Archive for the 'Austin' Category

Spinster aunt begins to hallucinate. Now with seafood similes.

Published by Jill on August 5, 2011. 126 Comments

Vulture
This vulture is always giving me the eye as I stagger around in the dust, looking for a refrigerator to crawl into.

Maybe one of you science brainiacs knows whether this flippin heat wave is just a normal fluctuation in the Grand Climatronical Scheme, or whether it’s Al Gore’s nightmare come true. Either way, I blame the patriarchy for it. And for the only conversation anyone ever has around here anymore. It goes like this:

Jill [wiping forehead with back of forearm]: Hey Cindy Lou. How are ya.
Cindy Lou [wiping forehead with back of forearm]: Well, I sure wish it were a little hotter.
Jill [smiling weakly]: Heh.
Cindy Lou [smiling weakly]: Heh.

I admit it. I made a couple of snide remarks a week or two ago when it was all over the news that the Eastern seaboard was all flushed and dizzy over a few days of temperatures in the 90’s. “Call the networks, it’s 98 and we’re starting to perspire!”

Waa. What a bunch of whiners. In Cottonmouth County it’s been 100 degrees every day since May. Texans, however, don’t go on NPR and get all verklempt about it. We suck it up. We carry on. We spring from the TempurPedic an hour before dawn, dunk ourselves in a vat of sunscreen, shove the noggin into a large-brimmed hat, sprint about the countryside doing this and that, and get our ass back under the palapa by 9 AM. Then we find a chair in front of a fan and sit in it, motionless, until the sun goes down. Then we drink a bunch of margs, hit the sack, and do it all over again the next day. Until November. Here in the Prickly Pear Belt it takes more than a little triple digit solar radiation to harsh our mellow.

But today I’m crying uncle. Uncle, do you hear? It’s the 3rd or 4th day in a row of 107, after a week of 106, with another two weeks of 107 in the forecast, with heat indexes ever more purgatorial. 111. 113. 115. Record after record is smashed. It hasn’t rained since about 1947. If you stare too long at the scenery, the friction of your gaze upon the old dried-up grass ignites a wildfire. If you have access to a pool you wouldn’t swim in that thing with a ten foot pole or you’d get poached like some sad tilapia entree at the Golden Corral Buffet.

At this point my air conditioner merely wrinkles a cynical lip and exhales a hot, wet breath if I try to crank it below 90. Yesterday morning when I opened my front door, a crematorial blast of glowing orange air melted my lobe. It liquefied into a glib and oily slime and dripped off my honker. I collected this lobe-grease in a jar, and will probably use it for fuel this winter when the furnace breaks down.

Until then, I’m packing the bathtub with ice and making like an oyster on the half-shell.

Posted in Announcements, Austin and Lobe-blowing. Bite me, Chad.

Michael Jackson perv alert in Austin neighborhood

Published by Jill on February 14, 2010. 50 Comments

Blamer Susan just got this postcard in the mail. She yawned.

Risk Level: HIGH!!!!!

Risk Level: HIGH!!!!!

You know these cards. “NOTICE OF HIGH-RISK SEX OFFENDER IN COMMUNITY.” The state sends’em out when a convicted perv, who for some reason isn’t in jail even though he is “high risk,” moves into your neighborhood, to frolic and molest.

The question is, what the fuck are you supposed to do with this information? Go from orange to red alert? Or, if you are already on red alert because this is, like, the 8th one of these cards you’ve gotten, escalate to infrared alert? Arm yourself at all times with a pit bull and a flamethrower? Build a cinderblock bunker and lock yourself up in it?

They should send out cards that read NOTICE OF BLOCK PARTY CELEBRATING CASTRATION OF ANOTHER SEX OFFENDER. PUBLIC SHAMING AT 9. MUSIC STARTS AT 10. BYOB.

Because, Jesus in a jetpack, these unhelpful warnings are meaningless, merely adding to the shitpile and general sense of exhaustion women perpetually experience as a result of performing our unceasing hyper-vigilance.

As Susan points out, big whoop. Another day, another perv in close proximity. As we all know, these assholes are everywhere, and the overwhelming majority don’t come with picture postcards. In fact, the only ones with postcards are the non-white, non-affluent ones.

