Monthly Archive for August, 2006

Public Cans of Austin: Kerby Lane (South Lamar)

Published by Twisty on August 31, 2006. 25 Comments

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The grim and sinister baby-changing table in the can at Kerbey Lane has graffiti all over it. It’s where all the infant junkies of South Austin go to get changed. I knew you would want to see it, but—and I blame my dog Bert for this—the pictures came out like crap on accounta when I was snappin’em I had to jump up and down on my one functional leg so as not to tip over into the toilet. Which toilet, though it is cleaner than the baby table, is nevertheless nowhere a spinster aunt wants to be. So all I can show you is the somewhat creepy bathroom hall.

I don’t know what other people eat at Kerbey Lane, but I go for the Cholesterol Platter, served all day: two slices of French toast, two slices of bacon fat, and two scrambled eggs.

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I required this meal today after my vigorous workout at physical therapy. The workout pretty much consisted of tapping my foot, which used to be one of my strongest talents. The fact is, I made the Olympic Toe-Tapping Team in 1980, although of course I never got to compete, because that was the year the USA boycotted the Olympics to protest the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.

Nowadays, I couldn’t tap a toe with pigs. In PT, after raising my foot an inch off the floor about 15 times, I thought my calf muscle, which has lain fallow for 2 weeks, had caught fire. This evidence of my paucity of buffitude caused my physical therapist, the gifted Lori Schwanz, to emit a chuckle.

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Back at Kerbey Lane, Stingray ordered a biscuit and a sausage patty, which ingredients she then formed into a hideous little breakfast burger. Shocking stuff.

Pig enthusiasts: don’t bother. I already know pigs are cool. Let’s just let this one go, hey?

Posted in Austin, Morsel Institute and Public Cans of Austin. Bite me, Chad.

In Which Ron Sullivan Raises The Level Of Blogular Discourse To Dizzying New Heights

Published by Twisty on August 29, 2006. 58 Comments

“Ever had a good close look at a bug’s junk? Lord, lord.”

Posted in Easy Persiflage. Bite me, Chad.

Dinner Bell

Published by Twisty on August 29, 2006. 42 Comments

When last we spoke I had set off on an enchilada hunt. This entailed begging Stingray to drive me—my bum leg has infantilized me to the maddening extent I must be toted like a warm six-pack—to iconical Tex-Mex dive Curra’s (the one on Oltorf). According to the sign, Curra’s is ‘the mother of all Mex.’ I don’t know about that, but it’s definitely the mother of something.

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Above: my standard Curra’s order is ‘award-winning’ vegetarian enchiladas and a Dr Pepper in a giant plastic cup. The award was the blue ribbon at the annual Texas Cheese Smothering Contest. The enchiladas, filled with flaccid squash and mushrooms, are covered with approximately 38% of Wisconsin’s annual Monterrey jack harvest.

Below: There are always four stoned dudes skulking in the corner at Curra’s.

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Posted in Austin and Morsel Institute. Bite me, Chad.

Snide

Published by Twisty on August 29, 2006. 31 Comments

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Phil

My ears were burning. Generally this portends another hot flash, but occasionally it signals something even more hilarious: someone in Blogville has invoked me.

I was moved to act.

“Phil,” I said (Phil is my secretary). “Check the internet! And bring me another tub of Cool Whip!”

Phil checked the internet. Sure enough, ‘Twisty’ was the subject of a sentence on a blog. Phil and I shared a hearty lip-curl over the following fruity send-up of what belledame222, writing in the comments at the always-entertaining PunkAssBlog, calls ‘snide Twisty mode’:

“Dump him! And take off those shoes; anyone who would wear those things voluntarily belongs in a home. Sexbot! Breeder! Illiterate mouth-breathing moron! Really I’m only telling you this for your own good. Oh, good, the dinner bell.”

“Hyuk,” said Phil, ringing an imaginary dinner bell and making oinking sounds. “Good one.”

I gathered the impression that, for some unfathomable reason, (a) Phil had no intention of bringing me any Cool Whip and (b) belledame222 is not entirely convinced that ‘snide Twisty mode’ does all that much to ennoble the human spirit.

So I went in search of enchiladas. What else could I do?

