Cruel & Unusual Punishment

Cruel and unusual punishment is forbidden in the United States. It’s in the Bill of Rights. The Eighth Amendment. Most of us know the First and Second Amendments but struggle with Three through Ten. I’ll admit I had to look it up myself.

It’s funny how the Bill of Rights is manipulated. The Second Amendment defended vigorously by some, the Fourth Amendment stripped bare by others, the First Amendment left in the cold like a candle in the wind never knowing who to cling to when the rain comes in.

The Eighth Amendment also forbids “excessive bails… nor fines imposed” but in this day and age when most Americans can’t afford a $500 emergency, bail and fines seem a mite bit excessive. But we’re talking about cruel and unusual punishment, which for example might include the sort of things you’d see in merry Olde England such as being whipped while being dragged by a horse and carriage. Or being drawn and quartered. That’s a funny way to execute a convict.

I had to look up “drawn and quartered” to make sure I knew what I was talking about and it turns out there’s multiple ways to skin that particular cat (one of which involves skinning the punished). I have always associated the drawing and quartering with tying each of a condemned person’s limbs to a horse and then sending all four horses running off on their own separate direction, pulling the body of the condemned ever so apart.

These are cruel and unusual times, ladies and germs. And if anybody deserved cruel and unusual punishment, it is Him. You can guess of whom I speak when I speak of Him. I don’t want to speak the name because it is said enough as is in culture and media. I want to see Him drawn and quartered.

By monster trucks.

Let me make this perfectly clear. I want to see him tied by each hand and foot to four different monster trucks that will all rev up and take off on the same signal. North, south, east and west, each truck in their own different direction. . . until such time that he is torn to pieces, which should be quick because these are monster trucks we’re talking about.

So it isn’t as cruel as you might think.

I hate Him. Most of us hate Him. He is incorrigible, without redeeming human value. We pretend that our country is a beacon of light, higher and mightier than all others but if that were the case a moron like Him would not be allowed within 5000 feet of. . .

He is a monument to human ugliness. Benito Mussolini’s body was dragged through the street and hung on meathooks, desecrated publicly by the Italian countrymen he tormented for so long. Men like Him do not deserve the dignity of a state funeral at the Capital. Nationalism and fascism lead to mass suffering.

Yet there is no ethos beyond self-interest with Him. He doesn’t even mean it. He’s not a true believer. He’s an amoral carny selling a line to the few left to buy it.

What are we waiting for? The cavalry to come in? The people are the heroes now. The people have the monster trucks. How many monster trucks do the government possess?

Exactly.

In your heart, you know this would be tits.

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Head & Shoulders

This one has been a long time coming and it is going to be tough to write. This is the sort of thing that would be somebody else’s Facebook status and I’d think it was a cliche but it turns out some things are cliches for a reason.

I don’t have time for flakiness. Next year I will turn forty-one years of age and I’m embracing it as well as I can. If Jay-Z is right and 40 is the new 30, well by God at age 40 one ought to not be a flaky jerk.

I’ve had to cut some people out of my life for this sort of stuff. What do I mean by flaky? Do I mean ghosting on plans to hang out? Do I mean abruptly ceasing a text/FB communication and not picking it up again? Does being flaky mean that on the few times you do pick it back up you’re incredibly patronizing, as if your time is too valuable to waste? I dunno. Seems like it to me.

I wouldn’t be writing this if I didn’t care, either about the way I was treated or the people who did this to me. It sucks and it hurts to be flaked out on. What did it mean? Was it a way of creating distance?

So I am letting them go. And I didn’t even say goodbye, as much as I wanted to. I didn’t even tell them I was going done with the nonsense nor did I explain why. I couldn’t. Would it even have mattered? I can’t even say “You hurt me with your flaky patronizing bullshit.”

A funny thing happens when you let toxic people go. You get parts of yourself back that you gave them. You almost don’t know what to do with them, those parts of you. You almost want to throw them back like fishing lures. But that won’t work at all. You won’t get the satisfaction you crave. Not a nibble.

