b a l l y

my life’s a stack of notecards,

shuffled and reorganized

according to daily whims

October O.C.D. #4: White Quartz Rock Accumulation

We are in the process of cleansing and purging the compound of the psychic and physical clutter that has accumulated and enabled us to lose control. I’m pretty adept at losing control, having been on that path from birth, probably even before so actually, and I’ve learned to navigate that chaotic path with comedic flair. The guineas have been a fucking bane, either confining them to the chicken tractor too sturdy to work on any commonly found wheel, whether from hardware store or off of old lawn mowers at the landfill, or having them disrupt my happy little chicken flock that’s kicking five eggs a day now. Well, we finagled the chicken tractor over to where the sunflower garden this year was, which was planted on top of last year’s burnpile. I want to make key-shaped garden beds circulating around all that, and the guineas can peck it up in two-week increments now, laying the groundwork for sheet mulching and then hay and all that other Gaia’s Garden bullshit.
But to replace the sunflower garden as the gradual centerpiece of this garden upgrade... I have for a long time wanted to build a giant rock cluster of white quartz, and work little by little to accumulate that shit. All I’ve got is a little pile I snagged rock by rock from the hiking spot nearby, but I got to feeling guilty about snagging all those rocks from the hiking spot, so I quitted it. So now I keep the lookout for white quartz wherever I can find it, riding back roads near rivers and hoping to get a pick-up bed load, which is never a full visual load since everything I own is half-broken and hobbled by malfunction. There’s a cutback to Charlottesville that I did some work along recently, and there’s quartz everywhere around there, lining people’s ditches. I need to find a couple folks there that I know to let me get my fill because I know it’s got to be everywhere.
My ultimate goal is to build a pyramidesque structure of carefully stacked rocks, preferably a good twelve feet high, and hopefully nobody ever gets crushed under it. But if somebody does, I hope it’s me, and they make it my grave.

October O.C.D. #3: Cell Phone Contract Battling

Here was my situation... I had two cellphones in my family with the cheapest deal for that company that was like $90 a month, and being a self-employed American asshole, a separate line for that was a good idea, especially since my landline was usually tied up by internet from me, my wife, or oldest kid. That was $22 a month, for shitty dial-up aka internet welfare, and my cell didn’t work at home, at least not when it was Alltel. Then Verizon bought it and it worked sitting in one window of my house. Seriously, that was it. Well, I decided that I was gonna be a Freelance Writer because I like to decide ridiculous things, and in order for this to be successful, I would have to move beyond my internet welfare aka dial-up, and the only alternative where I kick it and rest my head is satellite internets, which, on the cheap deal, is still like $80 a month. So I figured if I could drop my cell phones and get some pre-paid burners instead, and renew them since I ain’t nobody on The Wire, the drop in that would make a switch from the internet welfare aka dial-up to satellite internets an even wash, maybe even a few bucks in the black. So I called the cell phone company to get out of my deal, except them bitches don’t budge, trying to charge me a $200 per phone (meaning $400) disconnect bullshit fee, because I accepted the phones they sold me on the cheap, and in the fine print, even though I never signed anything, by using them I agree to their terms and conditions. So I looked up all types of shit. I called them begging poverty due to the economy, which unfortunately isn’t that far from the truth, sadly, and they had no options. I was like, “You know, as I’m losing everything, and trying to be straight with my creditors, most places understand how things are working right now and have plans. Maybe I’m naive and most people who have cell phones are impervious to current conditions, but I would assume you had something in place to help people work it out.” Dude or chick would be like, well we can do this or that and it’d be a little cheaper, oh no wait, you have the cheapest plan already, and I’d be like, “Look, this is not a case of me paying or not paying my bill. I am about to be homeless, and a cell phone is useless to me, and you’re trying to charge me $400 more when I can’t even pay my bills as they are or feed my kids...” and that type of thing because I like to put it on the customer service people. I know it’s just a job, but fuck it, they should get a different job and not enable those assholes to separate themselves from the bullshit rules they set in place.
Well, none of the sad sack phone talks with customer service reps, asking for superiors worked. So I did internet research, which said basically you’re fucked unless you see a change in your contract, which you can always cancel afterwards. But that never happens, or we never look at that part of our bill (though we will now bitches!). They can drop me with no charge, but I can’t drop them even though I got the cheapest ass phone each time, because they give us phones for blah blah blah blah, even though I was like, “Tell me how much the fucking phone costs so I can pay you back and not get hit with the two hundred bones.” Talking like that helps make them uncomfortable, which makes the long, unending, unsatisfying customer service phone calls more enjoyable in retrospect.
Basically, after calls galore and internet research, my best bet was to make them not want me as a customer. So with my home phone set up as part of my network, not to mention the two cells, I’ve been setting them both on roam and putting them in the one window in our compound where you get reception and having them call each other and then sit there. We are halfway through the month, and if you count both phones separately, we’re up to about 8000 minutes. I’m hoping for the around 30,000 roaming minutes by the end of the month, to make them cancel my contract of their own volition. Fucking cocksuckers. I expect them to put in fine print on the back of my bill how I can’t call phone-to-phone anymore, to try and slip one on me, and then I can cancel with no charge, although them assholes probably already slipped one on me without me knowing and I’ll owe them $7000 at the end of the month. Which means I’m gonna kill Mr. Verizon, unless he’s a chick, in which I’ll sex her up real good, make her fall in love with me, get her pregnant, and abandon her, leaving her with a child cursed with my genetics where you do really elaborate things to get out of financial obligations accepted as normal by the rest of society, because you refuse to be like them people, at all costs.

