bad sandwich chronicles

I don’t even really know how to write this. I stand firmly on the side of these cartoonists, freedom, satire, etc. I am anti jihad. I don’t back terror at all. Ever. I am team Rushdie. 100%. I don’t want to take anything at all away from a terrible tragedy. Cartoonists being killed because they insult someone’s goofy ancient belief system, that’s a horrible, dark, inexcusable thing. It really shook me yesterday morning. The rhetoric around this that I’ve seen, regarding the shooters has been pretty “look at these savages, they’re so humorless, they’re beasts. They deserve what they get,” which I tend to agree with.

However, this isn’t really very different from the response to a furious black america burning down gas stations in Ferguson recently. “I got no sympathy for people who trash their own neighborhood” say disappointed white people who have probably never been pushed to the breaking point by a world that actively hates and seeks to destroy them. To quote a great, and severely underrated band, the Honor System, “Starve the dogs for a week, fence em in, they’ll fight until they feed.” When you systematically attempt to destroy people, and senselessly harm them, how can you act surprised when they flip around and use seemingly random, or at the very least, misplaced, frustrated violence in return. At the risk of drawing a super condescending parallel, kids who are beaten often grow up to beat their kids. It ain’t right, but you beat something into someone’s blood long enough, it starts flowing there. Violence begets violence. This is always true and anyone who denies it is either terribly naive or so pampered or detached from reality that they have no real business commenting on violent acts of desperation in the first place.

So the people in Ferguson destroyed some locally owned businesses. How shocking! My friend recently smashed his acoustic guitar into bits after getting into a fight with his wife. Was it stupid? For sure. Is it an unprecedented act of savage sub-humanity? Not even close. there’s a reason that soap operas feature a lot of lamp throwing during heated domestic disputes. That shit happens all the time, even to fancy, white people lamps. BUT, we ain’t talking Ferguson or American race relations or any of that shit today. We’re talking about a couple of shitty thin-skinned, humorless cowards killing some cartoonists simply because they dared insult mohammed. It’s ugly, and it’s a dark day for art, for freedom, for any kind of world that seeks to be free from brutal, thuggish strong arming.

But lemme ask you something. Do you think there’s ANY chance that these dudes had been pushed so far that they just wanted to kill, and this just seemed like a good lightening rod? Do you think it’s possible that the ‘these mofuckers drew mohammed’ was…not an excuse, but a righteous rallying point, a magnifying glass through which to magnify a disenfranchised rage so profound and complete that even the people of Ferguson couldn’t quite understand it?

When we say things like “well, US foreign policy creates more terrorists through these botched military operations” what are we really saying? We’re saying that our bombs and soldiers go into these deserts and kill everyone, brutally. The people left, young men who have seen their children killed for no reason in front of them, children who have seen their parents destroyed IN FRONT OF THEM, rally together in destroyed, bombed out shells of homes and try to make sense of a world where the sky rains fire, money flows like rivers away from them and the organization that just killed your family, your neighbors family and your entire neighborhood, is still occupying your rubble, not speaking your language, not assimilating into your value system, but instead mocking it, killing more people and making more plans to destroy and undermine your way of life. I know, this sounds dramatic and apologist. It’s not. I’m just suggesting that under these circumstances, I bet some pretty fucked up value systems get run up what’s left of the flagpole.

I mean, have you EVER considered traveling intercontinentally to kill a cartoonist? Fuck no. That’s desperate shit. Psychopath shit. In the states, our psychopath shit just seems senseless. Over there, decades of brutality give it an agenda. It’s still psychopath shit, but it’s psychopath shit with the paper-thin veneer of an excuse attached to it, and it seems like we’re all focusing on the excuse like it has any real relevance at all, when it’s obvious bullshit. It’s like focusing on accidentally bumping into a guy at a bar who’d already decided he was gonna kick your ass because he hates your face.

To be clear: I hate the idea of thuggish censorship. I hate violence. I strongly distrust guns. I hate radical fundamentalism, whether it’s islam or christianity. Fuck it all. However, I think that our narrative is deeply flawed when we see these kinds of acts and don’t even ask why they’re happening beyond “wow, these assholes hate our freedom and get super butthurt when you mock their dumb prophet.” That’s ignoring A) that this is an act perpetrated by crazy people and B) that there’s rage out there that’s very real and it’s the result of personal loss and horrible grief. “They hate our freedom?” Sheeeit, maybe because our ‘freedom’ is what’s dropping bombs on their children. At this point, that party line is so played, but all yesterday, I heard otherwise-smart people reducing this senseless horror to that.

No one should be killing anyone, and when something truly evil happens, sometimes it’s just a mailman in a clown suit burying young boys in satanic patterns in his crawlspace but sometimes it’s psychopaths spawned from a place where the rest of a world has destroyed everything they love right in front of their faces and lit their cigars on the burning remains. That horror is real too. Just something to think about.

love you guys.

xoxo

In honor of national men’s day (seriously, that’s apparently a thing), I’ma type about sex. Specifically, I think we should talk about theoretical sex, which is the kind of sex most men tend to discuss most of the time. In this PARTICULAR instance, I’m not referring to “Oh, I’d bang the shit out of Andy San Dimas,” type theorizing even though 1) she’d probably never let you anywhere near her and 2) on the off chance she did, you’d do a terrible job fucking her (yes you would). No, I’m referring to the pervy, 13 year old boy Olympic playbook of theoretical sex acts that gets added to every day by new crops of teens and boring men—the same one that populates about 70% of Urban Dictionary and generally serves little purpose other than to make the world a more uncomfortable place.