Except this one. Ha!

petetownshend

Wouldn’t it be funny if, instead of sending out postcards announcing the arrival of unreconstructed violent criminals, the state would think up ways to prevent dude-based violence in the first place? Such methods would not, if I may be allowed an even more improbable dream, include advising women on how to keep from being attacked.

Posted in Austin and Rape Culture. Bite me, Chad.

I got yer rape prevention email forward right here

Published by Jill on December 6, 2009. 96 Comments

Gas Pumper

It was on a recent comment thread that the subject of racial bias in abduction reportage popped up. I allude to the phenomenon where a white woman and a black woman may be kidnaped on the same day, but the news media only get overwrought about the white girl. The socio-pathology underlying the phenomenon is said to be that, for a given kidnap/murder, the depth of responding media prurience correlates precisely with the abductee’s sex and social status.

As an aside, let us please observe a moment of silence for how fucking educational this blog is. I had always informally thought of the aforementioned phenomenon as Natalee Hollowayism. Come to find out it’s an official syndrome. It’s called, in fact, Missing White Woman Syndrome. I read all about it in Wikipedia. Speaking of Wikipedia, here’s a kind of funny example of Wikipedian copy-editing gone awry:

“Described as ‘bright and beautiful,’ Huston’s remains were found more than a year later.”

But I digress.

No, wait, I feel another digression coming on. While I’m on the subject of race bias, an anecdote:

Austin’s swankiest second-hand store is a joint called Uncommon Objects. This shop, located on trendy South Congress on the event horizon of an irony wormhole, is jammed to the joists with quirky, overpriced mid-20th century bric-a-brac and weird-ass shit running the gamut from cheezy to creepy: huge pink vulvateen ceramic ashtrays, disfigured and disembodied rubber baby-doll heads, rusty old dental instruments, frayed Masonic tapestries embroidered with sinister symbols, etc. I go a-rummaging there whenever I’m in the market for a Mason jar full of petrified sugar cubes ca. 1953, or a disintegrating antique leather baby shoe, or, as was the case yesterday when I adjourned thither for a quick rootle, a heartwarming gift for my sidekick Stingray (see the chic and elegant plastic brooch pictured above; although for some reason, she failed to warm to it in the enthusiastic manner I had anticipated).

Anyway, I had just finished examining a disturbing, moldy-looking object labeled “FAKE HAM $45″ when I espied a faded 8 x 10 portrait of a young couple in love. The label said, “PHOTO OF BLACK COUPLE $16.50.”

Because I am an advanced patriarchy-blamer and world-famous sleuth, I immediately looked for, and detected, a similar photo of a white couple. You’ll never believe it! The sticker on this photograph did not say “PHOTO OF WHITE COUPLE $16.50.” It said “ROMANTIC PHOTO, $30.”

So there ya go.

Onward. In the comments thread to which I allude above, blamer Speedbudget observes, with respect to the idea that media coverage of women’s abductions reflects what blamer Isabel sneeringly refers to as “a public outpouring of concern:”

“In my neck of the woods, the public outpouring is one of, you guessed it, disdain for the women who get themselves kidnapped, raped, and murdered. You know. Cause she should have been doing whatever it is women should do to avoid getting kidnapped, raped, and tortured by the perpetrators of crimes everywhere.

The media tends to use these stories as object lessons for us ladybrain holders. The commentary on news programs is all about how to keep yourself safe, not about the perpetrators and how men have some [I would say "all" -- Ed.] responsibility for the violence.”

Coincidentally, I recently received, from blamer frootloopz, an email on a totally related subject. The email contained a satiric regendering of one of those “scaremongering emails that people forward to me from ‘An Othershire Police Constabulary’ about how I shouldn’t go out at night, shouldn’t drink alcohol, shouldn’t do this, shouldn’t do that etc.” For the edification of the cosmos, I reproduce (a slightly modified version of) it here.

___________________________________________

Sexual Assault Prevention Tips Guaranteed to Work

1. Don’t put drugs in women’s drinks.

2. When you see a woman walking by herself, leave her alone.

3. If you pull over to help a woman whose car has broken down, remember not to assault her.

4. If you are in a lift and a woman gets in, don’t assault her. You know what? Don’t even ogle her.

5. When you encounter a woman who is asleep, the safest course of action is to not assault her.

6. Never creep into a woman’s home through an unlocked door or window, or spring out at her from between parked cars, or assault her.