October O.C.D. #2: Hot Peppers & Early Mornings

My wife learns the herbalism witchcraft and knows the Ayurvedic thangs of our inner Constitutions, and lately I’ve found that if I eat hot peppers all the time and get up early when the rooster calls (literally at my compound), I have a much more productive day. I used to think I was a night owl, which might have been true in my younger days, but now it seems if I get rolling early on, I hit the dumpster and get the good wilted cantaloupes for the chickens, and get a good long day at work, breathing in the fine sanded dust of progress deep down into my lungs. At that point, I come home, shower up, and so long as I don’t sit down on the deep ass couch we got from our friends last winter, I am awake and rearing to go for a few more hours to do word things inside the guts of cybertronic machines. It is a great life when these days happen, because I feel like I’m maximizing my potential. My wife told me this is my kafa (of kaffa or kapha of kafka or something... I don’t pretend to know) and I shouldn’t overindulge in either the hot peppers or the super-early mornings.
I have found my favorite peppers are the anaheims. I don’t really eat jalapenos so much... oh wait, I forgot, if there’s serrano peppers that aren’t just green but have red and orange color to them as well, that’s the ones I want most. I like slow sautéing up a little frying pan of hot peppers and sweet onions and mixing them in with whatever we eat normal that night. It does me good. And I have learned to chop the peppers on our second cutting board (one only used for hot peppers) with the plastic bag I bring them home in used as a glove, so I don’t do that thing where you rub your eye with your fingers afterwards and have burning eyeballs for half an hour. Also, there’s nothing worse than cutting hot peppers and then taking a piss and then your penis is burning for twenty minutes like you were wearing jeans with a zipper standing too close to a bonfire with no underwear on, but only right around the spot you were holding it at. Often times I fear I have a yeast infection, and then I remember I was cutting hot peppers earlier, and plus, I don’t cheat on my wife, unless we’re playing Parcheesi for sexual favors.

October O.C.D. #1: Backyard Fowl Studies

My chickens have started to lay some eggs, making them worth more while than just me sitting there looking at them with keen interest. Which I could do all day to be honest. People have those corny fake fish tank screen savers, you know? I want one that's just chickens walking around a pen. Both white leghorns are regularly laying their solidly egg-like eggs, pretty much daily. The moody ass americauna has started dropping her green eggs, not as regularly as the leghorns (white chickens work harder, am I right?), but steadily. And we got one brown egg a couple days ago, waiting on the second. I also suspect whatever red laid the brown egg was the one that dropped the alien shell-less egg that freaked me out last week one morning.
The strange thing is, I know for sure the one americauna is a roo; he does big country ass cockadoodledoos now when I walk out in the morning. That's a tight style, and I enjoy looking across my oddly piled back yard at the sound through the cool ass fall mornings we've been catching the past two weeks. And from the eggs, I know for sure, four of the other out the 11-chicken flock are hens. I am working under the assumption both my other reds are hens, and the pair of australorps and buff orpingtons, I think there's one hen definite out each pair and one question mark that I'd been leaning towards hen. Until today. The buff orpington we call Dixie (get it, "be my Dixie chicken", which was playing in the back yard speaker when I was watching them one day), my wife said, mounted one of the hens. So I go out to kick it and watch these birds, as I love watching the birds, and the two australorps (which are black, but have these subtle dark greenish/bluish feathers in the mix, very pimp ass) are fake fighting, ruffled neck feathers, jumping up with the twist where, throwing legs. Then Dixie rolled over and busted up their little fight by doing the same. And honestly, I am no beast of a man, but seeing a pair of chickens stick out their neck feathers and ninja jump at each other, it's a crazy and beautiful and energy-inducing sight. I can understand the attraction to gamefighting. Although the whole adding steel gaffes bullshit is kinda disturbing. Why can't we just have civilized all-natural as-gods-intended chicken fights, like poultry mixed martial arts?
But now I've got to spend some free time tomorrow hanging out by the chicken pen and figuring out if they'll all get along and whether I need to relocate Dixie, because our other rooster, named Arishkagol, he's a classic. I bought him off a Christian dude who said he was a hen, but if not, because no one can tell, I could bring him back. But Arishkagol is a beautiful fucking rooster. And he's thick as shit too, like a cock diesel ass little gangsta of a chicken. I can probably have hundreds and hundreds of chickens for the rest of my human life hanging with farm fowl, and Arishkagol will be a Hall of Famer, guaranteed. He's americauna, meaning all mixed feathers, but he's got a black throat with these long skinny gold feathers on the back coming around the side, like a mullet. But I told everybody (meaning my wife and kids - I lead a sheltered social life) that if one of the buff orps turned out to be a rooster we'd never get rid of it, because buff orpingtons are nature's pimps. I guess I'm gonna have to take this pen we already have and put a new door on it since I snaked the door from it a couple years ago for a goat pen and throw in a nesting box to make it rooster acceptable.
And while all this chicken dynamic is unfurling itself for my enjoyment, I also have a chicken tractor full of five guineas, who make a big fuss, and went back on lockdown after freedom to roam the yard because they were fucking up the chicken area. I put new wheels on the chicken tractor to make it roll easy, wheels I snaked from the dump off a lawn mower, but the tractor contraption still won't roll over this dip in our yard, so I've been waiting to kick it with someone to con them into helping me move it to the other side of our back yard (two-and-a-half acres ain't really a yard I guess) so, hopefully, the guineas reattach themselves inside the chicken tractor to that corner of the property and won't wander back to the chickens and fuck up their chicken game they got going on, pumping out the eggs, as well as the visual entertainment. Guineas are not fun to watch. They stink and are stupid. But they eat ticks. Basically, on this earth, if ticks didn't suck so fucking much as a pest (one powered by our evil government with Lyme disease to cause more damage than ever before), guineas would be useless. Settling the guineas means three more weeks, once I get the chicken tractor in the right spot, of their confinement to feel homed again. Fucking guineas; they are annoying.
By the way, in case I never mentioned to this to you (as if you, the internet, was a friend, who remembered what I typed into your brain directly), we have one white guinea and four regular looking ones. White guineas basically look extra retarded (with guineas looking retarded already). But we named our white guinea Carmela, and the other four are named Tony, Paulie, Sylvio, and Furio. I have no clue how to tell them apart, but that's all their names. Because they are guineas. I do feel sad for Italians if that disparaging term came from the actual guinea bird, because no human ethnicity should be considered that stupid and ugly in my opinion.

