Pregnant With Possibility

I was just reading articles on the internet about the 50-game suspension of Manny Ramirez, the superstar outfielder for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

He got nailed for using steroids.

As I read of the multi-millionaire baseball player's drug abuse, I realized this was an unfolding, real-life tragedy.

Now, after thinking things through, I'm left with just a single question:

How could someone who:

(a) is so young,
(b) is so talented,
(c) is so bright,
(d) is so good looking.
(e) has everything going right in his life,

be wasting his time (like I was) reading internet articles about that overpaid, drugged-out cheat, known as Manny Ramirez?

Euphemistically Speaking

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, this is the definition of a euphemism: the subsitution of an agreeable or inoffensive expression for one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant.

For example:

Here are a couple of euphemisms that men commonly use:

well-hung: means I have an enormous penis.

well-endowed: means I have an enormous penis.

When we use euphemisms, we're saying the same thing, but we're not grabbing others by the back of their heads and shoving it in their faces. Not usually, anyway.

The two examples given above are, what we in the blog industry commonly refer to as being, "manly euphemisms."

But what about women? Do they use euphemisms?

Absolutely.

For example: Let's pretend that there's a young attractive couple of newlyweds, who don't mind us hanging out in their bedroom, as they are getting ready for bed. (As long as we're prepared to be quiet.)

Let's say the young wife is already in bed, reading this blog on her laptop as she waits for her husband to return from the bathroom, where, unbeknownst to her, he, too, is reading this blog from his laptop.

Why would he be doing that?

For two reasons:

(1) He knows that by reading this blog, he's gaining an edge over his competitors in the fast-paced, cut-throat arenas of commerce, quim, and ideas. He's not sharpest of bulbs, so he needs to utilize every nugget that falls from on high. After all, that particular nugget could be just the feather he needs to complete his arsenal.

(2) He knows that reading this blog is like gliding down an icy toboggan course of love when it comes to getting himself "in the mood." (Admittedly, this newlywedded husband may be dealing with SSA issues, but let's not judge. Please. For once.)

When he's "ready," he enters the bedroom sporting, what is for him, an impressive erection. It is poking brazenly out the fly of his designer shorts, like a stoutly built, bearded, tugboat captain surveying the action in a gay disco through the back door exit, while he tries to decide whether the cover charge is worth it. Don't be fooled. He's a salty old bugger. He'll pay. He always does. What else is going to do at this time of night?

His wife sees "the captain saluting," and knows immediately what is on her husband's agenda for the evening.

She frowns. She just wants to go to sleep. She grabs a Kleenex and blows her nose as violently as possible, as if she's sick. Then, slinking down under the blankets, she groans: "Oh, honey... I'm sorry .... I can't. Not tonight. I'm having my period, and I feel like I've got a migraine coming on. Plus tomorrow, I've got a big presentation I have to give before the entire board, first thing in the morning. "

This is a classic example of how a whole series of phrases is actually one fairly easily understandable euphemism.

In this case, what she's actually saying is: "Honey, tonight, I'd prefer to give you a blowjob, and then you can fuck me good and hard up my pooper."

Euphemisms are the unheralded diplomats of communication. It's time they received their due respect.*


* In a way, it tugs a bit at my heartstrings to come to the grim realization that, during the entire history of language, I am the only blogger to ever have paid tribute to our friend: the euphemism.

What can I say? I'm a giver.

( I'm just glad, that by virtue of my being so well-endowed, I can offer so much.)

The Fundamental Things Apply

A kiss is still a kiss,

A sigh is still a sigh,

A restraining order is still a restraining order,

But most internet blogs will always be

One-car pile-ups that no one will ever see.

Obama versus the GOP

In case anyone has missed it, as of today Barack Obama has been President of the United States for 100 days.

I think he's doing pretty well.

But what about the Republicans? I thought I might use this space to clear up a couple of common misconceptions about them.

Contrary to popular belief, not all Republicans are corrupt, hypocritical, war-mongering chicken-hawks, who think that torture is swell.

That is patently absurd.

