Drag.

Today's photo comes from Cap'n Syphilis Pin Cushion, aka Matthew Hornyak. 

Sorry for the lack of posts this week. It's been murder on the keyboard. So let's get right to it.

I have no transition from Drag the River to the Drag Queen Bar Where I Was Sexually Harassed By My Male Boss And Nearly Fired At The Same Time other than the word "drag" is in both.

So....

Several years ago, I was working for an ad agency in Chicago. I had three gay bosses.

I only mention this because, anybody who is employed has multiple bosses they have report to, but who has three gay bosses? I have no problem with the fact they were gay, it was just an anomaly—kind of like finding a kitten that can speak Portuguese.

Anyway, for a company party, the head boss decided he was going to take us all to a drag show. This was no big deal to me, nor was it anything new.

Hell, I rang in the new millenium in drag bar that served 25 different kinds of mashed potatoes. While the spuds were exploding on my plate and Dick Clark's synapses were exploding in his head, crossdressers were trying to keep their sausages from exploding out of their gaffs.

So again, nothing new.

But what made the company outing drag show different was having my boss tell me, "unless you get up there and tip that dancer, you're fired." And he wasn't kidding. I asked several times, just for clarity.

This wasn't the first time he threatened me with sexual harassment. On other occasions he told me:

• My "boys" looked nice in a pair of pants I was wearing.
• My "boys" looked nice in a pair of short I was wearing.
• He would fire me if I didn't come to his birthday party, where he promptly grabbed my ass.
• To "get your sweet ass over here" at a party.

I wasn't the only one he sexually harassed. He also reached up another employee's shirt to "feel how much of bear your are", tried to kiss another employee at a gay bar and got way too close to another employee at a urinal—to the point where he asked if he could "shake you off".

The employee he tried to kiss ended up shoving him down a flight of steps. The "bear" grabbed him by the throat. The "shake you off"guy pushed him into a wall. I ended up tipping a Jessica Simpson look-a-like tranny—hey, he had great legs—and then quitting.

Oddly enough HR was aware of his behavior and did nothing. And I mean nothing. All of us went to complain. All of us considered suing the agency but backed off for no real reason other than common decency.

Which is more than he showed us.

I need a shower, I feel dirty.

Our machine overlords vs. our lords.

"The Gods shall liberate us from the machines."

Okay, I think this is French, however I do not know French. 

I did a Google search and this is as close as I could get to a translation. Google Translate was useless oddly enough. Of course I could be really, really wrong. But for the sake of me having something to write about today, let's go with this translation.

I seriously doubt the Gods could or would want to free us from the machines. Ultimately, this would mean they would have to give them up too. Right? Because, at this point, our Gods are just as addicted to technology as we are.

If they shutdown Ma Bell, how in the hell are Zeus, Jesus Christ and Chalchihuitlicue going to group message one another? They're not going back to string and tin cans for interstellar communication.

You're telling me Athena is up there using an abacus and a clothes line to balance the checkbook and dry her clothes? Bullshit. She's got a Kenmore washer and dryer and an MIT Asian graduate student to help her with her checkbook. (Hey, at this point, Asians might as well plug-in and be rechargeable, because Americans suck at math.)

You think Ganesh is waiting on an oven to preheat for a slice of warm pot roast? Hell no, he's got a top of the line convection microwave. 

So you say these Gods aren't real or aren't as important as "God"? That "they" can use technology but our one true overlord would never do such a thing? Well let's look at what he's up to with his Radio Shack credit card. 

For a person that is supposed to be all knowing tell me how he does it if he isn't using security cam feeds to spy on us picking our noses in traffic, murdering hobos behind Wendy's dumpsters and stripping naked to try on bras at Victoria's Secret? 

Sure, back in the day when it was just Adam and Eve, he had no problem keeping an eye on them. I mean there were two of them. The fucking Duggar's watch what, like 30 kids at once? But anything past say 100 people has to necessitate some type of live feed, video monitoring system with a team of angels watching 24/7. He can't keep track of us all by himself, I mean I can't keep track of a 12 pack of socks.