I’m, of course, talking about the donkey punch, the Dirty Sanchez, the mechanical bull, the angry dragon and all the rest of that shit. For those of you who don’t know (and I cannot honestly believe there are any of you, but whatever, let’s at least pretend we’ve got a little dignity around here), these are all degrading sex acts that involve (mostly) buttfucking, (often) violence, (usually) feces, and an element of shitty, fratty, high fiving surprise that occurs when you divert your course from run-of-the-mill fucking, getting a BJ, whatever, and turn it into, let’s say, a Dirty Sanchez (which is [and, again, you all know this already]) when you pull your dick out of someone’s ass and wipe the head along their upper lip, thereby creating the appearance of a Mexican revolution-esque resplendent turdskid mustache on your unwitting partner). These acts are, to the last, vile, lame, unfunny and (and this is the main thrust of my Men’s Day blog post) almost entirely imaginary. These are acts that, until recently, only exist in the Terminator technology loop, not in any sort of organic real life. I’ll explain:

In Terminator 2, it’s revealed that the way that humanity was able to develop the robotic science and corresponding AI (artificial intelligence) that facilitated what was to become Skynet and ultimately the Terminators was all contingent on the fact that when the original Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenneger) came back in time to kill Sarah Connor, he was blown to bits (among other humiliations), and, as a result, left a semi intact, robotic forearm and hand laying around, where it could be studied. Scientists analyzed the robotic artifact, and from their findings, they were able to move forward with the technology that would ultimately create Skynet and the Terminators and thereby doom humanity. You see the implication here? No one ever actually developed the technology. It was able to be improved upon because it existed, and it existed because it had been improved upon to the point where it had been developed into a time-traveling, Austrian killing machine who was able to visit a time that would be able to properly develop the technology. It’s a closed loop. No one invented it. If I were the kind of person who thought that James Cameron considered himself or his work to be more grandiose than it is, I’d maybe invoke the idea of some sort of AI/robotic immaculate conception theme at this point, but I’m not that kind of person, and I’m digressing, so we’ll just put a pin in this ‘closed-tech-loop’ idea for now and get back to the Dirty Sanchez.

The Dirty Sanchez, along with the donkey punch (punching your partner in the back of their head while fucking them from behind) and the angry dragon (something about blowing a load in someone’s face and then punching the blower during your orgasm so blood and semen squirt out the nose [beyond being a violent assault and absolutely a deplorable thing to do, this seems like a terrible gamble for your dick, but whatever, dumbass], are all things that were invented by people who have never, ever, ever been allowed anywhere near a woman’s vagina. If you need evidence, consider how fucking stupid you have to be to come up with this nonsense, give it a name, tell people about it, and assume that any of it could be part of any sort of sexual oeuvre ever. No, the people who came up with this stuff never did it, or even did anything else, but a funny thing happened on the way to the future:

The internet popularized these fake acts and their definitions and, importantly, presented them as something that happened, without forcing the person learning about it to see the loser dumb enough to talk about it. To put it another way, when I heard about the Dirty Sanchez, it was from an old, gross buzzard, that I knew never got laid. I chuckled, and filed it away under “dumb shit that dipshit virginal losers make up during the time they spend not getting laid” because the guy enlightening me was obviously and transparently a total fucking loser. However, when people ten, fifteen or twenty years younger than me heard about the Dirty Sanchez, they were just reading about it on the internet. There was no cautionary loser involved. Add to that, that some of these intrepid internet explorers were young, naïve and probably stupid, but potentially otherwise charming/rich, and next thing you know: BOOM! Screech from saved by the bell is giving a Dirty Sanchez to a woman in a porn he filmed himself. Now, let’s set aside, for a moment, how disgusting and degrading it is to just have regular and consensual, loving sex with Screech. Screech didn’t make up the Sanchez. He didn’t even make it famous. He just was one of the first people to commit this theoretical act in the public eye (eew) simply because he’d heard about it and (probably?) assumed that the Dirty Sanchez was something that people did, even though (and I can’t stress this next point enough) IT IS ABSOLUTELY NOT SOMETHING PEOPLE DO. So he did it, hoping, one can assume, for a bunch of high fives from a bunch of dorks who also maybe assume the same thing, namely, that sex is/could potentially involve moves like this, if you just dare to get ‘rad’ enough. Cool.

So you see what’s happened here? The Terminator technology loop has come to pass, but instead of robotics and AI, it’s happened with the non-consensual, violent, gross out sex fantasies of dumb, unfuckable 12 year old boys. Cool future. Our Skynet will come to wipe out humanity by way of women who no longer want to be anywhere near men because of these antics. Nice. I don’t blame them one bit.

So, here on national (or is it international) men’s day, I’d like to just remind everyone that we, as men, definitely don’t deserve much of a day, but since we have one, let’s try to tuck our dicks back into our drawers and pretend we have just the tiniest smidge of dignity for once? Kay? Great. Have a good one.

xoxoxo