Some Republicans are also sanctimonious, lying fuck-wits, who, when not out whore-mongering, find the time to enjoy gay sex with strangers in public restrooms, and then use the Constitution sop up the ejaculate oozing from their backsides.

Mister Softee

Think about all the weird DVDs, cable channels, stupid TV programs, and internet videos available to us today.

We are floating on a sea of shitty shows created for someone's viewing pleasure.

Surveys show that 99 percent of the population agree that 99 percent of the movies and shows are crap.

But when asked to name the one percent that isn't crap, everyone makes different choices. There are people who love really strange stuff. Religious shows. Shopping networks. Game shows. Slasher films. Fox News. Etc.

Every show, film, or genre has its audience. And it isn't difficult to imagine what kind of person it is who really enjoys whatever category you can name.

However, there is one entertainment niche that I am baffled by. I can't think of anyone who is deranged enough, or elderly enough, or stupid enough to be even remotely be interested in this genre.

It is: "soft porn."

Even its name is an oxymoron.

It doesn't have an obvious audience.


People, who would never watch porn, would never watch soft-core porn.

People, who like normal porn, would never watch soft-core porn, either.

Who likes it? Nobody.

Every adult in America, with the exception of your mother, can name at least one famous hard-core porn star.

Hard-core porn stars may not be universally loved, but they are respected. Why?

Because they're bad asses, who don't give a flying fuck about what anybody thinks of them.

And they make decent money. The audience for hard-core porn is massive. Who doesn't, every now and then, enjoy spending ten minutes or so watching a King Kong-sized cock sawing away happily between a pair of tits the size of igloo skyscrapers?

It's one of the things that helps make sex with your spouse, tolerable. Or, maybe I should rephrase that. It's one of the things that makes sex with your spouse even more fantastic than it already is!!!

When it comes to soft-core porn videos (which it never does), the best you can say about them is that they "don't suck," because they never do. Ever.

I pity the fool soft-core porn performers. Most of them entered the field, thinking that they were going to be admired for being "edgy," while still clinging to more of their dignity than they would if performing in hard-core videos. They were wrong.

It's not like members of “The Academy” any more respect soft-core performers, than they do hard-core porn stars.

And what about taking pride in one's craft? Is that even conceivable in soft porn?

Here's a bit of dialogue recorded on a limp-core porn set, after a non-climactic climactic scene:

Actress: "Mmmmmm......You were....like........totally on lukewarm out there!"

Actor: "Babe, when I'm with you, it's so unbelievably great. You are so fucking tepid -- I go nuts."

Director: "Keep it down, you two! Save that simmering, low-level warmth for the camera."

Actor: "That won't be hard."

Actress: "It never is."

Director: "Good.... That's why I hired you."

For the viewer, watching soft-core is like being a baseball player who comes to the plate in the bottom of the ninth inning in a scoreless game. You hit a double, but wind up stranded on second base for eternity (or whenever the film ends -- whichever happens first). The game is called due to darkness and despair. The game never ends. Nobody scores, so nobody wins. Ever.

The One That Got Away

It's a saddest evening in the history of the universe.

Gazing out my window into the black empty sky, I can’t help but feel that, at this moment, I surely must be the loneliest man on the planet.

The future, and even life itself, now seems meaningless.

I'm missing someone. Pining for her. Tormented by her absence. Decimated by the hollowness within me.

Really, it’s much worse than feeling hollow; it’s more like being stranded on sand dune in a vast, desolate desert, and feeling miserable because of the hollowness inside you.... well, that, and the fact that you're way the fuck out in the middle of some stupid desert.

Then, at the moment you think you’re going to pass out from grief, a flock of large birds arrive. You think they’re going to lift you gently up into the sky and whisk you safely away like carrion luggage to your final destinations, but ... no.

Instead, they cut you open and start tearing at the inner lining of your torso’s shell with their bone-dented beaks, desperately ripping away any stray bits of gristle or "mystery meat" that still remain.

Satisfied that they've gotten anything worth getting, they then just stand in an informal circle and nonchalantly shoot the shit for a half an hour or so, before getting bored, tossing their toothpicks onto the sand, and flying away.

Things were bleak enough for you already, but then, by being forced to listen to brain-dead vultures talk trash about assholes you don't even know.....well... it has left you feeling more than slightly peeved.

