Monthly Archive for November, 2008

Thanks for nothing 2008

Published by Twisty on November 30, 2008. 35 Comments

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With all the patriarchy I’ve been blaming over the past few years, I’ve somehow drifted away from my roots. That is, it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted a photograph of my lunch.

Who among us right-thinking honky Americans is not conflicted (“conflicted” meaning the discomfiture experienced when it becomes necessary to juggle opposing concepts in order to avoid rocking the boat. It is a funny word the use of which I cannot advocate, but which has nevertheless crept via some sinister psychotic impulse into the spinster vernacular. But what preposition to use? Is one conflicted with, by, or over a thing? Stupid ungrammatical word) on accounta Thanksgiving? Like all holidays, it is riddled with horrors. Smallpox blankets. The spurious Squanto mythology. Genocide. The expectation that one manifest a hearty, convivial mood in the bosom of the fam despite the fact that the whole binge is (a) quasi-godbagious, (b) a shitload of extra work for the womenfolk, and (c) poultry-based.

Regale me not with sanctimonious tales of your tofurkey, by the way. It’s not like the soybean industrial complex isn’t a major player in the megatheocorporatocracy.

And you know? All the vegan Thanksgiving feasts the details of which many of you will not be able to resist posting in the comments section? Still no good. That’s right. Because feasting of any kind, while fun-filled on the surface of it, cannot, in this culture, be accomplished without guilt.

I don’t mean pop-psychology “white” guilt; without question millions of Americans are perfectly capable of greasing their colons with the traditional 37.8 pounds of fat without giving the the American honky’s role in world hunger the flicker of a thought. I also don’t mean the self-imposed I-shouldn’t-be-eating-this-delicious-fatty-meal-
because-of-social-pressures-to-be-thin-and-”healthy”- type guilt. Maybe gluttony isn’t of the highest philosophic importance, but capitulation to patriarchal beauty mandates is the worst possible reason to modify your relationship with the feed-trough.

When I say you can’t feast without guilt, I mean actual guiltiness. It’s the privilege principle. When the stuffing of the maw at Thanksgiving is experienced as oppression by Native Americans and atheists and factory turkeys and the millions of humans globally who are screwed by honky American excess, it is irrelevant that your intent is innocent, or that you are a “good” person, or that a nice dinner party with good food and good friends is what makes life worth living and who am I to cast aspersions, or that if you’d blown off Thanksgiving dinner your mom would’ve been pissed. None of this shit matters. The reason we are able to exist the way we do is that somebody else isn’t able to.

Not that anything will fix it.

Well, revolution maybe.

This complaint is not specific to Thanksgiving feasts, of course. Guilt obtains twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It’s like the Eyes of Texas. You cannot get away.* I blame the patriarchy for the whole lousy set-up.

Thus, my leftover stuffing and ativan lunch.

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* The University of Texas fight song is a creepy stalker’s anthem.

Posted in Morsel Institute and The megatheocorporatocracy. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt casts jaundiced eye upon stupid product

Published by Twisty on November 21, 2008. 87 Comments

American culture is infested with a great many pernicious social constructs the abolition of which the Twistolution would celebrate with a yacht party in Bali. Drinks on me! Sarongs optional!

There are so many pernicious social constructs, in fact, that without a little help from the megatheocorporatocracy, it would be impossible to focus my full blaming powers on any single one. Fortunately, this morning I was aided by the Bayer drug company.

The Bayer drug company, you will recall from the Drugs and Society course you took sophomore year, did not invent heroin, but they were the first to market the heck out of it. Not, as is popularly thought, as a cure for morphine addiction, but as a cough syrup. Because heroin is just a quick-acting morphine, it really took off. After it was criminalized in the US in 1914 — kicking off one of patriarchy’s most beloved and enduring class wars, the War on Drugs — a sub-facet of addict culture was to scavenge scrap metal to finance one’s skag habit: hence, junkie.

Bayer quit selling heroin a hundred years ago, but they have been far from idle when it comes to producing pharmaceuticals of questionable efficacy intended for human ingestion. In the 80’s, they sold stuff called Factor VIII to hemophiliacs. Come to find out, Factor VIII contained the AIDS virus! Thousands died! So they developed a safer version to sell in the US. But they kept selling the old one in Asia and Latin America. It wouldn’t have been profitable to just throw the tainted stuff away.

But I digress.

Bayer blipped the Twisty radar this morning when it aired a television commercial for vitamin capsules. The capsules are called One-A-Day Teen Advantage. They come in two versions. That’s right. “For Him” and “For Her.”

Thus pointing at two highly celebrated pernicious social constructs with one spinster claw-finger.

I allude, of course, to the revolting concepts of gender and of teenagerdom.