It won’t make me feel better to go back and tell anyone off. The only thing that makes sense is to reassure myself that I will be all right, no matter how much I may doubt it at times. I will be all right because I won’t torture myself hanging on to something that isn’t there.

I hope that never happens to me again because I’m too old for this shit like Danny Glover.

The Post That Won’t Die

I have crunched the numbers and my most popular post of 2018 is “WWE Wrestler or Porn Star”. I won’t bother linking it because it has little value.

The premise of the post is for the uninformed reader to guess from a list of names which belong to AVN award-nominated porn stars and which ones belong to WWE women wrestlers. Most of the hits come from non-English speaking countries.

The most reasonable explanation is that a bunch of sad sacks from the Middle East desperately searched for naked pictures of their favorite WWE diva and happened upon my site.

A few well-known women wrestlers’ private pictures and videos have leaked online (most prominent Paige from the WWE) and led to an exceedingly horny fanbase of wrestling fans who want more more MORE.

With no effort on my part, I dashed hopes for the desperate fanatic by supplying not a treasure trove of pix and vids but instead a list of names.

On the bright side, some of the names on the list are porn stars so if you look them up hoping to find nudes you will be more than satisfied. Just don’t expect them to throw German suplexes.

I guess what I’m saying is that you have no control over anything, especially what posts on your blog get the most hits. Look for more lists combining porn star names with wrestlers in 2019. Apparently it works like gangbusters.

Why Do I Have To Know Who This Is?

This guy. Why do I have to know who he is? What I have done to deserve this fresh hell?

The music business is filled with artists who have difficult histories. Some of the greatest artists of the modern era have also been terrible people in real life. John Lennon, James Brown, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Chuck Berry. . . all important to the advancement of popular music and all have had troubled lives having done legitimately horrible acts to others.

The hip-hop era has continued in this unfortunate tradition. Tupac Shakur, one of the guys that gets wall-sized murals in his honor, had a rape charge on him. Dr. Dre is justifiably recognized as one of the greatest producers but he assaulted a woman reporter. There are very few Chuck D’s who have no criminal record and a lot more like Flavor Flav, who have at least one drug charge.

But we know about these people for a good reason. Talent, charisma, good songs that last the test of time. Tupac could be as eloquent as Lennon in interviews, speaking truth to power. I know who these people are because of their contributions to culture, regardless of their human failures or bad acts.

But this fucking guy. Tekashi 6ix9ine, Why do I know that name? Why do I know his stupid, tattooed face? What is this idiot bringing to the table, creatively? Because the first thing that comes to mind is his going to jail for promoting the performance of a minor. He was videotaped with a thirteen-year-old. I’ll spare you the details. He’s also charged with racketeering, a charge that no rapper has ever been dealt in the history of the genre.

Look at the picture up there if you have the stomach. That is a terminally stupid person with an unfortunate choice of style. Even without the colored hair and the rainbow fronts and the oh so idiotic tattoos, he would still come off as a dumb motherfucker. But those things don’t help.

So we’ve got a guy who is a sex offender, a moron and a talentless oaf. He has the #2 album in America this week. Why has the record industry perpetrated this abomination on the public? Take away that there are impressionable youngsters paying attention to this guy. He just sucks. There is nothing of redeemable value to him. We can easily do without this.

I MEAN GODDAMNIT, EVEN CHRIS BROWN CAN FUCKING DANCE AND SING A LITTLE BIT. AND THAT GUY IS A GARBAGE PERSON. BUT THIS GUY HAS NO REDEEMABLE TALENT. HE LOOKS LIKE A EX-MICHAEL JACKSON IMPERSONATOR WHO HAD A TERRIBLE BREAKDOWN AFTER MJ DIED.

Give George Clinton his hair back, you fucking moron, and kill yourself.

I’m Just Not A Movie Guy

Some movies I have seen in the theater/drive-in.