You think God doesn't have a Hi-Def TV? You think he doesn't want to watch the waves he sends destroy entire seaside cities so he can have a good giggle? Or that he doesn't want to see every detail of the flies on the faces of starving African children? Oh and what about porn? I mean porn in HD has to be the coup de grâce for him—he gets to see his greatest creation from an asshole camera get rammed for 25 minutes before a backside splash zone occurs.

Also, if God isn't using technology, then why in the world are there constantly better iPhones coming out? Dang white bearded perfectionist.

Give a hoot.

Nice to find a piece of owl art every once in a while. 

Have a good weekend.

You might be a Kentuckian...

The level of the graffiti I find varies. I often question why somebody would write certain things. More often though, I applaud the unknown person for their doodle or witticism.

But this is just awful.

I live in Kentucky and unfortunately we are never going to escape the whole Jim Bob thing. No matter how hard I try, I am reminded daily that I live in Kentucky by some type of antic that can only happen here.

For example, here are three things that happened in the last couple of days that prove I live in Kentucky—America's Short Bus:

1. Cancer, is it in you?
Needed some cereal this morning. Instead of going out of my way and hitting a grocery store, I swung into a Walgreen's. Grabbed my breakfast and a bag of snack mix for lunch—with 60% less fat than potato chips, how could I fucking not! Stood in line behind a girl who bought two jugs of Gatorade and a pack of cigs.

I was not disturbed by her purchase combination. She was obviously trying to recover from a Wednesday night, tequila induced vomit frenzy. The kind where her vagina was used as a reverse human piñata for every frat guy in a five block radius. What was disturbing was the total of the sale—$5.27.

Really?

Are you fucking kidding? I can get cigarettes and two Gatorades for under $6! I'm gonna starting smoking and gonna get me one of those vaginas. (gonna)

2. Bocephus
Not more than a mile from me is a billboard for Hank Williams Jr. He's playing the Kentucky State Fair.

I have thought about going. Not for the music so much as the pageantry.

Bocephus at the Kentucky State Fair has to be the equivalent of World War II Victory Day for the slapnuts of this state.

Rednecks are gonna be out wearing their finest overalls, chewing the finest chewing tobacco and drinking Mountain Dew out of goblets.

I would have to think White Rain or Aquanet must be underwriting this whole event.

3. "Beards and Queers"
(I mean no disrespect to my homosexual/gay friends. I used this title only for the slight rhyming scheme. Please free to taunt me with chants of "Breeder, breeder, breeder!", if you like.)

During a Dirty Projectors show this week, my friend and I realized that Louisville has a love affair for two types of men—the bearded type and the dances and sleeps with other men type. Many of the latter also had beards, which created some type of superfecta.

No other state in the south would allow these two groups of people to mix. There would be fights, tears and glitter showered in the eyes of the innocent.

(again, no offense.)

And now—weak ending.

Elton John >

Okay!

Short post today.

Elton John is greater than? I would actually flip the greater than to a less than symbol.

I am not a huge Elton John fan. In the grand scheme of piano playing pop rockers, and I'm only including Billy Joel, Leon Russell, Ben Folds, Randy Newman and Elton, I'll choose Ben Folds every time.

This may totally be a generational thing.

I do think Elton lost a lot of cred during the Disney years. Same goes with Phil Collins. Disney also raped us of a Genesis reunion by making Phil sing Adult Contemporary pop fuck songs instead of letting him go back to drumming.

I do love how these fuck songs are the core of most Disney movies. So while mom is getting excited, her 4 year old is watching a montage of mermaid talk to a fish.

Disney, you're a fucked up company.

Penmanship is bullshit.

Before I start, I know neither Ed Vanetten or Barefoot Danger (Dancer? Shit, we'll get to this in a bit.). I mean you no harm and hope you can settle this greater than/less than debate without the use of rusty butcher knives or tossing chili powder into each others eyes.

Business car trips usually spur interesting discussions.

I've discussed everything from dildos to taxes to gun laws to strip club buffets to the art of dinning and ditching from said strip club buffets to you name it.

Debates are also naturally going to happen when you put three or four people in a car who don't spend their days mucking out port-o-potties or stocking a bread aisle. (My apologies to the Wonder Bread folks, your knuckle dragging stockers are ironically not like your bread.)  Last week was no different. During a long car ride back from Atlanta, a debate raged on about how fuct, yes fuct, the American school system truly is today.

One of the most interesting areas that popped up in this debate centered around penmanship.

