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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hello. I’m using a Android tablet for this post and will be doing so until things improve. My laptop’s processor don’t work right. A few weeks ago it stopped working altogether. My local guy got it working but now the video won’t come out. The screen works but there is no video getting to it. No graphics card and everything runs off the processor. Can’t hook up to a TV to get video neither. It just died like that.
I have a car that severely needs maintenance. New ball joints and brakes, plus a wheel alignment and a new tire. You know how many Americans can’t afford a $500 emergency? It me.
I pulled a muscle in my leg a few weeks ago while going to the pool at the health park. I couldn’t work out because I needed to rest and elevate the leg. I actually missed working out. I only went back yesterday because it finally felt like it was up to the challenge. As I get older, I heal slower.
I need an dentist appointment NOW. One of my teeth is showing gum erosion and it hurts to drink cold liquid. Only started hurting this weekend so maybe there is still hope for my mouth.
Do you know how hard it is to find a dentist who will accept Medicaid and Medicare? Eyes and teeth are not covered for the most part. Why would they be? It’s not like they’re part of the human body or something.
All of this adds up to MONEY, which I do not have. You see why this is a problem. I can’t work and I have to depend on the monthly disability check I get which covers living expenses (barely).If I had some money I don’t know what I’d do with myself. I might get an eye exam and a new pair of glasses. I might buy a new pair of shoes or a full tank of gas.
I just remembered that my electric bill is due in a week. I’m rooting for a meteor to hit me straight in the head.
Some things I have heard discussed in regard to the case of Brett Kavanaugh, Supreme Court nominee and accused attempted rapist:
Bill Clinton
Ted Kennedy
The Duke Lacrosse team scandal
The people who bring these subjects up seems to run the gamut from “what about those guys – weren’t they guilty” to “Kavanaugh’s not guilty because women lie sometimes”. And I know I don’t have the energy to yell at these people so I can’t imagine what it’s like being a woman.
A lot of women have been attacked and say as much yet nobody ever takes credit for those attacks. I don’t have any reason to disbelieve women any more. Once upon a time, I wanted to believe that rapes and sexual assaults didn’t happen. I wanted to rationalize why someone would make up an accusation. What is there to gain? And eventually I realized there’s nothing to gain. There’s no book deal or movie deal or TV series or whatever. You can’t spin being a victim of sex crimes into an entertainment career.
I was in denial. Because they do happen. Sex crimes happen all the time. Rape, battery, molestation. I was molested as a kid and I didn’t tell anyone until last year. How could I not understand why someone would not come out for so long after an attack?
So in the abstract, I understood there were people who reflexively didn’t believe women accusers of rape but it took this week for that to come into focus. A guy I’ve known since high school kept pushing the Duke Lacrosse comparison to me, where a group of athletes were falsely accused of rape by a woman who stripped at a party they threw.
He was equating the Kavanaugh case with the Duke Lacrosse incident. Talked of ruined lives. What can be worse that that? Lives ruined by false accusations.
I would have asked him to name one of the Duke guys but we were on Twitter so I blocked him.
All I know is if the guy who molested me had the chance to be an elected official or Supreme Court justice, I might have a grudge myself and might want to do something about it. I don’t know know what relevance any of this other stuff has to do with this particular case. I also don’t know what urban crime in Chicago has to do with preventing school shootings. I don’t know how to argue with people who are intent on diversion after diversion.
It’s not my job to argue with them. They’ll have to come to a realization sooner or later. It took me some time but I came around. And if they can’t or refuse to, they can go to hell.