Posted in Easy Persiflage. Bite me, Chad.

Sex

Published by Twisty on August 28, 2006. 224 Comments

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Footwear as birth control. Photo of three of the author’s lower extremities by Stingray

Linking to yesterday’s essay on misogyny in sporty-wear is this post by pro-sport-corset blogger Random Bird. I am sorry to report that Random Bird’s remarks are mostly of a nature that causes bitter tears to spring to the despondent auntly eye (for example, Ms. Bird employs, without apparent irony, the hideous, superincumbent word ‘Derrida,’ in conjunction with such cringingly dude-o-centric rhetoric as “The vagina is empty. The penis fills it.”).* Happily, she does discover what is perhaps the only imaginable use for a McDonald’s salad: comparing it to an uncircumcised weenie. Then she asks the very same question that blamers with the old pioneer spirit have often asked me.

“What are you wearing?”

I kid, I kid. Everybody already knows what I am wearing: two boob scars, a pair of red polka dot boxers, a couple of Ace bandages under a giant fracture boot, one cruddy green leather oxford, and three chocolate marshmallow bonbon crumbs.

Anyway, what really interests me about the post to which I allude is that, after some blogular introspection on the subject of her ‘blowjob duties’ (gulp), Random Bird, who of course is 25, muses thusly:

It seems that some feminists today are taking the position that to embrace your sexuality is to embrace the patriarchy. Yet at the same time, some of these women are also saying that the patriarchy is stifling women’s sexual rights. So I’m left wondering: What is a good feminist supposed to think about sex? Is it simply sex on women’s terms? Is it sex separated from our culture? If it’s the latter, how can we separate our individuals sexual identities from the social constructs that have created us? Is there some Supreme Feminist Platonic Essence of “egalitarian sex” where men and women are equal?

Random Bird is onto something here (ignore the first bit—which I include only for context—where she invokes the strawfeminist; a girl who mistakes her vagina for an empty void would see feminism as the enemy of female sexuality). If I’m reading her right, she’s very sensibly curious, as have been a decent number of blamers over the years, as to just how a feminist is supposed to get off in this crazy, messed-up world.

Yall will be pleased to know that I have the answer.

A feminist gets off the only way a member of an oppressed class can get off: with extreme caution.

In other words, until the psychotic global system of dominance and submission gives way to a sane one that doesn’t fetishize oppression, there is no solution to the buzzkiller political problems inherent in all heterosexual boinking. That’s right. No solution. No happy ending. No scenario wherein prancing in a pink sportcorset can be construed as a politically neutral act. No ‘egalitarian sex’.

Sorry!

I can already smell the fallout; this unpleasant observation always pisses people off. Particularly women. Particularly those straight women who derive a large-ish chunk of their identity from their mad sexbot skillz and brilliantly successful assimilation of the principles of femininity, e.g. “pole dancing is empowering!”, women who don’t yet grasp the scope of the hatred with which men view them. Because they are members of a patriarchal society, and because patriarchal societies always blame women for injustices visited on women, Sexy McSexersons often feel compelled, in no small numbers, to accuse radical feminists (and the occasional spinster aunt) of trying to suck all the fun out of fucking.

Not so fast, Sexy McSexersons! Whoa there, femininst-o-phobes! Radical feminists are not the enemy. We’re not even a bunch of homely old frigid prudes jealous of all the hot sex we’re not getting. Patriarchy is the real sex police. By convincing you that you’re hot when you cave in to its psycho demands, it has turned you into its slave. “Well, what of it?” you say. “What I choose to (a) do in the sack or (b) wear to work or (c) have implanted in my chest is none of your beeswax.”

Perhaps not, but, well, it’s just that certain of your so-called choices are making the whole group look bad. Men appear to have gotten the impression that women are not, you know, quite as entitled as men are. So they’ve institutionalized ‘beauty,’ dieting, cosmetic surgery, sexual harassment, wife-beating, and rape, to name but a few of the thousand unnatural shocks female flesh is heir to. We’re blaming the patriarchy, not you, but really, mightn’t it be time to step up?