1988: Who Framed Roger Rabbit

1996: Scream

1996: The People Vs. Larry Flynt

1997: Private Parts

1997: Liar Liar

1997: The Crow: City Of Angels

1998: The Big Lebowski

1999: Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace

2001: The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring

2002: The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers

2002: Star Wars: Episode II – Attack Of The Clones

2002: Auto Focus

2002: Tapeheads

2003: Anger Management

2003: American Splendor

2003: Big Fish

2003: The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King

2004: Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy

2006: Snakes On A Plane

2008: The Dark Knight

2010: Kick-Ass

2018: Bohemian Rhapsody

 

 

 

Who Are You, Mike Farmer?

I threw my rock in the water and it skipped until it sank. The rock made tiny ripples before it was swallowed by the water. When it sank, it was over and done with. Time to get another rock.

That’s a clumsy analogy. My music isn’t some rock. It’s one of a kind. It can’t be just picked up out of pile anywhere. But I feel like whenever I release my music into the world, I’m throwing it into the great big cavernous world like it’s a rock into the ocean. It won’t displace anything or make any impact. In a way, that’s even worse than being hated. Would you rather be hated or ignored?

Five years ago, I recorded a set of songs in a Greenville, Ky. church. This was the beginning of where my musical direction would go from thereon out. I finally “released” it on Bandcamp today. Whether I had tried to promote it for weeks and weeks or just dropped it last second (which is what I did), the impact would have been the same.

I do not have the quiet confidence that my music will find the right ears. I have to hope it finds any set of ears.

My fears are counterproductive. They lead to me shelving this music for years and years. Hiding away like a wound. I’m too protective to have a career.

Kill Me

I usually don’t writing anything here unless I’m driven near crazy. So here I am, writing publicly. A post that will be read by dozens, perhaps. Great. I’m throwing my piss into the great ocean of content.

Don’t you hate it when your therapist gives you an assignment for the next session?

I just caught myself saying “kill me” like it was a reflexive thing. I sat still for a moment, not writing, just sitting and waiting and not doing anything and “kill me” just came out of my mouth. How often does that happen and I don’t notice it? Do I walk around saying “kill me” and people see it? Can people hear me saying “kill me”? I’m not just thinking it? I’m mouthing it. I’m turning it into words that can be heard by human ears.

Every time I go to my psychiatrist, he asks me if I have suicidal thoughts and I tell him I don’t. Because I never think it’s time to go or let’s do it. I think about dying in a gruesome, violent way. Death is a thing I secretly hope for yet fear and dread at the same time. And I feel like I’m not alone. I feel like there’s a lot of people who aren’t going to commit suicide but are ready to get the hell off this rock. So if global warming or nuclear war wipe us off the map, so be it as long as the problem is taken out of our hands.

The doctor asks me if I think about self-harm. I don’t know, doc. Do thoughts about dismembering yourself with a chainsaw count? If so, then yeah I guess I have been thinking about self-harm. But a chainsaw is just too unwieldy for the task. You’d have to go legs first and then go for an arm but let’s say you do that and then you lose control of the chainsaw. Then what? That’s only a partial dismemberment! And what if you bleed out your leg stumps before then? What a failure! You need a friend to help you out, or an enemy. Somebody who cares enough to do it.

That’s a lot to drop on anybody, let alone a professional.

Maybe I oughta be locked up for my own good. Or restricted chainsaw access.

 

Punchdrunk On Politics

I should have thrown in the towel weeks ago but I thought I was a fighter. I thought I could crap lighting and eat thunder. But I ate shit and puked up the hubris of a million political ads. I felt tired and worn down this morning and politics is what did it to me.

It feels as if election season began immediately the day that orange-fuzz-covered turd of a human being swore an oath he didn’t understand on a Bible that should have burned him when he touched it way back in January 2017. The midterm elections began that day and they never stopped until Tuesday night. Months and months of ads upon ads and eventually everything began to blur together until my brain felt concussed.

Steve Kornacki of MSNBC is the lead election stat geek on cable news TV and he works all year for Election Day, with his rolled-up sleeves and his boyish pair of glasses. One can easily imagine him being younger than his 39 years. One can also imagine the amount of fan-fiction that has been written about this earnest, Jimmy Olsen-esque energy-ball/vote wonk. Imagine the Steve Kornacki Rule 34 drawings, all manga’d out like a Japanese comix hero/erotica star with his pet squid/electricity-shooting peep.