September O.C.D. #3: Madden Football

Usually as professional football seasons starts up, I dig out whatever Madden variety I have to fool around with it's time-wasting foolishness. Used to be Madden 01 had a solid run for half a decade, because usually I buy last year's game when this year's comes out. But Madden 08 (Vince Young's career was ruined by the cover) has been pretty enjoyable, so I probably won't even look for Madden 09 this year. My involvement with Madden though, is probably about as minimal as possible, because I don't like spending an hour per game to actually play the shit out. At one point, I had reduced myself to only being the GM and picking the players every year or signing free agents, and all I'd do is let the game sim any playoff games the Redskins won and watch them in the background as I worked on other projects on my laptop. But this time, cranking up the game, I decided even that was too much, so all I did was sim seasons, and hire the coaches, and let any Redskins playoff games sim in full while I half-watched and worked on other projects on my laptop. Oddly enough, I've found this highly enjoyable, most likely because fake computer Redskins, about 20 years into my franchise, became a very successful organization, continuously contending for the Super Bowl. Meanwhile, in real life, it's more of the same Dan Snyder-related frustrations, with no sign of ever getting better since he's a very wealthy man and has access to finest health care around and will in all likelihood outlive me, making my adult life of football emotional attachment a complete waste of my time, and actually shortening my lifespan honestly, considering how worked up I get.
I have to say, after a few NBC games this year of the NFL, I miss John Madden. I'm not joking either. I think his reputation for saying stupid shit was overblown, because he always said stupid shit. I think what killed Madden off was not so much Madden becoming more senile but him not working with Pat Summerall anymore, who had that deadpan play-by-play style of a golf announcer. Once Madden was paired up with Al Michaels, it was over, because Michaels believes his own P.R. too much about being an all-time great, which he used to be, and he's always making corny ass jokes or telling stories that really aren't all that interesting. This was what killed Madden, because when playing off some schmoozy asshole telling corny jokes like a wedding reception, Madden seemed forced and cornier by attachment.
I saw him sitting there at the Cowboys game with former President Bush though. You know them dudes were talking about some food. Plus, what a fucking dumbass Jerry Jones is.
Oh, in my Madden interactions this time, I am in year 22 or so of the 30-year maximum, and after that runs it's course I'm sure I'll think up some other dumb, time-intensive, obsessive-compulsive way to use the game to kill off my life. I could list a few other "ideas" I've done through Madden football, but it kinda embarrasses me to think about it, much less admit it to computerized strangers.

September O.C.D. #4: Haiku/Renga

I have started writing the haiku again, on the regular, actually doing tankas with myself since I don’t really remember what I wrote three days later, so I guess it will work. If the weather is nice this weekend, since I will be home with the kids as the wife is studying elsewhere on some herbal doctoring tip, I may try to finish polyurethaning the original 12-pack haiku boxes project so that I can get some more grommets and brass chain and finish that shit completely. I find haiku to be a great form of writing because it’s quick blasts of observation, like a sample in music. But it’s also a form of writing chock full of pretentious assholes and fake ass organic food eating pseudo-Zen Buddhists mad adept at studying the fingertip instead of the reflection of the sun upside the moon’s head.
By the way, if you are a Yellowman Poetry Dork like myself, you probably know about Han Shan and how he’s like the MF Doom of the T’ang Dynasty. Well, I’d like to tell you that Red Pine’s translation of Han Shan’s shit smokes pretentious asshole fingertip studying Gary Snyder’s translation. Also, Red Pine’s The Clouds Should Know Me By Now compilation is pretty tight too.
I wish there was more
to say, but it's late. I'm drunk.
Work is in five hours.

September O.C.D. #5: Netflix Indulgences

Netflix is a great tool for dorks like me who want to absorb themselves in some sort of very specific nonsense. Starting early this year when me and the wife re-watched the entire Sopranos, I've dug completely dropping myself into a series of video zombie entertainment to brainmerize myself for long periods of time, and dull the creative process wilting inside. As of late, I staggered my Netflix queue to have nothing but The Wire, start to end, and The Ultimate Fighter, which I had never watched before. It's a strange pairing, The Wire as internet nerd writer's ultimate television show ever, and The Ultimate Fighter, human cockfighting reality program.
In rewatching The Wire, oddly enough, I don't think I even caught how good it was the first time through. The second season at the docks I playa hated the first time around, but damn, it was actually pretty good. I think maybe I was too caught up in that gangsta jive vicarious living of the first season that whiteboys like myself love so much. (I'm surprised poverty tourism isn't bigger here in America yet.) And it stays good.
The Ultimate Fighter, though really enjoyable, sort of proves the point my wife always makes about MMA after me making her watch the Kimbo Slice vs. hack dude with big ears fight on CBS that one time... that it's a brutal and pretty much unjustifiable sport. I mean, if you're accepting the fact that we have an elevated status on the planet as civilized animals, that is. I sort of feel we're no better than anything else, just more talented at reshaping everything for more personal enjoyment, so fuck it, let dudes fight and brain paralyze each other if necessary. I am only almost through the first season, as none of these have been in my local region, so Netflix drags their feet, skipping the next DVD, until there's a backlog of a couple of the TUF series, and then they send me something else at the same time as the TUF disc, which is a nice plus, but goddamn, I'm getting like 3 Wires for every one TUF.
Anyways, there's not much else to say, other than dorky fucking complaining about Netflix. Man, what a fucking cushioned life chump I am nowadays... no hunger, no passion. The only reason I made myself do this is because it's almost the end of the month and I haven't started a top 5 ADHD list yet. I guess maybe even my self-diagnosed ADHD is waning.