As a child, and still to this day, I have abysmal penmanship.

When I was in elementary school my teachers were constantly on me about the sloppiness of my writing. Notes were sent home, bottoms were spanked and every day after school while my friends would be play in their yards, I would be strapped to my desk or the kitchen table practicing penmanship.

Did five years of this make a difference to my handwriting? No.

Whether it was cursive or print, it never, ever, ever improved.

The only real thing that improved was my love of snacks and hatred for exercise—thanks Mom.

Anyway, while I would practice, my mother would sit over my shoulder. Every once in a while she would grab the pencil and my hand and try to "help" me form letters and words that didn't look like an abortion on my Big Chief Paper Tablet. Sure there would be a few words that would look okay—but more or less, everything I churned out was on the level of hoodrat graffiti.

It's not that I was a dumb kid or didn't get the basic shapes of letters and numbers, I just hated the idea of having to make every letter perfect.

This frustrated my mother to no end. She had no idea why she had been stricken with a script-sick dolt. She yelled, begged, pleaded with me and cried to the heaven's above, "Why dear Lord? Why have you cursed me with this child who as far as I can tell has the penmanship of a drunk bear? I'd rather have a morbidly obese child with a hair-lip and webbed feet than this sin to letters and words."

Then, my mother, a nurse, had the thought that enters all parent's minds when their child's handwriting is borderline special ed-equse. "He's going to be a doctor. Doctors have shitty handwriting, this is a sign! Sure he'll never be able to write a paragraph that is decipherable but he'll fix aortic valves, cure cancer and never have to put enemas up old women's cakeholes." 

My mother has spent decades describing to me the intimate details of having to fish fecal material out of old women's rectums. Maybe my handwriting was my family's escape from this level of near serfdom. 

Somehow my imperfect "q"s were going to elevate our family from the type of people who removed the final remains of last week's summer squash dinner out of Old Lady Henson, to the type of people who directed others to remove the final remains of last week's summer squash dinner out of Old Lady Henson.  

But this never happened.

My handwriting is still often described as "piss" by friends and family members.  My mother finally realized I was never going to be a doctor when I was around 14. One day my dad needed something from her while she was working in the emergency room in our county hospital. 

I walked into the hospital and I saw blood. I then proceeded to throw up. Which caused me to pass out in my own throw up. Unfortunately, my mom had to clean it up. 

Besides the sight of blood, touching anything described as "festering" really gives me and inward boner. Not cool. 

So I decided to go to journalism school. Now I am a Creative Director and despite my horrid penmanship, she thinks I turned out "okay". That said, penmanship is an outdated methodology and it's not sad for me to say texting, typing and emails have replaced it. 

Nothing requires you to use penmanship anymore:

• Nobody turns in a book report today that is handwritten.
• Nobody writes love notes—it's love texts, love emails or just flat out sexting.
• Nobody posts cursive proclamations to church doors anymore. 

Teaching penmanship in school is as useful as teaching kids how to run a loom, how to breed 

passenger pigeons or how to drive a steam powered thresher. 

I would rather the time American schools spend on penmanship be used, well, for ANY fucking thing that makes our kids slightly smarter! Shit, spend penmanship time on math. We could fucking use a generation that understands math. Because my generation is horrible at math, all of us—but fucking shit do our printed "G"s look amazing. 

Isn't that right Barefoot Danger? Dancer? Shit! I can't tell. 

I HATE EVERYTHING

It's no secret, I hate a lot of things—children, babies, near-strangers hugging me, cheap flip flops, anything made by Budweiser, cabbage, the country of Italy (it's mutual, so this is okay), Zimmer & Kohl contractors, Celine Dion, abbrevs, hollow Easter bunnies, that "snooty section of town", racists, Mexicans, homeless people who really aren't homeless, midgets who refuse to wear costumes daily (come on, you're already so small and we're already laughing at you anyway, go ahead and put on a lion costume), Minnie Driver, Andie Mac Dowell, Reeboks (have always thought they sounded like a synonym for vomit—"I just Reebok'd that corndog from lunch."), Gregory and Appel Insurance, Discovery Benefits, etc.

But as I woke up this morning, I realized there was one more thing to add to my list—hotel rooms.

