ads that go to a 100,000 blogs. Man – what a deal! But quite simply, my issue is, I do not want some hideous odious filthy disgusting corporate foulness cluttering up my blog. Really, is that too much to ask?
Jezus Christ, it’s enough to turn a nun into an axe murderer seeing my little site with disgusting ads on it, and all WITHOUT MY PERMISSION. I mean, that’s crazy! I PAY for my membership on Diaryland! Don’t I have some right to decide what is going to appear on my page? It’s enough to make me swear off this cockamamie site and open a blog on some other site, just out of sheer spite. If blogspot didn’t make all my grammatical errors look so much bigger, with that grey typeface of theirs, I swear I would do it, too.
Those motherfuckertittysuckertwoballedbitches. I hope they choke on a godamn chicken bone. If they got the plague, I’d show up and poke their eyeballs with knitting needles, I swear I would. Actually I suppose I could just create my own page for the personal page that would omit the ads. But doesn’t it seem like Too Much Trouble? And how would I figure out how to do such a thing. Should I hire the Naked Computer Repairman off of Craigslist to perform such a loopy task? What a lame thing that would be.
So my revenge will be this: I shall continue to blog about sex and my truly reprehensible thoughts in as lurid and as turgid a way as I can. If they are going to have ads on my site, I at least am going to be as foul as I can be. Those corporate sponsors can be complicit in sponsoring my blog’s most pornographic ravings. That way, perhaps some day someone will embarrass the advertisers, noting, “How can you have an ad out on such a filthy site? What kind of a business are you running?” I daresay it won’t work – but you don’t know til you try.
Christmas is fast approaching. And I must say, this year I seem to be feeling quite equinimitous about the holiday for a change. Part of it, I suspect, is that I am suffering from the utter peacefulness of diminished expectations. I honestly now just don’t give a rat’s ass! No job? Eh, what the heck. Something will come through. I’m gaining weight? Oh, whatever – I’ll worry about it later. An inability for forge deep and satisfying relationships with anyone, with the possible exception of my immediate family, who are predisposed to liking me anyway? Pfft – it doesn’t matter. None of it matters, really. Just get it on through this life, that’s the point of it all, I think.
This year has been decidedly tumultuous. I lost what I think was my last chance for a decent job, and have made my peace with being an Eternal Freelancer, if that’s the word. Yet, I am still alive and plodding along. I have my health – and, even better, I have health insurance for another six months, courtesy of the payout at my last job. And, on paper, it has been a year full of travel and adventure. Why, just these 12 months, I visited Alaska, Mammoth, New York, and Venice, so how bad can things be? Not to mention the fact that I have partied hard and swithed more guys than there are stars in the heavens. Hardly pursuits to express with pride, but there are worse ways to spend the year, I suppose.
And now, a gigantic wall of fog has descended on Santa Monica. It’s beautiful! I just went for a stroll along the beach, and from the end of the beach where the sand hits the cement of the bike path, you could not see the ocean whatsoever. The tops of the California palm trees vanish into the mist. It’s really quite moody – it’s not snow, mind, but it casts the city in that cold, slate grey color that simply sings Christmas to one. And it sets off the blinking lights of the shops all so nicely.
The town’s mood is also pleasantly low key: This seems to be a sort of sweet natured Christmas Season. It’s less ostentatious than other years – but there is an undercurrent of celebration that I think the country has missed the last few holidays. Really, everything looks peaceful and seasonal. And, next door to the Novel, the little gift store that sells useless items like bars of glycerin soap and matching hand towels with reindeer antlers on them, is PACKED with fat, errant, grumbling husbands who are looking for that last minute stupid gift for their sow wives. It’s funny.
Meanwhile, in preparation for the holiday, I spent the day performing a wildly useful task. Can you imagine? Me! Doing something useful! Well, perhaps it won’t seem so important to you – but to me, well, it was a monumental task. You may or may not know that I have this pile of old newspapers sitting right in the center of my living room. Yes, I know, I know – how hideous! What could be less attractive than to have, in the main room of one’s home, a gigantic pile of disgusting, yellowing newspapers, dog-eared and limp, each page filled with generations of cockroaches, dust mites, silverfish, and god knows what?
OK, it’s not THAT bad. It’s really only about three hip-high piles of newspapers that line the wall. And they aren’t as unhygienic as all that. In my mind, though, I seem to imagine that they are teeming with vermin and skanks and disgusting filth. However, each newspaper contains a little review that I have written – and so I am loathe to toss them out like so much garbage. I mean, what shall happen when I am dead and they wish to donate everything I have written to the Johnny Darling Library at San Clemente? It is useful to have my work somewhere.