August O.C.D. #1: Dumpster Diving for Vegetables

At this point, I am only dumpster diving to style my chickens out with massive amounts of fresh-to-them vegetables, and it's interesting to see what a chicken prefers when it has a daily five-gallon buffet to choose from. Chickens are often hyped up as loving the lettuces, but I have found they get around to that only when there ain‘t better things on the ground. What they really love is melons. Cantaloupes are a huge hit with them, and a bunch of times I've found watermelons with like one rotten spot that I chop in half and lay in their pen like a bowl, and a day later that shit is picked clean, hollowed out, and the rind remains until it dries up enough in the sun they can kick it under their door. Cauliflower, the first time I gave it to them, they liked at first, but then dissed it. They also love the little plastic containers of squash and sweet peppers, because when packaged like that, the moisture sucks out of it and makes it soggy, which means it has a shorter shelf life than regular vegetables, which in turn causes it to end up in the dumpster, and feeds my chickens. The past week or so, I have not had the same luck looking in my steady routine of dumpster checking, and I've noticed a ridiculous increase in how much feed they go through. I guess regular folks have to buy bags of feed every week, whereas I am living off the fat trash of the land, bro. America.
From my steady routine, I have a few favorites. There is a grocery store near Short Pump in Richmond, which is where I do banking bullshit, so I always check this store on the way home. It has two dumpsters, the one behind the store is all their trash can shit and dairy trash and meat trash, and the dumpster on the side of the building is straight up nothing but produce, with both sliding doors on the dumpster unlocked. Usually the one about a foot off the wall is most full since it's right by the access door from the building, so I can squeeze in, open up the door, and bamm! vegetable smorgasbord. That spot is usually good for mad lettuces and spinach, like whole cases at a time, and has been the spot with watermelons at times. My main one near my home I check five or six times a week, usually around a certain time of the day where one of the produce dudes told me it was the best time to check. He had a Travis Bickles mohawk, so I figured he was a good enough dude to answer my questions about taking thrown out produce without sweating me about legalities or any of that corporate grocery store bullshit. That one can be hit-or-miss. Some days, I come away with a good 20-gallons of stuff, and other days it's nothing. The far side of the one dumpster's door is wired shut, and I contemplated cutting it one time since there was piles of cantaloupes on that side, but decided it best to not rock the boat. There's a shitty little Barney Fife town cop who sometimes is lurking in the parking lot, and he seems to be there more often than not lately during my timely check-ins, so I wonder if maybe he's not hip to my game and trying to catch me. I'm not legally doing anything wrong though, it's just trash, and I figure if anyone ever stops me, I'll throw out the hard times got three kids type mantra that'll make them feel all fucked up that I'm eating trash, even though I'm not. Well, I eat some shit if it's packaged and I can tell it just got thrown out. I ain't too proud to admit that. It's not like I'm eating rotten shit, so don't go looking at me like I'm that lady on Good Times that the Evans kids thought was serving them a catfood meatloaf. Although if you were at that party at my house last June, that big bowl of baby carrots came out the trash. Haha bitches. You ate trash. The biggest problem with this store's dumpster is the meat department dumps in the same dumpster, so you might reach down to grab a few heads of lettuce, and there'll be about a five-pound pile of beef fat right in the middle of it.
The latest addition to my dumpster routine I first visited the other week when I picked up some guineas to add to our compound, loud ass little fuckers. This store's dumpsters are behind the building and the path closes off as opposed to looping all the way around the building like most strip malls, so it's a little weird driving back there. But if you hit it early in the morning before the restaurant next door opens and has their back door open all the time with dishwashers and cooks always milling around smoking cigarettes and speaking Mexican or Honduran or something to each other, there's two dumpsters. One is a sliding door style and the other is regular flip top that you could easily actually climb into. Honestly, I prefer reaching in sliding door or over edges, and have not actually climbed into any dumpster yet, because I've worked enough shit jobs to know that you never know when you climb into shit like that. It is a gamble. This store has had crazy amounts of fruits the chickens love, including whole pineapples almost every time I've gone there. Today, at the back of the flip top dumpster was a ton of pre-packaged chopped fruit trays, with pineapples, honeydews, and cantaloupes, at the back of it, plus more pineapples. I almost broke my climbing in cherry and busted up in that bitch for the fruit haul, but decided against it, mostly because right within reach was about five pounds of tomatoes and five pounds of strawberries, and I'd already snagged almost a case of bok choy, spinach, and cilantro earlier.
I am amped to see how much trash I can haul this winter, because grocery stores don't stop having produce just because the growing season is gone. It'll be interesting to see the difference compared to summer time. I also have noticed trends amongst different grocery store chains regarding how they get rid of their trash. Harris Teeter is like the hoity toity local store, and they're some bitches about their trash, it all going into an enclosed compacting type dumpster with no outside access. I can't even figure out how they empty the motherfucker when it's full. Kroger can be hit-or-miss, but most of their stores are right in town with heavy traffic nearby, so not worth the hassle just in case somebody decides what I'm doing doesn't look right. Food Lions are everywhere, and tend to be the chain grocery store in most small towns where I live, as well as throughout Virginia and North Carolina. I have only found their dumpsters locked in urban environments, and that shit's really been the mainstay of my dumpster circuit. Independent grocery stores around where I live tend to just have one dumpster where all the store's trash is dumped, so it's so much work to find anything good or an amount worth the trouble when the bigger chain stores usually have a couple dumpsters where part of the store's trash is not included, and you can hit the produce dumpster and not have to sort through every fucking thing that came out of the store to get to the good stuff.
Really, this whole dumpster diving thing for my chickens is proof positive of my obsessive compulsive disorderliness, because I have mental checkpoints about time of day and part of town and know that wherever I am, oh yeah, I need to hit this one up or that one up on the way home, or I can swing through this way and check this one out. Sometimes, when I take a step back and see how my brain so methodically yet retardedly works, it can be a little scary. Had I been trained to use my mind for good as opposed to odd, the world would probably be a better place in some very focused aspect.