Everybody has a different bitch against hotels. Most center around the level of cleanliness or the level of ejac smeared on everything in the room or discourteous staff.

None of these are mine.

Cleanliness is cleanliness. I found a half eaten rotisserie chicken under my bed in St. Louis one time—and this was after I had already spent the night in this hotel room. Was I mad? No. And now I can tell everybody I found a half eaten rotisserie chicken under my bed. Who else can say this?

As for the level of ejac on the pillowcase, pillowcase, nightstand, alarm clock and evvvvvvverything else—eh. Who cares? The world is covered in jizz. Anytime we stay at a hotel we just happen to be sleeping in the Hall of Fame of Spunk. Consider yourself lucky. If you're in a hotel room right now, you could be rolling around in Giovanni Ribisi's ejaculation. He was good in that one movie.

The staff is the staff. You put a bunch of high school dropout lunkhead whippet do'ers together in one facility and you're lucky if it doesn't turn into a prison.

My complaints against hotels are in the following areas:

The Decor
All hotels today look like they were decorated by the same unimaginative white man. Beige walls, non-descript everything, fake plants, paintings that nobody would ever hang up in there home except white folks, etc.

This needs to change.

One time I stayed in a hotel shaped like an abstract turkey. It was circular. It was odd. It was awesome.

Why don't more hotels do this? Yes, they can claim cost and blah, blah, blah. Shut up.

Make me a hotel where each of the rooms has a theme. Go over to the non-white sections of town and do some damn shopping. I want to stay in the "El Paso Suite". I want stay in a room where the only thing separating the bedroom and the bathroom is a beaded curtain. I want to look fondly at little brown people statues riding donkeys and pricking their fingers on cactuses on my damn coffee table. I need to see Aztec wallpaper border on the walls and sombrero ashtrays on my nightstand.

Get me some velvet paintings, some mirrored Scarface mirrors, some phones that look like giant lips and white furniture trimmed in gold beading.

I'm the traveler, you owe me some entertainment dammit.

The Pillows
Too soft? Too firm? No. My problem is too many.

Every hotel now has 30 on the fucking bed. You can spend money providing us with 29 pillows we're never going to use, but I make a request for some mirrored tiles on the ceiling and you scoff?

How about this—just have a vending machine in the lobby that works with your keycard. You use your card to select the two pillows you want—D1 Soft, B4 Semi-firm. Two. That's all you get. No more. You want more? Go sleep in a fucking Sears.

The other solution here is dragging your pillow from home. Right.

The car ride alone would rob me of whatever safety and comfort I would have bringing my pillow. Odds are I would be taking it in a rental car that has either had children (grubby little germbags), old people (shitty big germbags) or the morbidly, morbidly obese (they all masturbate when they drive) in it.

No thanks.

The Shower
I want hot water that is going to scald my skin off. I want my back to look like I've been in a mobile park meth fire.

I think every hotel has to, by some stupid ordinance, limit the temperature of their water to, "The temperature of a grown man urinating on me."

Fuck your tiny soaps, let's work on getting the temperature up to "The temperature of Satan urinating on me."

The Lamps
Just quit. I am in a hotel room this very minute with six lamps. SIX! Why?

Who is going to a hotel room these days and setting a mood? Are we making out in our high school girlfriend's basement? Where is the Dave Matthews button? Will she enjoy this strawberry truck stop condom I picked up? Shit, I hear her dad.

I can never figure out how to turn these lamps on. Is there a wall switch? Is there a knob I'm supposed to turn? While I'm trying to figure them out, I've stubbed a toe and dropped the beer I'm trying to keep cool in the undersized ice bucket. (Just give us coolers already.)

And the lamps that have the plug-ins for your cellphone or laptop. Fuck these. 9 times out of 10, I plug something into them to charge. Only to forget you have to turn on the lamp in order to get that cell phone, iPad, iPhone to charge.

To paraphrase Brick Tamland, "I hate lamp." And while we're at it, "I hate hotel."

Scrub this Heather!

Got a headache yet?

Sometimes I take photos with my cell phone sober.
Sometimes I take photos with my cell phone after two beers—which is also known as sober.
Sometimes I take photos with my cell phone after 10 beers—which is also known as sober but maybe it's not a good idea to go mano y mano with my cat in a game of Russian Roulette. He's part Russian, so I always think he has the upper hand. Got dang commie.