It will not knock the regular reader off her recliner when I say again that I am revolted by the phony socialization bullshit that accompanies the arbitrary establishment of two — not one, not thirteen, but two — officially recognized genders, the differences between which are supposedly so extreme and whose interests are supposedly so diametrically opposed that an entire global paradigm of domination is necessary to control the vast, unknowable forces unleashed by this volatile boy-girl narrative.

But I haven’t touched on the bogosity of teenagerness much. So just let me say how revolted I am by the phony socialization bullshit that accompanies the arbitrary establishment of a bogus phase of the human life cycle devoted entirely to drunk driving, moping, responsibility-shirking, and JD Salinger novels. Teenagers are a marketing concept created to sell acne cream.

And now to sell vitamins, apparently. Bayer’s new Teen Advantage pill focuses on the “top health concerns of moms and teens” (dads, it is well documented, are oblivious to their children’s health; their top health concern is erectile dysfunction). The “For Him” vitamins address the critical dude issue of “healthy muscle function.” Girl-teen vitamins, on the other hand, are primarily concerned with “healthy skin.”

Seriously. This shit just writes itself.

So I don’t need to spell out the multi-faceted celebration of patriarchal ideology, binary genderism, and sexist bullshit encrapsulated by this asinine product. Hey, Bayer Product Development Guy! The 50’s called, and they want their male chauvinist pig jibbajabba back!

If, back when I was still a captive rebelling against the stifling stewardship of my nuclear family, my mother had induced me to take dork-ass pills called “Teen Advantage,” I would have written 8 pages in my journal about her smothering suburban uncoolness and how I couldn’t wait until I was 18, whereupon I would move to Manhattan, wear black, and become a fixture at the most prestigious literary salons.

Posted in Keep your bias off my gender and The megatheocorporatocracy. Bite me, Chad.

Wine fridge

Published by Twisty on November 15, 2008. 45 Comments

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Zippy, still hearing the call of the wild at age 16, does not need a wine fridge to survive.

Goddammit, it’s been months since the initiation of my relocation to the Texas Hill Country. The move has not yet been completed. This is because the house, which has been under construction for three years, remains adamantly opposed to my occupation.

For example, the cistern water is of a highly questionable character (I’m being generous here. If I described accurately the semi-liquid substance emitted by my spigots you would have to stop reading and hurl. See The Magic Christian for more information). Windows leak, doors freak, faucets overshoot sinks and soak people square in the crotch (funny until it happens to you), flipping on a porch light causes a county-wide blackout, etc.

Even still yet now today a hora, as years drag into decades and I begin to wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled, there remain holes to be drilled, filters ordered, bondo applied, Bobcats rented, seeds sewn, seams caulked, snakes removed, water samples sent off to labs, messages left on sub-contractors’ cell phones so they can leave messages on my cell phone placing the blame for their fuckups on other sub-contractors, and, naturally, bills to be paid.

In the meantime I’m camping out in the new house, come hell or high water. Fortunately the wine fridge — an anomaly, it’s the only non-German appliance in the joint, and consequently the only one that works — has been properly installed and is humming along like a vintage Bentley. At some point in the distant past, when my obstreperal lobe was running on all eight cylinders, I cleverly stocked this excellent fridge with a bunch of snazzy boutique wines my father left me. I hate to think to what abysmal depths of despair I would have sunk had I not seen to this critical detail.

I allude in particular to an episode of telephonal infamy. In this episode, the phone company — a vile entity known as Verizon — put me on permahold for about 86 and a half hours. This permahold was necessary so that I might experience the maximum degree of angry frustration when they at last informed me that it would be three months before they would get around to installing a land line. Bright young auntie that I am, it began to dawn on me that this delay would leave me to fend off the creeping discomfiture of boondockian isolation with nothing but my wits and my cell phone. The ruralized performance of which cell phone I can only characterize as shitty.

I won’t comment on my wits.

You’d be surprised at the frequency with which a phone can come in handy when you’re living in a half-built internetless house out in the middle of West Rattlesnake. It turns out that, out here, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the degree of phone call urgency and the ineffectuality of your cell phone. Your mom calls to jaw about Erica Kane getting booted off Dancing With The Stars? No problem! You got 5 bars. But the minute a pack of rabid wild hogs corners you on the precipice of a 60-foot bluff, forget about it. You’re goin’ down, and no one’s gonna find your vulture-pecked corpse for weeks. Thanks, AT&T!

Cell phones: at or near the top of my list of things that people cling to desperately despite the fact that they don’t fucking work. Also on that list: wrinkle cream, Jesus, and anything that purports to get the skunk out of a skunked dog.

Seriously. You can mix up hydrogen peroxide, lemony-fresh dish soap, baking soda, white vinegar and tomato juice, and soak that mutt all day long, but take it from me; if you think the dog smells even an iota better after all that, you’re delusional. Nothing but time gets the skunk out of a skunked dog. At least, nothing that won’t kill the dog.