However, today I decided, enough was enough. Because the Novel Café and indeed virtually every coffeehouse in LA was shuttered, I had nothing to do, so I sat down and started poking through the stacks of papers on the floor. First of all, I just decided to keep all the reviews from the last six months or so, given that they were “current.” So I moved all those to the side. But the rest of the papers on the stack, ah, well – those were fair game. So I just grabbed them all, looked through the theater and film sections, and made an ironclad rule. If the paper contained a review in which I was HILARIOUS, or in which I made some SCINTILLATING and PENETRATING CRITICAL POINT, I would keep it. Alas! Reviews of this caliber were few and far between.
I would occasionally have cause to preserve the review of that one man show starring a formerly famous, now HIV-affected porn star – and I made sure to keep the review in which I mentioned that such-and-such a play was “the dramatic equivalent of ptomaine poisoning.” But aside from that, I was quite startled by how much generic writing I have ejaculated. I mean, even when I am at my most wacked out, the sum total of what I write is basically meaningless. I have spent years reviewing plays and movies that had their one week or one month of release, and have then submerged into the brackish swamp of oblivion. Not only would the various filmmaker or playwright not remember the play, no one involved with them would probably put them on their resumes – that’s how thoroughly forgettable they are.
It certainly makes one realize that much of the world’s artistic endeavor is frankly, pointless. I don’t mean to say that art is pointless: Brilliant art lives forever and is priceless. But folks who put on this-or-that mediocre play or so-and-so journeyman film -- well those people, it seems to me, are less about adding to the artistic o’euvre of the day than they are about simply making some cash – or, in the absence of that goal, since no one ever makes money on a play, they are simply doing it so they can SAY they’re an artist. Even they know that the stuff they are putting on will be forgotten. And it is amusing to me that my little review, 200 words written for the Big Paper or the Small Paper, is occasionally the only document that survives the show. Those reviews also often represented a fearsome amount of work, too: Not only did I have to spend upwards of three hours on the bus to and from the damn things, there was also the huge amount of time writing the disgusting piece.
But as I dug through my pile, which suddenly and inexplicably leapt from the year 2005 to the year 2002, I suddenly realized that none of these stupid things mattered. And so, after cutting out the comparatively “best” reviews that I could find, I just shoved the rest of em into the trash bin and took them downstairs. What a pile!
And then, in a furious rage, I ripped open my closet and grabbed the first heap of papers I could find. They were all the papers -- about a hundred of them -- from the year 1998! And I threw them all into the trash as well. Ba-blam! It was an odd experience – I was essentially deleting a whole year’s worth of useless writing. In 1998, all those reviews just seemed so important – but time has moved on, and now they are consummately devoid of meaning. And so, into the trash they went! Now my living room looks so clean and nice, I can hardly believe it. But, of course, it goes without saying that I shall almost immediately discover that I desperately want to read some review from 1998 that I have just transported down to the trash bin and which is now being recycled into toilet paper. To that, I say, “Oh well!”
Christmas, meanwhile, was quite pleasant this year, much to my surprise. The highlight, aside from the turkey dinner and the apple pie, was the totally unexpected phone call from my Uncle Harvey, whom I haven’t heard from in something like three years. On the paternal side of my family, we seem to go for decades without talking to each other – I think the issue is less downright animosity than it is, well, that famous Darling Family Lack of Affect. If one is out of sight in my family, one is also out of mind.
To be honest, Uncle Harvey is a repellant fellow. He is, you see, about the size of a small house, with a round, egg-shaped body and a bald, chrome-y skill that is framed by a big bushy mustache. Even less pre-possessing is the fact that, due to some kind of genetic flaw or ailment, he suffers from having a high octave voice that is fixed in a sort of squawking falsetto. Have you heard the Howard Stern Character called “High Pitch Eric?” My Uncle Harvey sounds almost precisely the same. Almost EXACTLY the same. But, unlike High Pitch Eric who’s hysterically funny, poor Uncle Harvey is a monster of near-pathological boredom. I mean, he is terrifyingly boring. He is so boring, he ought to be listed with the government as a potential weapon of mass destruction – he can bore whole armies to death.
And yet – it was rather nice to hear from him. The problem was keeping him on the subjects that I wanted to talk to him about. I would keep asking about my half brothers Joe and Jerry Darling, and he would keep drifting to other topics – his pension benefits payout, the fact he only pays 500 bucks in rent-controlled rent for his Flushing, Queens apartment, the fact he was on a cruise in Alaska during 9/11. It was a tough piece of work to get him to tell me what everyone else was up to – and even then, it turned out that he didn’t actually know much more than I do. Joe is, what, working for various political campaigns in New York in a low level way, but I don’t see any evidence that his star is a-rising yet. Jerry, meanwhile, seems to be working at a chicken slaughterhouse in Colorado. Can you imagine such a thing? I don’t know what to think of that. In any case, I was amused by the family update, which is still very much a Darling Standard tale of woe. And on that note, perhaps it is time to go and enjoy the beautiful day which celebrates the birthday of our Lord Jesus.