I took this after two beers and after some photoshopping, this is the best this thing is going to get. So I fuct, this shot. Fuct it. Took two other shots of this same thing, they were noticeably worse.

As I am knee deep in some Georgia shit right now, this trip will produce one of two things. One something semi-interesting to write about, or two boredom. Hang in there. Hopefully this blog will get interesting again.

Smells like baby powder.

It's Friday.

I'm whipped.

Instead of being longwinded and ranty, I'm just going to let my main man D. Cheques do the talking today...

Smells like baby powder
tell me about yo three kids
Best to write you a check
gurl. What yo name is?

Shit gurl, "tell me about yo three kids"!

I'm out. Have a good weekend and don't whiz on the electric fence or the third rail.

What is that coming out of my penis?

Sometimes things just don't make sense.

Was the author going for "Penis" and mis-stroked a letter? Or does he just have shittttttty, "N" to "I" transitions? Or is "Pems" the nickname for his junk?

Maybe it's a cute little abbreviation, sorry an "abbrevs", for his cock.

Speaking of abbrevs, I hate this shit. Out of nowhere, people—ahem females—are unnecessarily abbreviating words.

While I don't think any of the females reading this blog are responsible for the proliferation of this movement, I have to warn you. I am going to make a bunch of grand sweeping statements in the following paragraphs about females and this fad.

I am only making them about females because, no male has yet to approach me and say:

"Oh, I had Qdobes for lunch."

Translation:

"Oh, I had Qdoba for lunch." 

Qdobes? You didn't even actually "abbrevs" the name of the restaurant. You actually made it longer! Did you need to cute up Qdoba? It's already a pretty cute word. Could you not handle the fact that you just face planted into a 1300 calorie burrito? Does Qdobes have an application process, because you should fill it out. I see in your future a job as tortilla warmer.

No guy has also ever said to me:
"You should totes do that."

Translation:
"You should totally do that."

I enjoy the English language and I abuse it daily, but saying this to anyone makes you sound like a Danish sailor with a hairlip. At some point you will get punched in the face if you utter this phrase. Somebody somewhere will have had enough of you talking about your My Little Pony collection and how you haven't had to poop in three weeks, you will utter this phrase and you will get punched in the face. $5. This is happening.

Final example:
"I love Grey's Anatomy, that one doctor is so adorbs."

Translation:
"I still watch Grey's Anatomy because it's the only thing that I can pick up in my trailer park and I totally have every copy of every magazine 'that one doctor' has been in. I also masturbate to them."

I realize the translation here is a little longer, but using adorbs in this instance really is a space saver. It also makes you like a maniac who wears Bugles on your fingers so you can scratch your three cats backs.

So maybe "abbrevs" does have a use? It's a good guide for cutting the lunatics out of your life.

Whatevs!

Simple enough.

Prints available in the gift shop.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/69977911@N00/7698323370/in/photostream

Back later with legit post.

Wednesday Reader Submission Day: I Fucked Yer Mom

Today's reader submission comes from the Grand Wizard, Keith Raines. Keith has been sending me good shit for months on end. Which makes me question how much time he's really hanging out in bar and truckstop bathrooms.

Today's post is going to be a little low on humor/excitement. Sorry. But it promises to be a bit enlightening, maybe.

I've posted this type of post before, but it's always interesting to me to see how people come across this blog. I don't publicize it too much. I toss a link up via Twitter usually twice a day whenever I post. I have a few friends I email it to occasionally. And every once in a while, people forward it on to their friends.

I'm not doing this to make money. More or less, it's to keep me writing something other than the usual drivel I turn out. At some point, I might like to actually grab all these photos, re-color correct them, redo a bit of the copy and have a coffee table book made—but that's a ways away.

Anyway, from time to time, I look at the back end of the blog to see how people are getting here via web search.

Take a look at Saturday's traffic...

9 of the 10 ways people got here is via a swear word. 

This makes me laugh. It also makes me happy—as I swear a lot. 

I love that "bear tits" got two different people here and "tits trucker" got one person here.

I am not sure I have ever used the phrase "tits trucker" before. Maybe I need to put this on a hat?

Anyway, here's to hoping, "I Fucked Yer Mom", gets me some traffic.