7. When you lurk in bushes and doorways with criminal intentions, always wear bright clothing, wave a flashlight, or play “Boys Who Rape (Should All Be Destroyed)” by the Raveonettes on a boombox really loud, so women in the vicinity will know where to aim their flamethrowers.

8. USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM! If it is inconvenient for you to stop yourself from assaulting women, ask a trusted friend to accompany you when in public.

9. Carry a rape whistle. If you find that you are about to assault a woman, you can hand the whistle to your buddy, so s/he can blow it to call for help.

10. Give your buddy a revolver, so that when indifferent passers-by either ignore the rape whistle, or gather round to enjoy the spectacle, s/he can pistol-whip you.

Don’t forget: Honesty is the best policy. When asking a woman out on a date, don’t pretend that you are interested in her as a person; tell her straight up that you expect to be assaulting her later. If you don’t communicate your intentions, the woman may take it as a sign that you do not plan to rape her.

______________________________

Forward this, along with $1, to everyone you know, and soon you will be a millionaire!

Posted in Austin, Blogulation, Mass Media, Men Hate You, Oppression Culture and Rape Culture. Bite me, Chad.

Austin inhabitant eschews Twitter; employs extremely inefficient low-tech communication device

Published by Jill on September 6, 2009. 46 Comments

Still life with blue plastic army man, deflated balloons, ribbon, and instruction sheet

You know how sometimes something sort of funny happens? Something sort of funny happened to me this morning.

The canids and I were out traipsing over hill and dale, like we do every morning. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, the fish were flapping, the snakes were snaking, etc. I’d found a funky fungus and taken a few photographs for my new, eagerly anticipated series “Mutant Prickly Pear Paddles of the Texas Hill Country.” All in all a delightful pastoral tableau.

But, uh-oh! Out of coffee. Time to wrap up this heartwarming nature crap and get my under-caffeinated ass back to the bunkhouse. Naturally, at this juncture, Bert took off after a deer and was miles away within seconds. Thus were Fran and I obliged to track him over rough terrain with the handy GPS device we had implanted in his brain stem for just such occasions.

We were stumbling through a section of El Rancho Deluxe known as the Oaky Knoll — which knoll, if accuracy had been considered at all when determining the nomenclature, really ought to have been called the Spider Webby and Ankle-Destroying Fatal-Rocky Knoll — when Fran espied a foreign object which oozed forth garish hues and improbability. She ate it immediately.

I pried the thing out of Fran’s throat in the nick of time. It was a blue plastic army man tangled up in ribbon, grass, popped balloons, and a muddy slip of paper upon which some slogan appeared to have been printed. My dog nearly choked to death on a plastic infantryman with a machine gun. The war, I thought, comes home.

But what of this slip of paper?

“! ! ! YOU FOUND ME ! ! !” it announced, helpfully. “Help me continue my adventure.”

There was a Flickr URL, too, but it had been partially digested by Fran. Eventually, however, I was able to determine the identity of the party responsible for showering the Psmith country seat with non-biodegradable trash and nearly killing my dog. This person.

A couple of months ago, balloon releaser/photographer Atxrobledo bid adieu Fran’s nemesis, the blue plastic army man, from trendy downtown Austin. I wondered why. Surely, if s/he was suffering from a surfeit of plastic army men, there are more efficient methods of disposing of them than sending them into the Austin horizon dangling from balloons. I mean, dude. Don’t Mess With Texas.

So I scanned Atxrobledo’s Flickr page, hoping for some insight into this maniac’s brain. And so I found it.

S/he apparently makes no effort to control a compulsion to “release” plastic figurines into the wild by attaching them to balloons and letting the wind take them wherever it may.

The dream goal is to get a map of where balloons have been released and see how far the chain of connections can go.

Jeepers. It’s a message-in-a-bottle-cum-chain-letter type deal. Quaint. But ultimately, I can’t get behind it. Why? Two reasons.

One, this Atxrobledo is just a little too bossy for someone who communicates via balloon with perfect strangers upon whom s/he relies for the fulfillment of her/his dream goal.

[W]henever you can, if you’re awesome, get your own set of a bunch of balloons and figures and let them go from your apartment or wherever. Be sure to take pictures beforehand and geotag where you’re releasing them from (basically try and just replicate what i did with when you released them and from where…) [...] Make sure and make my day by responding.