Don’t laugh. Somewhere on election night there was somebody touching themselves watching MSNBC waiting for Kornacki to return with vote tally updates, muttering and cursing whenever Brian Williams, Chris Matthews or god forbid Rachel Maddow was on the screen instead. Shut up you goons! Let Li’l Stevie tell us how the Senate races are going county-by-county. How many more ballots are coming in from how many more precincts, Mr. Pornacki?

Ari Melber? Get this man and his shoehorned hip-hop lyric references off the screen, they call out in despair. Rank your favorite Steve/Stevie’s, they type on Twitter. Here’s mine: Kornacki, Wonder, Nicks, Ray Vaughan, Sax, Perry, Martin, in that order. It’s never enough, never enough.

Kornacki is not the kind of person who gets punchdrunk on election night. He has taken body blows in preparation for this. He has crunched and stared at more numbers than most non-mathematicians. Election night is his night. He does not get lost in a daze unlike most laymen. Try doing that job sober.

Is Steve Kornacki an Adderall fiend? How else do you explain his monomaniacal focus on that night of all nights? It’s nothing to show up for a segment and go over poll numbers in the weeks ahead of the election but a whole night where you have to be Johnny-on-the-spot? Does his Adderall usage become more pronounced as he approaches November year after year? Does he require detox immediately after Election day? Is that how he does it?  It must be difficult doing your job knowing that people you will never meet are frothing over you and drawing strange but sexy illustrations of you and posting them on DeviantArt.

Fame is difficult to cope with. Thankfully you’ll never have to deal with it.

Some More “Bohemian Rhapsody” Errors

This weekend I went to see the Freddie Mercury biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody”. I enjoyed it immensely and even teared up during a few moments. However, the movie tries to condense fifteen years worth of events into a two-hour-plus movie and because of that the timeline gets mangled. I’ll give you some examples.

• Freddie Mercury was diagnosed with the HIV virus in 1987. He took a standard blood test. He did not use an app on his iPhone.
• Freddie also did not contract the HIV virus from playing Pokemon Go.
• Some people know about the confrontation between Freddie and Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols but fewer people know about the knife between bassist John Deacon and Vanilla Ice.
• Guitarist Brian May was an astronomer, not an astrologist. This wipes out the entire ‘Brian May Psychic & Lottery Number Hotline’ subplot.
• Drummer Roger Taylor did have a psychic hotline, but it was for a brief time and came years after Mercury’s death.
• Contrary to the film, Queen did not lose rights to the words “mama mia” in a 1976 arm-wrestling match between Roger Taylor and Bjorn Ulvaeus of ABBA.
• Freddie’s mustache was grown not in a government laboratory, but on his own upper lip.
• The following lyrics were not used in the band’s 1982 hit “Body Language”: “You make me think of lighting in skies”, “Your offbeat dance makes me fantasize” and “Your ass is a spaceship I want to ride”.
• Contrary to the film, when the band walks off stage after their famous Live Aid performance, Lady Gaga does not come up to them and say “You just gave me a great idea.”
• In real life, Freddie’s corpse was cremated. In the movie, his living body is frozen in carbonite by Vanilla Ice.

It’s Just Not Your Moment

Life is filled with near-misses and the occasional ripoff moment. I’ve done my best to put those moments behind me but sometimes I’m reminded of them. It happened again Thursday night at the Tidball’s show. Someone reminded me of a major ripoff in my life. A time I won, then lost a rap/r&b/soul talent search in Memphis. The winner of the contest was to receive a recording deal with Sony Music, which probably meant recording time instead of an actual contract to release music.

This happened in 2005. And I won the contest. They announced me the winner, right there on stage in the New Daisy Theatre on Beale Street. And then about a week later, I was informed that there had been a mixup on the vote tally and I had actually not won. The true victors were a four-piece r&b group who weren’t even in the contest but performed on the show anyway. I knew it was a ripoff and there was nothing I could do to change it. The organizers never tried to make any restitution to me for my loss. The underhanded nature of it gnawed at me for years afterward.