“Examine your lives!” is the Twisty refrain. Don’t forget that, as a member of an oppressed class, everything you do is political. So what say you reevaluate those phony, misogynist feminine constructs? Every tube of lipstick, every coy little head-tilt, every train-yourself-not-to-gag-while-deep-throating-a-flaccid-bratwurst session is a symbol of oppression. And not just your oppression, either, but the oppression of all women. And they’re not just symbols, either, but concrete evidence of your collaboration with the dominant culture. Every time you ‘choose’ to totter down the street in a pair of heels and a pencil skirt you’re a Yay Patriarchy billboard. It says “I willingly brand myself as different from and subordinate to men. Shall I bend over now?”

Patriarchy isn’t just some hollow word invented by hairy dykes with sour grapes, you know. Women’s oppression is some serious shit. The sportcorset, insignificant little bondage joke though it may seem, doesn’t exist in a vacuum, ladies. It’s a part of the normativization of femininity—globally pernicious patriarchal bullshit that, if women are ever to fuck unfettered, must be chucked back into the fetid swamp of dudecrap whence it came. Nobody really looks hot working out in a human rights violation, anyway.
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*A vagina is no ‘emptier’ than a leg or a dick or any other body part, but today’s empowerful woman remains unshaken in her belief that we’re all tottering around town with tragic, gaping holes in our clams. The vagina-as-negative-space/woman-as-receptacle concept is one of patriarchy’s more unappetizing morsels of propagandical bogosity.

Posted in Patriarchy, my patriarchy. Bite me, Chad.

Sports, Corsetry, and the Empowerful Woman

Published by Twisty on August 26, 2006. 81 Comments

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Sportcorset

This modern preoccupation with the Empowerful Woman was funny for a while, but it begins to wear thin. I predict that if a post-patriarchal social history of the New Millennium ever gets written there will be a hilarious chapter on this bizarre, buffoonish construct.

I allude to the confident, photogenic, entirely fictitious female who inhabits TV ads, “Sex in the City,” Oprah, and the popular imagination. Today’s woman isn’t a feminist. She doesn’t need to be, because she’s empowered.

She may only earn 3/4 of what a man earns, but she damn well has the empower to look sexy doing it in her cheapcrap push-up bra from Victoria’s Secret. She has the empower to demand pink products from manufacturers. She has the empower to cry out ‘I did it for me!’ when she gets her boob job; maybe she even has the empower to believe it. The empowerful woman is saucy, yet feminine. Clever, yet feminine. In her early thirties, yet feminine. Heterosexual, yet feminine. Stays in shape eating Lean Cuisine and sweating blue Gatorade while kickboxing in slow motion, yet feminine. Yes, the empowerful woman is many things. Too bad powerful isn’t one of them. That’s because feminine is all of them.

It’s no accident that the empowerful woman has stepped into the void left by the absence of any actual, fully-realized women. She was invented for precisely that purpose by the global corporatocracy, without whose tireless sponsorship of consumer feminine consciousness real-life women might have no clue how ugly and unfeminine they are. Femininity—that set of self-absorbed, self-defeating behaviors required of women by the dominant culture to ensure a ready-steady supply of submissive sexbot availability—is central to the empowerful woman narrative. Because there was never so hideous an abomination as a woman who can’t prove, through word, deed, and sportcorset, that she has successfully internalized the patriarchal message and is conversant in fulfilling male fantasy.

But dang it, I keep forgetting: the subject of today’s essay is Nike, the sportswear company. Nike is currently running an ad campaign for their women’s line featuring whup-ass tennis stars and the slogan “I Feel Pretty.” On TV they play the song over footage of Maria Sharapova, who is supermodel foxy, looking surly on her way to the US Open. The juxtaposition of the cutesy song and the take-no-prisoners expression on Sharapova’s face supposed to be edgy-ironic. We women are empowerful enough to be pretty and pretty good at tennis!

NIke has also bought itself a spokes-thlete with actual power, the magnificent Serena Williams. Now, you could pile the earth’s entire supply of pink lace on Serena Williams and she would still, I am happy to say, exist well beyond the bounds of ‘feminine’. But in order to sell overpriced sportswear made by Asian slave labor, Nike dilutes the terrifying spectre of Williams’ threatening prowess; a catalog arriving in the Twisty mailbox yesterday describes her with this howler: “Powerful, feminine, unexpected.”