Look, I’m awesome as hell, but I’m too sure I’ve got time to tie blue plastic army men to balloons, photograph’em, and let’em go “from my apartment or wherever.” Such an enterprise would seriously interfere with my reclining schedule.

And two: whereas the chance of an Earthling with Internet access finding one of these things and chuckling quietly to herself even as she mindlessly obeys cryptic instructions on the slip of paper is exceedingly remote, the chances of birds getting tangled up in’em, or some furry woodland creature ingesting’em and so forth, are quite a bit higher. Who knows how many raccoons or kangaroos are even now suffering debilitating balloon impactions as a result of this project? Do you know that, as we speak, floating in the Pacific Ocean there is a thing known as The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and that it is twice the size of Texas? According to the Sierra Club, fur seals in New Zealand “poop shards of yellow and blue” plastic. Is that what we want for the Texas Hill Country? Seals pooping shards?

I think not. I say, stop the madness now!

This wanton littering of the countryside with blue plastic army men via balloon must cease, I tell you! Not for me, not for you, but for the spinster aunts of tomorrow. I hate to imagine that theirs is a future bereft of raccoons and aardvarks merely because some thoughtless urbanite killed’em all off with blue plastic army man balloons in pursuit of some fatuous whim. You want random strangers to do your bidding? Try Facebook.

Posted in Art is my LIFE, Austin, El Rancho Deluxe, Heartwarming Nature Crap, Not Altogether Depressing and Varmint Center. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt perceives misogynist billboard

Published by Jill on June 14, 2009. 96 Comments

Pregnantscared
Creepy billboard somewhere on MoPac.

There is only one reason that pregnancy should “scare” you: your culture hates women and kids.* It especially hates teenage women. It especially hates pregnant teenage women. It especially hates teenage pregnant women who get knocked up under unapproved circumstances.

Some unapproved circumstances:

they are not legally bound to an approved representative of the state (husband)
they’re poor
they’re prostituted
they’ve got a drug problem
they’re sluts
they’re women of color
they’re unmarried and poor and have some kids already

Your culture totally fucking hates these women no matter what. It hates’em if they have abortions, and it totally fucking hates the resulting kids if the unapproved women keep’em instead of adopting them out to approved (white affluent heterosexual married) people under the guiding auspices of godbag motherfuckers.

Yeah, I said “motherfuckers.” Take a Xanax.

The world’s uteruses are owned by the state. This means the world’s women are owned by the state. Unapproved pregnant women who aren’t claimed by a state-licensed nuclear family replicator (husband) are required to be scared shitless. This is so their culture can punish them for their sins, and so that godbag uterus-control groups like the Majella Society (the cabal responsible for these asinine billboards) can get their hooks in and brainwash the unapproved women into having babies they don’t want.

These Majellans are world-class kooks, by the way. This is the promo for a commercial airing in local Austin markets:

Have you ever wondered how our country would be different without abortion? Lifesaver [the title of the commercial] shows how over 50 million individuals would be helping our society today.

Here’s how the commercial“shows” how 50 million non-aborted fetuses are morally superior to aborted ones: it features a Beauty2K-compliant actor wearing a firefighter suit at a fire –she’s a former fetus, brought to term and given up by a scared teen mother — who grew up to be gorgeous, and to save lives, too!

Apparently the theory is that all aborted fetuses possess magical powers that might-have-been. Majella suggests with all seriousness that millions of aborted “babies,” had their host humans not asserted their personal sovereignty and gotten them removed, would have all grown up to be Mother Teresa and Jesus and dudes who would cure cancer. It does not seem to occur to Majella that the mere circumstance of having once been a fetus that was not aborted in no way ensures that a person will become a selfless world-saving supermodel scientist.

While there is no way to actually disprove the hypothesis that aborted fetuses are somehow superior in character to unaborted ones, the fact that all aborted fetuses are dead would indicates that they lack at least one trait necessary for superhumanness: not being dead. Furthermore, that the entire human population, all of whom are former unaborted fetuses, are just regular schmoes eating Twinkies on the couch watching internet porn, suggests that preventing abortions does not create heroes.

_____________________
* Homicide is the leading cause of death among young women. Homicide is the leading cause of death among pregnant women. The homicide rate for black pregnant women is 3 times that of white pregnant women.