August O.C.D. #2: Cumbia Rebajada Music

A random link inside the internets turned me onto cumbia rebajadas a while back, and honestly, I had never really listened to even cumbia music, which is a percussion-heavy latin music popular amongst mainland latinos more than island latinos. Rebajadas came from a DJ in the '60s who's radio ran out of batteries, causing the record to drag, pumping up the bass sounds and warping the vocals but the high end percussion still popped like crazy. Of course, this is the basic DJ Screw music story, except it predates it by about 30 years. Oddly enough, the guy who originally did this to cumbia music is now in his fifties, lives in Houston, and is an air conditioner repairman. He had a flea market stand in Mexico proper where he sold his mixes of slowed down cumbia music, and as far as I know, he still has a stand down there. I'm not sure why, but slowed down music heavy with percussion really speaks to me and I could listen to it forever. In fact, upon finding about cumbia rebajada, I downloaded whatever I could find online (there's two good mixes to be found online: Sonido Martines' Las Rebajadas Van a Brooklin and Dr. Auratheft's El Maldito Accordeon) and drove my wife and kids crazy with it. The fact there's so little of it to be found sucks, because I've played out what I have, but in that time, did break up those two mixes into individual tracks in Audacity to shave off the chaff and keep the wheat. My search for such stuff also led me to an album called The Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias from Peru, which is pretty goddamned amazing too. Chicha is a hallucinogenic drink popular with with the more indigenously inclined, and this is music made for and by such folks. I don’t think I have to tell you that music with lots of clangy drums and a repetitive-yet-catchy-as-fuck rhythm made by people under the influence of mind-altering substances is usually a good thing, so long as the people aren’t white as fuck. Even then, it often works still.

August O.C.D. #3: Sumo Wrestling

Professional sumo in Japan is probably most closely akin to baseball in America in that nationalistic nerds take immense pride in the history of the sport and dedicate far more mental matter to over-analyzing it than is probably necessary. They only hold six tournaments a year, basically every other month, and I've always kind of been fascinated by it, as a kid when it still came on NBC sports on weekends from time to time. I guess it got retriggered a few years back when the Necro Butcher was on his first extended working trip of Japan and he sent me an email talking about how he was playing fantasy sumo online a lot. I looked for sumo shit then, but not much was going on.
For some reason though, I started looking it up a month or so ago, and found assorted online forums and places to keep up with the shit and learn about it. I remember a few years back when Akebono was the big shit in Japanese sumo that it was a big controversy, the Polynesian sumos as opposed to traditional Japanese sumos. Well, that argument's gone now, as the top couple stars (Asashoryu and Hakuho) are from Mongolia, and catch the same flack to an extent for not being Japs. But what caught my interest more than anything was this dude Kotooshu, who is a white dude, from Bulgaria, who I guess you could rank as probably the #3 dude in sumo right now.
First off, online sumo forums are like any online thing with message boards and internet fans - sad, depressing places with ridiculous nerd projects involving formulas and ratios to mathematically calculate who is more awesome than who else. I'm not sure what it is about the internet that attracts these types to physical things they could never hope to imitate in real life, but it does.
But as for Kotooshu, he's like the pre-eminent player in an influx of eastern Europeans starting to infiltrate the sumo sport's upper echelon. Kotooshu - white dude name Kaloyan Mahlyanov - was an old school style wrestler who was a national amateur wrestling star, and had hoped to compete for Bulgaria in the 2000 Olympics, but he got bigger than the highest weight limit for the sport, so he turned to sumo. Shady sumo Japs (the sport is mad hooked up with the yellow mafia) funneled money to Bulgaria to get the kid into a certain stable of sumos, where Kotooshu ("koto" is his stable name, and "osho" means Europe) flew through the lower five classes of sumo, getting to the top rank in 11 tournaments, or just under two years - the fastest ascent ever. Only eight tournaments later, he was promoted to ozeki class, which is the second highest rank of sumo possible. The highest - yokozuna - is rarely handed out and only given to dudes who are expected to contend for the championship every tournament. In the sense of sumo, contending means if you finish below say the top three or four guys, you bring shame to your yokozuna status. Anyways, Kotooshu was the first Euro to ever attain ozeki class, and he actually won a grand sumo tourney in the summer of 2008. Just last month, while I was actually looking up results every day of the Nagoya tournament, he came in second behind Hakuho, but he had a questionable loss during the tournament that put him one loss behind Hakuho.
Since that tournament ended, he flew back to Bulgaria to get some high ass national awards, and be considered a hero and source of pride for Bulgarians everywhere. Plus, with his hair done up in standard sumo style and his hairy ass chest, he reminds me of John Belushi's samurai cook character. But also, knowing sumo's yakuza connections, and also knowing how wide open and mafioso eastern Europe has been since the fall of the Soviet Union, the emergence of eastern Euro sumo wrestlers is really intriguing to me. I'm sure there's insane stories galore behind it all, when you mash two insane sub-cultures together like sumo and mafia, and then spike it with the environmental psychology of some eastern Europeans. August is a down month, but September will bring back the last Tokyo tournament of the year, and I'm sure I'll again be following closely Kotooshu's white dude dominance of a sport where giant dudes use sheer girth and strength to move each other around. It's such a simple assed sport, yet ridiculously overloaded with mysterious traditions that go back to things half the people who see it have little idea what it means, that it's hard not to love. It's like alpha-male religious extremism that allows and even encourages drunkenness and womanizing.