But wait—while you’re deciding whether to laugh or cry—there’s more: Nike, in an apparent bid to position itself as outfitter to the tragically empowerful, has come up with a thing called a ’sport corset.’ It’s sort of a pink sports bra, but—no joke—it has boning and laces. God forbid you should fail to look like a Hustler centerfold when you’re out on the court. At last, a way to show the world you’re empowerful enough to be a complete moron.

Posted in Patriarchy, my patriarchy. Bite me, Chad.

Gimp

Published by Twisty on August 22, 2006. 30 Comments

Perp and victim. Photo by Stingray.

I must put all speculation to rest. The gripping details of my ankle surgery are as follows.

They appear to be sushi and/or teeth, but the chunks from yesterday’s winsome post-op foto are actually fragments of various ankle bones. The fragments gradually chipped off over years and years of more or less annual sprainings. The tooth-shaped object in the foreground does resemble, in terms of shape and size, a feline fang. A few of the smaller chunks used to be a single super-chunk, but Dr. Ankle had to explode it to get it out. A shame. It had shown great promise, for a chunk.

The sartorial issues resulting from my temporary one-footedness are several. My 46-pound knee-high Velcro boot, for example, was black for the first eighteen minutes I wore it but is now and forevermore enmeshed in golden retriever fur. This unkempt crustypunk look blends, I guess, with a few of my 80’s hair band T-shirts, but I shudder to think what the Manolo would say. Other than ‘Ayyyyy,’ I mean.

You know what else, my crutches effect awkward armpit-bunching of whatever shirt I am wearing, a glamour-don’t that is exacerbated by my not having any boobs to keep the fabric where it oughta be.

You know what else, I am outfitted, at all times, in an anti-embolism stocking. On my good leg. An anti-embolism stocking is a repulsive thick white thigh-high made of the world’s most unforgivingly taut spandex. Its purpose, as far as I can tell, is to cut off completely the circulation in the designated extremity. I may not take it off (like that would even be possible without scissors or a phaser or something) lest I ‘throw a clot.’ I don’t know what ‘throw a clot’ is, and I don’t want to know.

The good news is, there’ll be physical therapy 3 times a week for about 86 years. I can’t wait! Because I have the most excellent physical therapist in Texas. Her name is Lori Schwanz, words I utter with awestruck reverence. She is an artist. Her work is superb. I know because I am an old customer of hers. In between my assorted cancer treatments and various surgeries, Lori Schwanz can be found tirelessly rehabbing a capsulitisized shoulder I messed up when throwing a baby one time about a year and a half ago. What happens is, Lori nearly gets the thing fixed—which miracle she performs by making me stretch giant rubber bands over and over—and then what do I do but go and get another boob chopped off or something, and then the shoulder re-freezes during my inactive convalescence, so we have to start over again. Thus I’m a fixture in her clinic, and I’ve seen a lot of leg injuries limp in and out of that joint. I confess that I always envied the gimps their more glamorous therapies. While I perpetually pull on the boring old giant rubber bands, the crutch’n'cast set get to balance on boards and pick up rocks with their toes and do a kind of high-steppin’ Rockettes routine with orange traffic cones. If that weren’t enough, afterward they get to lie around extravagantly in ice packs while little electrodes buzz juice through their wrecked limbs.

Man, if I don’t get to lie around extravagantly in an ice pack while getting electrocuted in physical therapy I’ll just die.

Meanwhile, perceptive Austinites can expect to observe me crashing around town on crutches for at least the next 2 months, with possible partial weight-/blame-bearing privileges commencing after four weeks. My crutches, actually, have a nice industrial look. Except for the logo decal. The decal says ‘Guardian Select’. To which I say, “my ass.” The only thing those crutches are guardianing is the looming contingency that I will soon go crashing down a flight of stairs, thus ensuring more work for my orthopedic surgeon. At least 78 times every day I teeter on those Guardian Selects with comical precariousness, most often when I am at the pinnacle of some precipice or other.

You know, before I became one-footed, I had no idea how much time I spend on precipices. 78% of my waking life, it turns out.