Posted in Austin, Compulsory pregnancy, Godbagism, Men Hate You and Oppression Culture. Bite me, Chad.

Texas state rep needs reprogramming

Published by Twisty on April 13, 2009. 72 Comments

Texas State Rep. Betty Brown, racist tool

Texas State Rep. Betty Brown, racist tool

Not all Texans, I regret to say, are easygoing, progressive thinkers. State Representative Betty Brown, for example, is a tool.

Betty Brown just can’t wrap her brain around the fact that some certified 100% Texans have Asian names. This is because her brain has the philosophical sophistication of a Thomas Kinkade painting. Texans should have names like “Betty” or “Brown,” good, solid American names she can spell and pronounce. Asian names freak her out. People with these wacked-out foreign monikers should “make [them] more accessible.” Or so she told Ramey Ko, a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans giving testimony at the Lege on voter ID legislation.

Ramey Ko. That’s one crazy fucking inaccessible name.

“Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?” Brown said.

Ko’s “citizens” should make an effort to grasp how “difficult” their language is, and what an inconvenience they present to the real Americans here who are trying to run good, old-fashioned, discriminatory Caucasian elections. They should lose those bizarro names and get ones that Betty Brown can feel more comfortable with. Because, seriously, it’s bad enough that she has to put up with all these damned Spanish people speaking Mexican.

If it’s hard to imagine a white lady with pink lipstick and helmet hair uttering anything more bigoted and condescending than that, you don’t know Betty Brown!

Brown later told Ko: “Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?”

Listen, Ko, you and your kind are trouble. Can’t you see that if you just knuckle under to honky bigotry everyone will be happy?

[Xie xie, B.R.]

Posted in Austin, Lobe-blowing and Politics. Bite me, Chad.

First, the bad news

Published by Twisty on January 27, 2009. 38 Comments

BatterBlaster

I’ve just found organic aerosol waffle batter, and I’m telling everyone! Just heat up the old waffle iron, point, and squirt! Try it with a glob of organic aerosol whipped cream for a virtuous-yet-space-age breakfast experience that can’t be beat. Waffle-hatas in your breakfast nook? Let’em do the whippet!

While I absorb my organic aerosol waffle, my thoughts drift ahead, as they always do at breakfast, to dinner. There is asparagus in my fridge. A brilliant plan begins to erupt in my brain’s molten core: organic aerosol Hollandaise sauce. Why has nobody thought of this?

Because I cannot focus on anything for more than 42 seconds, my thoughts also drift back to yesterday. Yesterday I found myself on the receiving end of a few media broadcasts, all of which caused my obstreperal lobe to sort of seize up. Fortunately, owing to the merciful proto-dementia of chemo-brain, today I remember only two of them vividly enough to recap them for the blametariat.

One was an episode of “Leave It To Beaver.” The other was a story on the public radio show All Things Considered By Honky Liberal Intellectuals. Just as the horrible specter of aerosol Hollandaise dawned on me, it has dawned on climate scientist Susan Solomon, writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that global warming is irreversible.

That’s right. Irreversible.

Quoth Solomon:

“People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide that the climate would go back to normal in 100 years or 200 years. What we’re showing here is that’s not right. It’s essentially an irreversible change that will last for more than a thousand years,”

Guilty! I’m one of those people who has imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide that the climate would go back to normal. But no, it turns out that in a few decades the Texas Hill Country will be permanently transformed into a fucking dustbowl.

Already Central Texas is in the middle of the worst drought in about 568 years. Everywhere you look are skeletor cattle standing on barren dirt. They just fall down and die (this has a lot to do with the stupid beef industry pressuring ranchers to plant non-native GMO hybrid grasses that fatten cattle up fast but can’t survive a drought, and it’s fucking criminal that people are just letting these animals keel over, but that’s another story, as well as an excellent argument for vegetarianism).

Everyone likes to blame global warming on those stupid urban Texans driving Hummers, but shockingly, it’s not entirely their fault. Auto emissions, not to mention emissions from organic aerosol waffle batter, are a drop in the bucket when compared to, say, Asian industrial pollution.

Well, I guess that’s it, then. So long, world as we know it.