Their behavior was just plain rude!

Unseemly.

Whatever happened to manners?

You try to heave, but all that comes out is a sigh.... a featherweight one, at that.

The sigh is followed by a floating bit of angel-soft vulture down that is carried away by the gentle desert breeze.

"Typical," you mutter to no one in particular.

Minutes pass in silence.

You feel absolutely gutted.

The situation is certainly less than ideal. Much less.

You're feeling even more hollow and even more alone than you were before.

There's only one thing left to say, but you're too weak to speak, so you think it, instead: "It looks like it's going to be one of those days."


How did this happen?


To say that she played an important role in my life would the biggest understatement of all time.

She opened my eyes to the beauty of all that is around us, and, in the process, completely transformed my world.

It was as if she had made me the beneficiary of the most spectacular Christmas present imaginable – life, itself.

She already had already received the present; and then she re-gifted it to me.

I loved, and still do love, her completely, devoutly, and unreservedly.

The fact that I don’t know where she went, or why she left, is something I refuse to spend time dwelling upon.

I just want her to come back. Right now. I can’t tolerate living my life without her.


Happier Times:

We met in Venice, just a few years ago.

I had been wandering around St. Mark's Square, trying naively to differentiate myself from looking like exactly what I was – just another American tourist.

It was while sitting at an outdoor café, sipping a cappuccino, and quickly skimming an Italian newspaper for the non-Italian words, that I spotted her.

She was alone in a crowd, strolling leisurely near the center of the enormous piazza.

Even from a great distance, it was apparent that she was like no woman I’d ever seen. Her beauty was so all encompassing; I found it physically impossible to avert my gaze.

As if in a trance, I paid my bill and began drifting in her direction. The closer I drew, the more intense seeming was the force that propelled me towards her. It was as if there were suddenly an undiscovered property of physics, called “irresistible allure,” that was as powerfully real as the one we know as “gravity.”

Any woman, who is blessed with awe-inspiring natural beauty, soon becomes accustomed to attracting the admiring gazes of men. In Italy, this is especially so.

Some of these women enjoy the attention, but most devise subtle ways of gracefully ignoring it.

I was standing no more than 10 feet away from her, staring like a love-struck rube.

She appeared to be lost in her own thoughts, and genuinely unaware of my presence.

Hunched down low to the pavement, she was, I realized, searching for something. What had she lost?

But, as she looked for whatever it was that she was seeking, she exuded an inner calmness and contentment.

Unlike the map-obsessed tourists all around her, she was savoring her journey, not mindlessly rushing towards her destination.

It was the moment I started to move closer, that she and I made our first eye contact. She looked at me as if our meeting were preordained by the heavens. Her eyes told the tale. She was mine. I was hers. For eternity.

On that day in Venice, and on each of the days, weeks, months and years that were to follow; Piccione took me under her wing.

The moment we met, magic came into my life.

I couldn't speak her language worth a damn, and she wasn’t much better at mine, but when you’re in love the formalities of speech are for the birds.

Between my odd assortment of clumsily pronounced words and labored phrases, and her endearing pigeon English, communication was never an issue.

When my Italian holiday was coming to a close, she agreed to return to New York with me.

Together, we relished the exquisite pleasures that life in any city has to offer. Activities that had seemed mundane when done on our own; became euphoric experiences when shared. The simple things became fun: sharing a newspaper, window-shopping, strolls, concerts and picnics in Central Park.

We didn't live together. Her Italian parents, and my landlord, wouldn’t have approved. She had her acting career. I had ornithological research position at the Museum of Natural History. We always ate lunch and dinner together. Whenever the weather was remotely pleasant, she preferred to dine al fresco in the park.

I always felt so proud when we were together. She once told me that I resembled an Australian actor who had been her favorite when she was a child. His Name was Rod Taylor. I was embarrassed to admit that I’d never heard of him.

(I never her told her this, but later I had looked up Rod Taylor up on Wikipedia. He wasn't Australian at all. He was a Welshman, from New South Wales. She must have confused him with the late Australian actor, Richard Burton. Italians!)