August O.C.D. #4: Atlas Fantasies

I have been half-assedly working on sketching together a non-fiction book proposal about riding Greyhounds, which I've done far too many times in my life. The sample part of the proposal was fairly easy, though I could probably tighten it up, or maybe rewrite it from a different segment of bus travel in Oklahoma City that's just as notable and interesting to read. It's all that proposing part that I stumble with.
So what I've invariably been doing is pulling out the atlas, and plotting all sorts of strange paths. Sometimes off-the-beaten paths through the south, sometimes following long former U.S. highways that have been replaced by sterile interstates and clogged up with suburban sprawl and stoplight cluster crawl. Other times I draw out giant shapes across the country with itineraries that take about 5 hours of ride time a day (ideally, which is rarely how a bus rolls), and imagine all the bullshit I'll experience. Plus plotting out shapes makes me think of that kid in Iowa that was trying to blow up mailboxes and leave a smiley face pattern as if Detective Freamon and McNulty were gonna use thumb tacks to chart the crime scenes on a bulletin board.
But I've been spending a lot of time looking at atlases. I briefly entertained the notion of making "collages" over state road maps, using an exacto and my shoebox full of clipped pictures from magazines to cut out perfect shapes of little triangles or squares of tiny sections of states separated out by roads, but looking it over, it seemed like the final product wasn't gonna be how I wanted it to be. I need to get one of those in-depth state road atlases for a couple states and do a few pages together to make giant retard things using that motif. My early choices to do such a thing would be Vermont, Alabama, and North Carolina. Probably Carolina because the likelihood of me going down there and being able to actually buy a state road atlas are probably better than most. Then again if I go to North Carolina, I'd probably just try to find Vollis Simpson's compound of homemade whirligigs, go to a strange town's dirt track, get drunk, and try to figure out where one of my handful of old school homies who live down there actually live and if I could make it there without getting busted for DUI, or if I should just find a logging trail and sleep in the passenger seat of my truck.

August O.C.D. #5: Historic Porn

Look, don’t tell anybody, but once in awhile me and the ol’ lady might try to watch a porn movie. Very rarely does it actually happen though because very little porn is geared to be enjoyable to a functioning couple. Mostly it’s weird, control freakish bullshit meant to be viewed by weak-minded dudes who want to control the world they feel so lost inside of all the time. At least that’s how I see it. I’m not sure what’s stimulating about having three dudes standing around one girl and trying to blast cumshots on her face. That actually seems kinda gay to me, to be perfectly honest. In fact, a lot of man/woman porn seems ultimately gay to me, not in the sense it’s gay porn but in the sense it’s for guys unable to admit emotion to women or bond with them, but can do that with their bros, at a woman’s expense. This often involves her ass as well. Very odd. But anyways, I’ve sought out porn that might be interesting to both of us and not make us feel all creeped out or bored or whatever, and here are some things I’ve noticed. First off, porn video stores really get lazy by the fact they’ve got porn. I mean, they sort of separate it into categories, sort of, but beyond that, nothing. You’re thumbing through flicks trying to find something, and honestly, you’re gonna see something fucked up in the process. And once it’s in your brain you can’t make it go away. It sucks. Secondly, once you find movies that might not be bad, nine times out of ten, they end bad. Like what is the deal with newer porns (meaning since 1989 in my mind, and not featuring Randy Spears or Tom Byron) doing this thing where it’s sex, but you have no sound from the sex, and soundtrack is some generic ass music like a new age musician trying to make what they think is rock music? Does anybody like this? Shit, if you’re gonna dub over the sounds of the people completely (which sucks, by the way), you might as well just play some old wacky ass funk music and kick the whole porn soundtrack stereotype in full. This new age rock crap is terrible. But also, it seems no porn anymore is really about a storyline, which doesn’t have to be that great, but it’s nice to have a little story to explain why those two chicks are fucking that one guy in the back of a tractor and trailer, don’t you think? Doesn’t have to be a Pulitzer story or anything, just a simple tale to tie the scenes together.
But ultimately, what I want on my quest is historic porn, meaning set in the olden times, with chicks wearing lots of clothes that may not ever come completely off. We watched Pioneer House not too long ago, and oddly enough, that shit was highly sexual to me. And this dude in Australia sent me some old porn tapes of his, and sadly most of them sucked. Poor dude spent a ton of money mailing them to me. But there was a Dracula porn flick from the ‘70s or early ‘80s that was kinda cool, except the historic porn was very sadomasochistic. What I want is just some good sweet old school historically accurate porn, set in an old log cabin, perhaps along the river where flat-bottomed boats of trade poled by regularly, and all sorts of wild encounters happened from that. In fact, that’s a good idea, and if I could make it, I’m sure I’d get wealthy, because people love porn and spend money on porn like mad. Except those that spend money on porn like mad are social misfits and total malcontents and only want to watch nine dudes stand around glad-handing each other while they commit bukkake on some chick’s face. Fucking world. I wish it would blow up sometimes.

