Dallas Aunt is here which means I essentially have until Jan. 4 off. So this first day has been spent thinking about all the possibilities. I know there is a Super Happy Family Fun Santa Barbara get-together on Saturday. Then on Monday maybe Faith and I will be going museum hopping. Aside from some family things here and there, I’m pretty much open like a slut whose knees aren’t sewn together.

Maybe I will be like a slut whose knees aren’t sewn together. It’s been a while. How do I go about doing this again?

In an effort to avoid dealing with The Grandmother shit today, I will talk about this little weather system that passed through. Unofficially since yesterday afternoon, we here in the Pedro received around 0.35″ inches of rain. That’s pretty remarkable since it never really poured or anything awful like that. It just sprinkled for several hours, let up, sprinkled some more for several hours etc.

As gloomy as it’s been, news leaked this morning that after a couple of years of having to watch the World Series on mute I will be able to watch it with sound next season. Harold Reynolds has been defenestrated!!!! Well, he has been sacked I guess would be the proper way to put it. Unfortunately Tom Verducci is out of the booth also, but maybe they’ll put him on the field which would be great. John Smoltz will now join Joe Buck in the booth which will be a welcome relief to my ear drums.

Lord knows if this is real or not, but supposedly this is from a Guy Fieri rap album or something awful like that:

First We Feast leaked this, and I sure as hell hope this is real. It’s amazing to see how stuck in 1997 Mr. Fieri is. All he needs is to shave his head, dye it cheetah print and wear a wallet chain that drops down to just above his ankle.

With The Grandmother not doing so hot recently, I found myself cooped up in the apartment trying to attend to her needs. Also she hates it when I’m not home, so I try not to get too far away. For example when I went to Portuguese Bend last week, she yelled at me when I got home because I was gone for two hours.

The problem is I can feel my body going down the tubes as I try to make her feel as comfortable as I can. I can’t do that anymore. I need to go out and get some activity into my inert life whether she likes it or not. So yesterday I went out to White Point and climbed up to the Battery, and today I went over to Ocean Trails. Man, it’s been a while, and I felt every step of it throughout my body.

Whatever. I will do what needs to be done, and ain’t no one is going to make me feel guilty about it. It’s bad enough I’ve sacrificed time with my friends to do this. It’s bad enough I’ve asked for help to give me at least a day a month off only to be rebuffed.

Fuck. Now I feel worse.

Well I suppose it’s time to fix up some dinner only to see it left uneaten.

As anyone who listened to the last episode of the podcast or who know me personally, I cannot stand mediocrity in art. The role of artists is to push humanity into greater awareness about itself, into challenging itself and the status quo, and in so doing trying to make the world a better place.

People make excuses for Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Adele and the whole lot of pop musicians by saying that it is merely “pop music”, but that’s just a cop out. During the 80s, Madonna, Prince and Michael Jackson used pop to help transform culture and take it to a new place. The pop stars now are merely derivative at best ready to wallow in the acceptance of the masses.

Madonna made the masses come to her. Taylor Swift is merely happy enough to join the masses.

Being an artist is tough, and below are some musicians who did their best to move the masses and move my ass.

Arca – Mutant. I’ll admit that I only caught this album a few days ago in someone’s best-of-2015 list, and it was the cover art that captured my attention rather than whatever words were written down below it. I have a haunting suspicion that most of the 5 people who will come upon this particular list will do the same thing. Irregardless, I was transfixed and hypnotized to the sounds that came from this record. Sure it sounds EDM, but gone is the pervasive bro-ness about the music. It’s more as if the Future Sounds of London fucked EDM and this is what came out.

Björk – Vulnicura. It turns out that Arca aided Björk in producing this album. She mourns the disintegration of her relationship with Matthew Barney (to which I say good riddance, he’s a dickhead cunt anyhow), but doesn’t do it in any way we have heard before.

FKA twigs – M3LL133X. Grimes was too afraid of going this far, but Ms. Twigs just don’t give a shit. She took it this far, the fragility, the horror, the vulnerability, the anger and it’s exhilarating.

Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp a Butterfly. Holy shit. What D’Angelo did with last year’s Black Messiah, Kendrick Lamar took one step further. Listening to this takes me back to the Native Tongues and Neo Soul of Tribe Called Quest and Black Sheep and Common while keeping Compton in the forefront. Pure motherfucking genius here.

Peaches – Rub. Tits, tranny dicks and Kim Gordon. I love sexual perversion, and this is the perfect soundtrack to an orgy while getting dirty, pissed on, fisted while spewing cum like a firehose all over the place. Anything and everything goes here, and it’s so much fucking fun.

Sleater-Kinney – No Cities to Love. It’s good to be wary music bands make when they reunite. Take the Pixies for example. But here Sleater-Kinney came and rather than make a nostalgia-laced rehash of Dig Me Out, they made an album that would have fit had they never taken a hiatus in the first place. Hell, they made one of the few rock records of note this year.

I don’t know whether I should put Coil’s Backwards here since it was recorded back in the 1990s and a remixed version of these tracks were released back in 2008 as The New Backwards. I’ll just make a note of it here and leave it at that.

What can I say? Growing up I never watched a certain movie franchise. Sure I’ve seen it parodied with Spaceballs and on Saturday morning cartoons like Muppet Babies. It was hard to escape the constant references to it, so I was pretty sure I knew about the story well enough despite never watching it.

Then earlier this year I finally decided to watch it, and boy was it a let down. The movie is fine. It is good, but it has its problems. It’s too referential, too self-conscious, too into itself. For how rabid the fans are of this movie, I would expect something better — something along the lines of Barbarella. Then again, there are a lot of people who loved The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and I really couldn’t stand those movies.