So if it weren’t for that wine fridge — and the fact that it’s fucking excellent out here — I would have pulled my own head off by now.

Posted in El Rancho Deluxe. Bite me, Chad.

Internet connection, why hast thou forsaken me?

Published by Twisty on November 14, 2008. 16 Comments

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Who am I to thwart the public’s inexhaustible fascination for photographs of my radio tower?

As I merge my bony old biomass with the Arcadian rhythms of the Texas Hill Country, two truths emerge.

One: one of my slippers will contain a scorpion in the morning.

Two: radio tower or no radio tower, one’s rural high-speed internet connection is an evanescent figment. It vanishes into a fugitive fog, it shivers away from a puffy cloud, it drifts off with wayward microwaves from the neighbors’ tower, it stays out all night partying, it returns at dawn with an armful of flowers, chocolate croissants, and a print edition of the New York Times.

So my Software Updater won’t update my software, my email won’t mail my e’s, and my Vonage phone won’t von. Poor podcastless me.

Meanwhile, during a brief moment of connectivity, I note a trend toward blaming “minorities” for the wild success of recent gay marriage bans. I would suggest (again) that those most concerned with penis placement are godbags first and “minorities” second. My suspicions about the structure of Hetero-American culture are threefold.

Fold number one: Godbags — and their non-proselytizing but higher-power-believin’ brethren, the godbag-lites — regardless of race, creed, or color, are the majority in the US.* Fold number two: even if they weren’t the majority, godbags like to vote more than truthbags. Fold number three: Heterosexual honkys, as a general category, hate homos as much as the next guy.

You know, the megatheocorporatocracy of today, through millennia of evolution, is an intricate but brainless mega-organism that exists only to replicate its reactionary self ad infinitum.

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*See this June 2008 article in the Washington Post, which reports on a poll finding that 80% of Americans think angels flit around on sunbeams curing cancer and reward the faithful with “resources.”

“For many Americans, God is a vivid presence. About one-third of the people surveyed said they receive answers to their prayer requests at least once a month and say they have experienced or witnessed a divine healing of an illness or injury.”

Posted in El Rancho Deluxe, Godbagism and Keep your bias off my gender. Bite me, Chad.

Can’t have a bunch of fags queering the deal

Published by Twisty on November 10, 2008. 83 Comments

How, one asks, wiping a drip of spittle from lips slackened in disbelief, do American voters simultaneously elect a black dude president and ban gay marriage in a single swipe of the always-reliable electronic voting machine? Well, I am the world’s foremost authority, so I’ve got a couple of theories.

The Dawning of a New Post-Patriarchal Tomorrow

The New Obam-A-Merica is young, happy, hopey, changey. We’ll ban gay marriage, OK? but only to pave the way for the inevitable ban on straight marriage, whereupon we liberate millions from the stifling, dimensionless, heteronormative purgatory of the nuclear family, and from movies where beautiful brides claw each other’s eyes out under whimsical comedic circumstances.

Not buying that one? Well, how about

Mass Delusion

Bizarre as it may seem, many Americans mistake for truth certain fanciful narratives the central figure of which is an invisible, immortal male superdude who lives in a cloud palace and who is as obsessed with human reproductive material as he is with smiting infidels. Quite a large chunk of the populus are so besotted by this fantasy, they think the invisible superdude is actually real. They chit-chat with him, bargain with him, build fancy castles for him, use special gang signs with him, seek to appease his wrath, cajole him into intervening on their personal behalf, sacrifice the lives of the less fortunate in exchange for such filthy lucre as he sees fit to confer upon them, announce to the world that they believe in him so their peers won’t mistake them for amoral atheists, and reinterpret his myths in whatever manner will most benefit their own status in this super-fubar set-up.

As a result of the surprisingly widespread belief that this or any other fictional character ought to be given carte blanche in matters of social policy, quite a few inconsistencies plague the American socio-political scene. One such inconsistency is the dissonance between “liberty and justice for all” — a quaint story Americans tell themselves about themselves — and liberty and justice the godbag way — which puts into practice the immortal cloud-abiding superdude’s ideology that certain folks are more equal than others.

The fundamental irrationality of professional political godbagism makes things danged awkward for people like women, who in reality are human beings, but who are confined by the godly narrative to the humiliating role of meatsocks. It’s also awkward for queer women, who are not enough like traditional meatsocks, and for queer men, who are too much like traditional meatsocks. We don’t get to chillax and be ourselfs. Somebody is always threating to rape us or kick our ass or suddenly come down with Gay Panic Disorder.

The mass delusion known as homophobia is a sub-species of misogyny.