August O.C.D. #2: diecast cars

This is probably even gayer than the state glasses, but somehow I got stuck on buying stupid diecast cars (1/64 variety, or regular Hot Wheels/Matchbox size) because I have a shelf in the camper I do my stupid nonsense inside of that 27 cars could stretch across. I initially was gonna leave it at 27, but I got up to like 35, and some good ones got left out, so I figured I'd make a shelf to display 100 total. But that seems mad homo, so I was gonna do two rows of 27 and just toss the losers from that 54 car roster into the sandbox for the kids to play with. But then I found rolls of velcro (both parts) in my truck and starting sticking them to parts of the camper on the inside. Now I don't technically own this camper, so the fact I've graffitoed up a bunch of the doors and started taping cars to the ceiling is probably not good, at least whenever the old gypsy lady comes back for this thing, which is already pinned in by two piles of trash, and I broke the door off so it kind of leans against the thing too. Whatever.
Anyways, in my searching, I went from normal Hot Wheels to those stupid $3 or $4 specialty cars (Johnny Lightning be bringing the best shit), which is espensfical as fuck. And I can't sign off on the fact I've done this, and am currently not searching (but that's mostly because I've kinda figured out that shit runs on seasons like real cars and there ain't nothing to buy right now I haven't already seen), but one good thing came out of it all. When I was a kid around six, we were about to move into a new house my grandpa has built for us, and our old house was a piece of shit cinderblock house full of mice and snakes and just sucked. It has a big old tub sealed in on the front side but there were two holes on the back side because it was a clawhammer deal that they tiled in on the frontside. I had me a General Lee that I was playing with in the tub, running from a cop car I had, and wouldn't you know, General Lee got out of my soaped up hands doing a spin through the curves of the tub and went slap behind the tub in one of them holes. Moms used a yard stick like crazy, but couldn't fish it out, and it was gone. We moved. I never had a stupid General Lee car again until about a month ago. That motherfucker is velcro'd sideways on a trailer vent right above my head right now. If I could embed that horn sound in this post, I'd do it, but I'd have to google it to figure it out, and it probably wouldn't load up right anyways. That's why the Dukes of Hazzard was great - they did their stunts for real (well not the actors, but real stuntmen did it), not no CGI faggotry. If you're gonna wreck a car, wreck it; if you're gonna blow up a building, blow it up; if you're gonna shoot the head off a chicken, shoot the head off a chicken. That's what I say.

August O.C.D. #3: state drinking glasses

When we first moved in together, my wife had a slew of these little glasses from the ‘50s and ‘60s she’d gotten out of thrift store, back when Richmond had one of the best thrift store districts in southside, before the ebays fucked that all up for everybody, and they’ve been in our household ever since. I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point in the past six months, I decided I wanted more of these, which led to internet research. Well, in the ebays, they go for like ten bucks a pop, but I learned they were mostly made by Hazel Atlas glass company (which I usually mistakenly call Hazel Atkins, on purpose), and if ebay is any indicator, they are popular amongst homos as wacky retro-fare. I was about to try and get some from inside the ebays, but buying shit off ebay is so easy and annoying - you just bid, get caught up in “having” to have something, spend way more money than you should, and then it just gets mailed to you with no work involved. Shopping in shitty thrift stores is so much more satisfying, digging your fingers through musty glasses set up on shelves by recovering crackheads for Christ. We took a family trip to North Carolina a month ago, looking for shit like this (as well as other articles of nonsense) in thrift and junk and antique stores in the Raleigh/Durham area, and found a couple of them. But this led to me poking through antique stores in my area, looking for more of them, at a reasonable rate (which doesn’t always exist at antique stores). Poking around antique stores is a hard thing because those places are gay as fuck, meaning if you see five dudes looking around at bullshit in one of those places, one of them is old, one of them is begrudgingly occupying his time while his wife looks at old farm cabinets, two of them are gay dudes, and the other one is a wild card, which is my way of pretending me being in antique stores is not gay, because truthfully the fifth one is gay too, just probably more repressed than the other two more openly gay guys shopping the antique store.
Anyways, I have found more of these, and we now have far too many to really be proud of. Mostly these glasses are a map of the state, with major cities (at that stage in time) marked with dots, plus little caricatures of industry or noteworthy landmarks, as well as useless information like state nickname or song or some such trivia. They come frosted in different flavors (which can be pimped like our blue frosted Kentucky one, or the oddly toxic-looking frosted orange D.C. one), or have the state maps painted in yellow or lime green or odd pink paint. We even found one that was like black with gold markings, but it was all faded and dinged up at one of those crackheads for christ thrift stores. However, I found a stand in one antique store that had another one like that, in perfect condition, like that, and the black with gold markings style is straight pimp. The one I saw was North Carolina, which normally I would’ve snatched up, as Carolina del Norte ranks high on my list of desirable localities, but the old bitch at this stand was wanting six bucks a glass. I stretched my limit one time and bought a few at five per glass, when I was accumulating, but mostly I ain’t paying more than three bucks a glass.
See, obviously I’ve hit the mad homo stage of the state glasses, because now it’s no longer just straight up collecting of the style, but it’s become more like a sports team, with salary caps and shit, where I’m not paying a lot for minor members of the collection, and even if I find a shelf full of these things for three bucks each, if it’s not a good state or wacky looking, I won’t get it. I could turn my blog super-internetty and post digital pics of my favorite glasses, but even me in all my personal faggotries can’t come that far out the closet.