So I’m probably never going to watch this seventh movie. And for those of my friends who are afraid I will judge them harshly for being wrapped up in this mediocre masturbation fest, never you worry your hearts: I will judge you harshly. In fact, I already have.

Meanwhile, I’m in the middle of re-reading The Brothers Karamazov. I just got through the “Grand Inquisitor” chapter. Holy shit. Dostoevsky is good.

If I do go down the road of being nekkid, I suppose I have to come up with a proper nom de guerre. I was always told the proper porn name is the name of your first pet and the name of the street you grew up on. That would make me Pepper Roberts. Funny. I don’t feel like a Pepper Roberts. A Pepper Roberts would be someone who wears a lot of vinyl and rubber and latex in cyberpunk bondage gear of sorts. I somehow picture a much sluttier version of Switchblade Symphony’s Tina Root:

I don’t feel that I fit that. Maybe more of a Pot Roast Murphy or a Baby Back. I’m open to suggestions which you can send me using my contact form.

With Dallas Aunt coming next week and leaving on Jan. 4, I’m starting to put together my social calendar for those two weeks. It’s pretty amazing and depressing just how slim that calendar is.

Yesterday I went on a four-mile jaunt through Portuguese Bend, the first time I’ve done one of these jaunts in a couple of months. I could feel my expansion while The Grandmother was going through her shit. Even though she’s not back to where she was before, I just needed to get out.

As I was going up the hill, I felt every ounce of the two-month expansion in every wheeze, every jolt of neural overload in my hip, every scream from every alveoli. In short, I needed that.

Someone chatted me up on a hookup thing over the weekend, and we had a nice back-and-forth. He saw a revealing picture of me, and thought it was hot. Of course he probably wanted my mouth and/or asshole around his cock, and he would say anything to achieve that end — yes, even deception. I was a bit preoccupied to read his profile, but when I finally got around to it there were those two words which had me seeing red:

NO. FATTIES.

I don’t lie on these hookup things, so my true stats are there for all to see. The only Photoshop I really do on pictures is just to adjust lighting. It’s not like shaving myself off digitally like Todd Haynes did with the Barbie dolls when he filmed Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.

So despite his precondition of “no fatties”, he was willing to get my mouth and/or “nice fat ass” around his cock. I just dropped the conversation right there.

But this has stuck with me for the last several days. Why should we all fall prey to this fascistic body shaming bullshit that is meant to keep us subjugated and under control? I have half the mind to start posing my fat ass nekkid body for all to see. Maybe I’ll start a porn blog.

It’s happened again.

“I absolutely cannot predict any type of future in terms of sexual interaction or romance, but I have to tell you that every time I talk to you I feel so calm and relaxed. There’s something comforting about you.”

Never mind that I told him I like listening to Satanic music, that most people I know think I’m a cunt, that I don’t really conform to much of anything. That if I had more balls I would do porn, that sometimes I wish The Grandmother would pass so I can get on with my life. That most days I hate everyone in my family. That I do like watching sports and taunting the hell out of people. That sometimes I want to be slapped while being fucked so that I can slap and punch and choke right back.

But no. I’m comforting. A teddy bear. *sighs* Always a motherfucking bridesmaid…

To take solace I’m listening to a bunch of Coil and eventually I’ll have to edit the new podcast Brendan and I recorded earlier today.

(I am sitting on the toilet in this picture.)

I actually went out into the real world with real people. What’s sad is as I watched The Wolfpack documentary¹ the other day, I was starting to find myself identify with them. I’m really starting to feel like that agoraphobic old man horder who will die in a fire sparked by a decade old issue of Sports Illustrated, cat hair and friction.

So out with Abbey and Elliott we went first to the Watts Towers and then to the best burgers in Los Angeles: Hawkins Burgers. We blah blah blahed and all of that good fun stuff and even told Abbey, a NorCal transplant, the history of Watts and Compton and South Central LA and how everything is so much nicer now than it was in 1992.

I have to say that as underwhelming as the Towers are when you first encounter them, they do grow on you. I am always happy after I visit them.

I also think it is nice that some of the houses nearby also take its cue from the Towers.

All in all it was a nice way to spend a couple of hours with folks I very rarely get to see. It also broke the sort of monotony of trying to listen to the best of 2015 music and reading alternately Infinite Jest, The Brothers Karamazov and Gay Berlin.

That sounds real creepy, don’t it? A dream I had last night had me and a group of friends going to the movies to watch what I’m guessing was a David O. Russell movie. I had the same uneasy feeling in my gut that I get when I’m getting ready to see a David O. Russell movie for the first time. Is it going to be more like the genius that is Flirting with Disaster and I Heart Huckabees or more like the horror that is American Hustle or Silver Linings Playbook?

We start having a conversation about Star Wars where I proclaim that I don’t understand how anyone watching the original film now can even take it halfway seriously. It’s a completely referential piece of self-indulgent filmwork much akin to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.

We are talking about this quite loudly even as the previews start up. It is then an usher comes back and tells me that I have to leave the theater for causing a disturbance. I tell him that it’s ridiculous, the movie hadn’t even started yet and that I will keep quiet. I stay.

The movie is pretty awful. All I see is Bradley Cooper’s stupid grinning mug — it’s almost like the Richard James’s mug on the kids in Aphex Twin’s Come to Daddy video but nowhere near as creepy. I fall asleep in fits during the movie. I also remember wondering why people insist in being quiet during movies. How boring is that?

Right before Thanksgiving, I had another dream where I was at a screening in some film club where I was also being shushed. I tend to talk during movies at home, but at a theater I’m always well behaved. So what does this all mean?