Piccione was an actress, on her way to becoming a star. She’d already appeared in several films; her biggest
role came in the Macaulay Culkin vehicle, "Home Alone 2" (which was much funnier than the
first Home Alone, but, then again, I'm biased), where she had some scene-stealing moments with Kevin and a homeless lady in the park.

Maybe she resented our move back to my hometown of Seattle? If so, she kept it to herself.

What went wrong?

This evening, I've been haunted by the lyrics to the song from Hall & Oates: "She's Gone."

Now, I'd pay the devil to get that fucking tune out of my head.

The last time I saw Piccione, I had been regaling her with a tale of the late Graham Greene's childhood: how everyone in his entire family: his brothers, his sisters and even his parents were spies.

I had prepared a lovely candle lit dinner for the two of us, and I was perhaps overly enthusiastic about everything.

“Can you imagine the impact that the spy business had on dinner conversations in the Greene household?” I guffawed, perhaps too jovially.

“And just think of the gifts they must have given one another! ‘Gee whiz, Dad, thanks for the unusually large pen!’ ‘Thank YOU, Graham, for this unusually large tie-clip.’"

Piccione listened, but I recall that she wasn't exactly cooing with amusement, as she normally did whenever I waxed poetic about the romance of espionage.

Normally that kind of anecdotal spy intrigue stuff fascinated her. Some of her ancestors had done intelligence work for a variety of governments during the past seven or eight wars. (I'd even seen a photo of her great grandfather with Mussolini.)

Thinking more about it, I recall that Piccione's head had been cocked to one side, as I chirped mindlessly on about the Greenes earlier that evening. Perhaps, I had unknowingly ruffled her feathers, so to speak.

Also, at dinner, I recall that she had barely touched her squab.

Still, this sudden lack of interest in war stories should have triggered air raid sirens in me, but it didn’t.

What a self-absorbed fool I was! *

And why did I insist on teasing by saying I was getting her "Grecian Formula" for her upcoming birthday?

She’s been gone for TWO HOURS now! And not a peep.

If anyone sees her, please let me know. If I don't get back to you, it's because I'm posting flyers on telephone poles all around Seattle.

Sad to say, I don't even know her last name.

For the record: she's probably 6 inche tall. Gray with black eyes, and a shimmering bluish-green in her breast and wing tops. She looks like many other pigeons, but there's a strange magic in her beady little eyes.



The life, Piccione. Without you... the life ..... she has no meaning.




* Thank goodness, I've changed.

Blogger From U.N.C.L.E.

What an arrogant, audacious lot bloggers can be!

I just heard one imperious blogger say of another: "He doesn't write many sentences, but he owns every word that he writes."

Oh, does he now? Really?

We all know that "bloggers are the new rockstars," but did any of us expect that we'd fuck the shark Led Zepellin-syle so early on in the concert?

Blogging isn't even a decade old, and yet here we are -- past the Gladwellian tipping point of excess and decadent over-indulgence.

For some of our high and mighty bloggers, the use of ordinary words is no longer sufficient. They need to own the words they employ. .

Apparently, these snooty man-bitches blogs composed of sentences made up entirely of their own trademarked words, creating, in effect, what amounts to their own wholly owned, privatised languages.

(Not only is this an expensive, time-consuming endeavor-- it's an exercise in haughty absurdity. No blogger, no matter how wealthy he or she might be, can register words that are already in the common parlance, so what are these frivolous elites trying to prove?)

Sadly, this isn't science fiction. Privatised languages are here, and they're real.

Before long, the demon spawn of wealthy bloggers will be tweeting one another in the equivalent of their own "Blackwater-style" language.

I know of only one way for us to nip this trend in the bud: the immediate creation of a "Union of National Common-Language-Enthusiasts: Blogger."

UNCLE B could then force these privatized trademark-aficionado bloggers pay us fee whenever they use one of our common words: "to, you, and, me, he, she, and, they,-- words, like: shit, piss, cock, balls, fuck, or suck, will, always, be, mother, fucking, gold. mines."

The elitist bloggers still won't write many sentences, but they'll know who they're paying every time they're forced to use one of our common words.