August O.C.D. #4: Dirt Track Racing video game

This is a computer game that probably nobody on earth still plays except me, but it’s just a shitty race car game based on dirt tracks. You can race regular stock cars (which has three classes), or pro stock cars where you can customize bullshit (with five classes), or bonafide late models just like at Eastside Speedway (with four classes). But rather than just play the game, I have to be all parametric about it and set up a plan for conquering it, or at least immersing myself in it, which I’ve done on two other computers as well, but just in the past five weeks set the bitch up on my latest computer (I think the game’s from around 2000 or so).
Basically, each class year-to-year has its own schedule with its own set of dates, sometimes conflicting with other classes, so what I did was just start with the lowest stock class and run the three lowest classes I’d never won first place for the year in, going with the lowest as most important, marking them off my list as I finished first for the year. I am deeper into the game this time than ever before, having won all three stock classes, and beaten the first two pro stock classes in the same year (which is amazing dork game accomplishment, right up there with finding the perfect way to run through the Pac Man final screen on the Atari 2600 one day when I was ten, but having to abandon to go to All-Star practice, even though all I was was the shitty left fielder on the All-Star team), and am about four races away from finishing my sixth year, where unless I become retarded from a car accident but still play video games, I’ll beat another level of pro stock. That means I’ll start doing the late models, which go too fast for dirt, so you have to do the illogical thing of turning your wheels the opposite way of what you’d think to control your slides through curves. Luckily, the last pro stock class is a figure eight one, to learn you about using the right turn arrow cursor as well. I used to always use #69, like anybody with my limited cultural upbringing would choose, but this time I went with #0, all into that Agent Zero mantra by Gilbert Arenas (who is putting a million dollar shark tank into his house, with three sharks because that’s all the guy who would get them for him said he’d climb into feed). It was after this that I noticed with the computer drivers, usually the guys with the lower number (which starts with #1) do the best in each class. So I have been working under the assumption that I actually benefitted myself with computer love (you know how games will just screw you over oftentimes) by having the lowest number possible.
I can see this falling off the list pretty quickly though, as just like in real life, once football season starts, I don’t give a fuck about race cars. My newfound retarded Madden ‘08 project will probably preempt Dirt Track Racing dorkery. So hopefully this computer won’t become dead or poisoned by devils like my other ones (I now have a shitty cheap laptop that I relegate all questionable things like music stealing and masturbatory inspiration searches to, which keeps my main one more pure) and I can pick up again next spring.

August O.C.D. #5: NFL Self-hyping

Being I made it through the whole year of self-important dork internet football-related updates, and being the Redskins had such a strangely satisfying end to last year's season (up until Gibbs retired again, as I expected he would, and Dan Snyder took about two weeks to fuck up what Gibbs had built back in four years), I am more stoked for the football season than ever, going through my dork mag, and listening to the NFL channel on the Sirius. Well, I was, but I've had technical difficulties with the satellite, and when I called they had me on hold so long, I am being stubborn and hateful and now don't listen to it in the truck (being their bullshit cigarette lighter charger has broken four times in a year and has burned up both my cigarette lighters to where they just blow fuses now) and only the house, at least through the football season, since they have home team broadcasts for everybody, and then I'll revisit it after that.
It seems odd to me that people might actually like baseball so strongly, because my interest in that (as well as the Nascars) is always fleetingly excited, then drops completely come late summer/early fall. And I know this doesn't seem completely obsessive compulsive, but fuck man, I actually look forward to reading the daily Washington Post sports accounts of Redskins camp, and I don't even want to explain how many stupid half-drunken hours I spend looking up team rosters and a bunch of bullshit minutiae for. Shit, I actually spent about four hours one night using my internet welfare dial-up to go through all the minor NAIA and junior college football helmets at The Helmet Project website to find alternative second helmets for some of the NFL teams to use with my stupid rankings bullshit this year. It’s pretty fucking pathetic. But the worst is the fact the other day I was at Best Buy, and since the new Madden is about to come out, last year’s was on sale for ten bucks, which I got, even though I never really fucked with my Madden ‘07 that much to really warrant an ‘08 model. (I find it better to wait three years between Maddens, and immerse myself completely into franchise mode like twenty years down the imaginary road, to where I’m wanting to buy customized Redskins jerseys of fake players because I create these stupid stories in my head about them. Is there Madden game fanfic? I bet there is; every creepy fucking stupid thing you can think of is out there inside these internets.) But when I first hooked it up, I decided to put every team with me in control, reallign all teams geographically, and then do a fantasy draft where I assign players to the pro teams closest to where they played college ball (with in-state allegiances enforce before out-of-state closer cities). All I could really do the first night was the quarterbacks, drafting two per team, with each team having a third on reserve not yet drafted (since you can only draft positional minimums). The best pair was probably Peyton Manning and Jay Cutler at Tennessee or Brett Favre and Eli Manning in New Orleans, and funniest to imagine was Vince Young and Jamarcus Russell in Houston. Oh yeah, Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart in San Diego would probably be good too, but I think Carson Palmer’s a fucking fruit. I actually probably don’t like that guy even more than stupid Peyton Manning, and I’m not even sure why.
Anyways, stupid NFL football’s all soaking up in my brain lately, to the point I listened to half the Chicago Bears/Kansas City Chiefs preseason game on the radio tonight. That’s pretty bad, and pointless.

Monthly O.C.D. Index Intro

So I, like all of you, am bedazzled by seven million myriad ways to waste my life. I used to have sharp focus, and I think I still kinda do, but I tend to get all obsessive over retarded things and focus so intently on that one thing that I abandon all the other stuff in my life, as well as the more important lasting creative endeavors I could be working on. But whatever man, I'd rather waste my life than not live my life. Or something.
Not really. I often wish I had better focus on certain things instead of this laser beam puppy dog mind that just shoots at specific things for quick blasts of indulgence. But I'm not alone. Shit, the internet is pretty much based on very in-depth analysis of the most minute aspects of life or pop culture or olden day nonsense or whatever. So what I'm going to do, monthly, hopefully around the first week, is start laying out my top five obsessive compulsive indulgences of recent note, for you to enjoy how reflicted my mind be, but also thinking of this blog as something my children can look at and be completely embarrassed about ten years from now, detailing my ups and downs with all the nonsense that swirled around them in their formative years. It will either bring a smile to their face at best, or help them get through their inner conflicts at worst. But it will be here. I will start tomorrow. I'm basically telling myself that, or I'd like to think that. There's a strange dichotomy to doing this blog where I like to think nobody at all ever looks at it, but I know that like a handful of people regularly look at it. So it's hard to pretend you're not there because I know you are, but most of the world has no clue.
Whatever. Too much thought. The weed be clouding my visions.