A black dude can get elected president, but a woman? When swine defy gravity. Racism flourishes, all righty, but it’s covert, on the DL, the embarrassing private luxury of elderly honkys and parochial-minded nincompoops, an imp of the perverse the public indulgence of which is becoming increasingly difficult both to justify and to legislate[1]. It seems safe to say that if the majority of Americans wished to cling to racism as a defining aspect of their cult, last week’s election would have had rather a different outcome.

Misogyny, on the other hand, is bullet-proof. It’s not merely tolerated, it’s openly celebrated in the American street, the American courtroom, the American bedroom, the American internet. Except for a puny consortium of bruised and contused blamers calling blindly to the Vaginatariat through mists of dime store cologne, even the victims of this oppression embrace it. Thus is it possible for American voters to view straight male Barack Obama as a human being, but to view the queers seeking some of that liberty and justice as a bunch of deviant meatsock mutations to throw under the bus.

As mentioned earlier, heterosexual marriage is the primary unit of patriarchy. It’s how dudely power is transferred from generation to generation, and must not fall into enemy hands. Homos, apparently, are not equal enough to perform the sacred ritual of the white-veiled pussy presentation.

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1. Excepting, of course, the hysteria over “illegal aliens” — the screamingly deprecatory name given to that group of people who do America’s shit work for shit pay — which hysteria has climaxed with citizen militias — many of them, I am sad to say, Texans — patrolling the borders with flame-throwers and nukular bombs to keep our country free of suspicious swarthy types.

Posted in Godbagism, Keep your bias off my gender, Lobe-blowing, Men Hate You and Politics. Bite me, Chad.

Tower of power

Published by Twisty on November 8, 2008. 67 Comments

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The new radio tower at El Rancho Deluxe enables me to log back into the abuse. Yay internet.

Just so you won’t think I was blowing fumes through my snoot yesterday when I resurfaced to announce that I am back from hiatus, I am posting this here thing. This post will largely consist of nothing. It is mostly to reacquaint my claw-like hands with the rigors of typing, and my obstreperal lobe with the smell of the dominant culture’s putrid off-gassing.

Much has gone down in the life of the spinster aunt since last we spoke, but it was nothing I cared to interpret through the jaundiced lens of blame, which is why I didn’t feel too bad taking a blogular powder on yall. Mostly what have befallen me are events of a rural and therefore — because I had overestimated my boondocksian chops — a comical nature. Assorted hijinxes have involved, against a backdrop of prickly pears and Polled Hereford excrement: snakes, rogue cattle, sheriff’s deputies, a wild horse, two dudes from the ranch up the road who spoke such thick Texan I could not understand’em, feral burros, turkeys, deer, skunks, funnel-web spiders, jack rabbits, coyotes, scorpions and dogs.

My particular favorite was the dog/skunk/feral burro combo. Ah, what a wingding that was.

So. I went to considerable trouble to get some internet up in this mug, and now I am asking myself: “Why, why, why?”

For two months I enjoyed frolicking in meadows, eating Brussel’s sprout tacos morning noon and night, shoveling cow pies and 8-inch centipedes out of my garage, etc. Then today I finally check the blog’s moderation queue and it’s full of the same old mean, misogynist, racist, asinine crap as before. Apparently 7 or 8 more nascent teen unabombers have discovered just how hilarious it is to cut and paste the word “cunt” eight million times. Also, as before, I just don’t “get” BDSM; in case I’d never had explained to me the roguish feminist iconoclasm of the dominance-and-submission system of het sex, several readers thoughtfully provided graphic descriptions of how great it is, and of how stupid I am. One moron reminded me that if I didn’t publish his remarks he would spread it all around the internet that I censor readers and am a feminazi, which I guess would ruin my life forever.

Seriously? Blowing out to the middle of some inaccessible ranchette doesn’t actually eradicate world suffering, injustice, imbecility, and anti-Twistarianism?

I may turn this thing off again after all.

Posted in El Rancho Deluxe. Bite me, Chad.

Hallefuckinglooyah

Published by Twisty on November 7, 2008. 57 Comments

Somebody pinch me! I’m typing this from a bucket truck next to the 40-foot tower this guy Rick had to bury in 5 feet of cement next to my house, to which tower he then attached some kind of radio, to which radio I then attached my laptop. It’s been over 2 months in the making, but I think I now have an internet connection at El Rancho Deluxe.

I didn’t think I’d miss the internet all that much, but that prediction has proven to be inaccurate. It turns out I need the internet to live. For the past week, for example, they’ve had to lock me in a darkened room, in restraints, and with an IV drip of room temperature Cool Whip, to keep me from clawing my own eyes out. I only just found out today that Obama won the election.

Well, that’s all behind me now. Let the healing begin.

Posted in Announcements. Bite me, Chad.