Wait a minute. The world as we know it has been preserved on film, and, horribly, is broadcast daily on cable! The episode of “Leave It To Beaver” to which I allude above well and truly made my skin crawl, but in a totally different direction than did the NPR report. Synopsis:

Beaver is invited to a girl’s birthday party. He refuses to go. Ward and June force him to attend against his will. We know what they don’t know: that the Beave is the only boy invited to the party. Our hearts bleed for poor Beaver, being made to socialize with icky girls.

Cut to Beaver sitting in a chair looking miserable while little girls in crinolines scream hysterically. Beaver wins a prize: it’s a dolly. He couldn’t be any more horrified.

Meanwhile, back home, Wally hips Ward and June to the godawful emasculation to which they have unwittingly subjected their kid. Ward and June couldn’t be any more horrified.

Meanwhile, back at the party, Beaver sneaks away and ends up in Mr. Man’s study. Mr Man lowers his newspaper. He has been expecting Beaver. The kid is safe in here. Mr Man always hides here when there are too many women in the house. No squealing harpies would dare cross the line of demarcation into his private sanctum. Sensing that Beaver is suffering dangerously high levels of nellification, Mr Man shows Beaver his gun collection. The day is saved, the natural order restored; the masculine act of fondling weaponry has reversed Beaver’s impotence, as is made clear when he happily raises a rifle to his shoulder and goes “Pow! Pow!” Back at home, Ward makes some homophobic joke about Beaver’s having enjoyed himself at a girl-party.

I could write a doctoral thesis on this one episode. I won’t, though, because I’m not in graduate school. But Jesus in a jetpack, the whole of honky American civilization could be recreated by aliens using this one 22-minute show; it’s an effing blueprint for mid-century American patriarchy.

It blows my mind that shit like this — and by “shit like this” I mean pretty much every goddam thing on TV — is still being broadcast with a straight face. I’m not saying “Leave It To Beaver” should be taken off the air. I’m saying that every episode should have subtitles, like that newsflash thing at the bottom of the screen on CNN, pointing out each instance of hate speech, sexism, racism, stereotyping, misogyny, homophobia, honky dudelionormativity, and child abuse. There should also be a sound effect — say, the “blast of a trumpet”? — to accompany each infraction.

Radical Feminist Closed Captioning and Descriptive Video Service for everything! Who’s with me?

Posted in Austin, Mass Media, Morsel Institute, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today and The megatheocorporatocracy. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt suffers from bridge-to-nowhere fatigue

Published by Twisty on September 11, 2008. 318 Comments

The big push to relocate Spinster HQ to points west has begun in earnest. I’m swamped already, but apparently there is a hurricane tearing through the Gulf of Mexico with Texas’ name on it, which really puts a hitch in my gitalong. Everyone in Austin is in a panic. The local news makes sure of that.

“Evacuate! Or stock up on beer and diesel generators!” they warn, genuflecting woodenly before swirling computer graphics with terrifying red centers. “It’s a Level 42 Megacane!”

My sister Tidy called. “I’m off to buy water and batteries.”

This makes no sense to me. Why not invest in umbrellas and rafts?

OK, we might as well get it overwith. Let’s have the blametariat’s views on collaborateuse Sarah Palin, her bridge, and her possible effects on the future of feminism.

Posted in Announcements, Austin, Mass Media and Politics. Bite me, Chad.

Cardboard jungle causes smoking

Published by Twisty on August 19, 2008. 70 Comments

Have you ever, while you were packing into cardboard boxes all your spinster auntly accouterments (I allude to the complete Proust — in French — that you keep on the mantle, as if ; ceramic baby-smoking-a-cig figurine; giant rubber toad; 80’s vintage 4-track w/ gazillion basement recordings on cassette) run out of newspaper? Requiring an emergency run to to the U-Haul depot on Ben White Blvd? On a Saturday?

Admittedly, you are between a rock and a hard place here. If you don’t replenish your packing supplies, your whole Ambitious Plan comes to a grinding halt, at which point all you can do is fester on the lime green recliner, surrounded by cardboard chaos, emitting muffled sobs.

But if you do go the the U-Haul on Ben White Blvd on a Saturday — which U-Haul is, you will discover, held in the highest possible esteem by all other South Austin residents as the most desirable Saturday destination in Central Texas — you will be 48th in a queue of sweaty truck-renters, few of whom possess magnetic personalities, and each of whom requires an extended period of personal quality time with the U-Haulist behind the counter.