Posted in Easy Persiflage and Varmint Center. Bite me, Chad.

Greetings From The Zubik Bungalow

Published by Twisty on August 21, 2006. 38 Comments

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The featured chunks were smuggled out of the operating room by my handy sibling, Tidy. Tidy was lucky to get them. Apparently ankle chunks, even those as rare and beautiful as mine, are considered a biohazard or a terrorist threat and are usually incinerated or imprisoned without representation.

Greetings, earthlings. At last I return from my home planet, the Planet Obstreperon. I’ve got so much news I can’t fit any of it in here. Except for this:

I am changing my name back to Zubik.

Oh, and behold, pictured above, three of the seven chunks of interstellar space-rock extracted at great expense, in terms of both cash and piteous suffering, from the Twisty ankle last Tuesday (yes, I will be selling them on eBay). My handy sibling Tidy witnessed the surgery personally and remarked that the indifferent violence with which my surgeon brutalized my defenseless joint was breathtaking. Tidy further described the scene as strikingly gory; bloody sluice from my besieged ankle was apparently surging across the O.R. floor to such a delugical extent that the anesthesiologist, positioned way down at my slack-jawed head, was moved to ask for a canoe. Or perhaps it was a towel.

Either way.

While she was at it, she (my surgeon) decided to reconstruct a couple of ligaments that had, sadly, lost their youthful vim, with the result that I will be forced to wear a gargantuan* velcro boot-cast and remain unable to bear any weight—not even with the limpiest of hobbles—on the affected (or, as orthopedic surgeons like to call it, “involved”) limb for the foreseeable future. The foot is swole up to twice its original size and looks hideous, so I spend all day staring at it.

It smarts a bit, too.

After some consideration, I find that I cannot recommend spending any amount of time whatsoever balancing on one foot. The strain begins to show in the face, and is unseemly.

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*Roughly the size of Guam, or Gargantua

Posted in Easy Persiflage. Bite me, Chad.

A Sad Diminution of the Human Spirit in the Proliferation of Machine-Made Ornament

Published by Twisty on August 13, 2006. 27 Comments

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Self-Portrait Number 7: Watching Made-For-TV Biopic With Moon and Lime Green Recliner

Twisty + new camera = unprecedented banality.

As old dead John Ruskin said, “Photoshop will only make us shallower in our understanding.”

Posted in Patriarchy, my patriarchy. Bite me, Chad.

Encore

Published by Twisty on August 13, 2006. 27 Comments

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Regular readers will recognize the foul countenance of Bert, my 1-year-old golden retriever, and his puffy ball, also 1 year old. Bert, as I may have mentioned once or twice, is singlehandedly responsible for having dug the hole into which I innocently plummeted a few months ago, reducing what had once been an award-winning ankle to a mangled tangle of torn and bruised sinew.

Yes, yes, this is old news. But check this out: a couple of X-rays and MRIs later, it turns out that the reason I still can’t traipse hither and yon with my former Astairian élan — though my assiduity in avoiding further holes has been exemplary, I tell you whut — is that there is a loose chunk of something — a moon rock, possibly, or a petrified nugget broken free of my brain — floating around in my ankle joint, mucking shit up. I mention this because in a day or so I’ll be having — you guessed it — more surgery, both to remove the chunk (which is the size of a lima bean), and to reconstruct what’s left of my poor shredded tendon. By which I mean, I may be benched, blog-wise, for another small while. True, the ankle is a long way from my obstreperal lobe, but we’ve all seen the ghastly results of my Vicodin posts, so I’ll be keeping those to minimum this time (pause for cheers and applause), and it’s anybody’s guess when the fog will lift.

It’s funny, the way things work out. If anybody had told me, a year ago, that within the next 12 months I’d be undergoing 5 surgeries, four months of chemo, seven weeks of radiation, five million injections of radioactive goo, baldness, menopause, zits, an unseemly adult-onset dependence on narcotics, and an ankle chunk, I would have taken the next plane to Antarctica — I believe Southwest flies there for $49 one-way — stepped daintily onto the nearest iceberg, and floated off calmly into eternity.

I’m glad I didn’t, though. I would have missed tomato season.

Posted in Varmint Center. Bite me, Chad.