A year later I returned to that venue to perform a full set opening up for Black Francis on his solo tour. The staff remembered me and how upset people at that talent contest were about me winning. They thought it was funny how a guy drove all the way from Kentucky and won the whole thing over an entire city of Memphis hopefuls. But it was a ripoff.

Then there are the near-misses, the moments that a cool thing nearly happened. Like the time I nearly wrote a song with Black Francis. Let me explain.

“Threshold Apprehension” is a song from his 2007 album “Bluefinger”, a concept album about Dutch singer/painter Herman Brood (1946-2001). Charles invited me to submit some lyrics for the “Threshold” instrumental track but the caveat was that they had to relate to Herman Brood somehow. I did a little research on the guy and wrote a few sets of lyrics that weren’t used, which I don’t blame Charles for because I wouldn’t have used them either. To be fair, the subject of Herman Brood was not my fixation. It was his idea and his concept and what ended up on the album was far superior to anything I came up with.

My lyrics were mostly about Herman taking speed in the 60’s and playing with a band on US military bases. Interesting subject but lousy execution on my part. “Threshold Apprehension” was listed as one of Rolling Stone’s top 100 songs of 2007. Missed the boat on that one. A few extra dollars in my pocket, just a few.

Another near-miss was one of my songs nearly being released by another artist. Shooter Jennings produced one of my songs for singer Julie Roberts. That was over three years ago. I have a copy of it for my own listening but I’m pretty sure the entire project has been mothballed. A few extra dollars in my pocket, just a few. Julie has a new book out, “Beauty In The Breakdown”. I follow her on Instagram and she seems to be well and happy.

Every now and then, someone will bring up that I was on a Comedy Central game show, “Beat The Geeks”. I did ten episodes back in 2002 for their second and final season. Another lost opportunity, even though I actually got to do the show. They had me penciled in for fifteen episodes. I blew it. A few extra dollars in my pocket, just a few. Maybe the entire two years I lived in Los Angeles was a lost opportunity. I was surrounded by so many talented people who were working and making things happened but I was not in the right mind to do anything about it. Too mentally fried to catch the train. Full blown manic behavior, folks. I always thought I was on the verge of a breakthrough.

Was “Beat The Geeks” my moment? I’d hate to think so. I was twenty-four years old. I tried to build on it but I couldn’t. I joined an improv class at a comedy club but flamed out after eight weeks. I started a band that played about five gigs to mostly empty venues (some of these were the Los Angeles pay-to-play type of gigs, another outright RIPOFF scheme concocted by music business scumbags).

The pay-to-play thing is like this. They put you down for a date at a club, let’s say the Dragonfly club on the 21st. They’ll give you a block of tickets and tell you to bring them a certain amount of money on the day of the show. For us, it was $250. They didn’t care how we did it. Whether we sold 50 tickets for $5 or 25 for $10 or just showed up with $250 of our money and the same block of tickets they gave us to start with, it didn’t matter. That’s how you get on stage with pay-to-play. You have to hustle for weeks and weeks to get anyone to buy a ticket, even if they couldn’t actually come to the gig. Your name will be on the list of advertisements for the week of shows in the newspaper but unless you’ve got that money you don’t play. Ripoff. No wonder house shows became so prevalent. This shit has been going on for decades, going all the way back to the 80’s. Jane’s Addiction famously played house parties and built a following in Southern California while avoiding what was then a new pay-to-play scene.

The more I think about it, the more old moments like these come up and it makes me sad. I want to make this clear: the deals with FB and Shooter or Beat The Geeks were not ripoffs. They were just bad luck. Not my moment. Such is life. You weren’t meant to have that placement. You weren’t meant to have her for your girlfriend. That a&r guy wasn’t meant to show up in time for your set in Manhattan in 2007 (see? It’s all coming back to me and I HATE IT). You are where you’re meant to be and that sucks if you’re in a shitty place. You’d still be relatively broke. Still need help with things. Still not have what you need. Still not have that girl. Still not have all those songs recorded.

I hope nothing good happens to me again because I’m certain it will get fucked up somehow, either by me or by extenuating circumstances. Angels avoid me.