To be perfectly accurate, there are two U-Haulists behind the counter, thus two lines of sweaty truck-renters. But, as is required by rent-a-truck law, only one of the U-Haulists possesses sufficient security clearance to operate the top-secret truck-rental computer. This slows transactions down to a maddening trickle, which has the effect of escalating the anxiety amongst the clientèle, who by now are packed in cheek to jowl like hogs to the slaughter. The interminable line, the incompetence of the customer service dudes, the overwrought frenzy of movers who see their security deposits slipping away with each passing minute — you get the picture. U-Haul on a Saturday is like the IndyMac Bank on Failure Day.

If you conclude from the above that I chose, last Saturday when I ran out of wrapping paper, to go to U-Haul rather than sit weeping in my corrugated prison, you are correct. After waiting 25 minutes to spend twenty dollars on two boxes of paper, I dropped one of them in a puddle in the parking lot and was nearly creamed by a speed demon piloting a 17-footer.

Well, my obstreperal lobe blew right then and there, all over the dented hood of some poor schlub’s eggplant-colored Saturn. On the way home, with no internal regulating mechanism to prevent it, an imp of the perverse caused my car to turn in at the Bluebonnet quick shop, where I grabbed a roadie* from the handy ice bin and heard myself utter the most beautiful words in the English language: “pack of Marlboro reds, and make it snappy.”

Four-and-a-half packs later, it is Tuesday, and the self-preservational blaming gas produced by my blown lobe (obstreperone), has begun to kick back in. I have called my oncologist and renewed my date with Chantix. I love Chantix. Apparently there are six or seven people in the world who are not transformed by this anti-smoking drug into homicidal maniacs, and I am one of them.

Meanwhile, did anybody happen to hear a piece on NPR the other day about some Christian weight-loss group’s vilification of fat, and obesity as a moral issue, etc? I can’t find it anywhere on the site now, or, indeed, on the entire World Wide Web, and I’m beginning to think I imagined the whole thing.

See, I was going to tie this all together with a big tirade on the bogus notion of health as a moral issue — how people are always yelling at you to quit smoking or quit eating or quit procrastinating when you should be packing or quit doing anything the doing of which is considered a moral failure, ostensibly out of their concern for your health, but in reality because “health,” in accordance with some convoluted Christian doctrine embedded in the cultural subconscious, has become a kind of yardstick by which conformity within the social order is measured, and how shaming people who are insufficiently obsessed with their cholesterol puts these concern trolls in a morally superior position and creates an underclass of “unhealthies” who have brought it on themselves through their blatant ingestion of Cheetos — but I’m too exhausted from all the delicious smoking. Let’s just say that if you ran into me at the coffeeshop and suggested that my self-indulgent punk rocker lifestyle caused my breast cancer, you wouldn’t be the first. The idea that you, through some assiduously applied, sanctimonious personal health program, can “prevent” cancer, or death, or whatever, and that such practices should win you higher status in your tribe, is a fucking load of crap.

__________________________

* A roadie is an extra-large can of cheap beer that all Texas quick shops stock on ice right next to the door, thus simplifying the important work of driving drunk.

Posted in Austin, Crazy sexy cancer and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt cuts blogular corners by making another dorky video, this time about her outing to a giant Human Demoralization Center

Published by Twisty on August 13, 2008. 86 Comments

I know, I know, but these video things are way faster than writing, and these days time is of the essence for the spinster aunt. Sadly, because I did this in one take and without any script or rehearsal or talent, I perhaps failed to emphasize my main blaming point, which is my disgust at the obnoxious classist forces at work on the mind of the typical IKEA shopper.

A common misconception, one which apparently appeals to the honkys who flock there to pick up build-it-yourself orange leather entertainment centers, seems to be that all that cheapo IKEA stuff is made in Sweden by happy, well-paid blondes with excellent benefits.

It is not. By now we all know that the only time anyone can afford anything is when it was made by non-Swedish indentured workers in a part of the world far, far away from happy, blond, egalitarian Sweden.

Although everything for sale at IKEA does have a Swedish name, according to a “naming system.” From Wikipedia:

# Chairs, desks: men’s names
# Materials, curtains: women’s names

No shit.

Posted in Austin, Easy Persiflage and The megatheocorporatocracy. Bite me, Chad.