Pompadoured

someone drove through the front of my favorite bagel shop. there is lots of fog. i am drinking a forty. my wife is going to have a baby soon. everything dies, and i spend money on alcohol. outside, i cannot see the skyline.

I haven’t really talked about my personal life on this blog in a while, but I think I need to, just so I can have some sort of record of what things are like. You know, for my kids and shit.
I am going to be a dad in four months. I think I know an okay amount about being a dad. I have had a dad for like twenty-six years now. He’s been a good dad. I think I am an alright person, and it was his responsibility to make me an alright person. I’m not a hater, and since I don’t drink haterade, I know my dad did fine. I will be fine.
I like wearing ugly, stupid-looking clothes and embarrassing people in front of their friends. I like sports, cussing, and if I have a boy, I have some good misguided and stereotypically-correct information to pass on about women, and I was the beer chugging champion of my fraternity pledge class, so I have that going for me. Also, I can fart well.
If I have a girl, I am fucked, because she will eventually bleed, and that’ll fuck me up. I don’t know shit about bleeding from my genitals, and I won’t know how to react, and I only have like twenty or so years to figure that whole deal out. Until then, I’ve got it covered. I’ll just give her ponies and shit and take her to Glamour Shots. All little girls like that kind of thing. Also, if she doesn’t become a cheerleader in high school, I will disown her.
Overall, I think I am ready. All I have to do is hide my guns and porno, and work on making my farts a little louder, and I’m fully prepared for being a dad. I just ordered a helmet and some tongs on Amazon, so I have the physical part down, I’m just worried about my mental game-plan– like, if these things shit on you and stuff, how do you retaliate? Do babies like whiskey? And what if it’s porno time for daddy, and there’s no cardboard box around to throw the baby in?

this is a picture of my wife.
this is an interview with my wife.
me: do you like your butt?
that is my first question
Jenny: yes it is big
i get lots of compliments on it
i used to be sad the compliments weren’t about my boobs but i’ve gotten over that cause my butt is so awesome
me: what is your favorite song that i sing?
Jenny: wow, there are a lot
one of my top faves is “panini”
me: how does that song go?
Jenny: “panini” is just the word panini over and over again to a groovy tune
you used to sing one about sunday that i liked but i don’t hear you sing it that much anymore
me: the farting song?
Jenny: i think that was it
me: “i’ll fart on you / i’ll fart on you / i’ll fart on you / my name is sunday”
i like that song
Jenny: yeah its got a country twang that your other songs don’t
me: if you had to choose between not knowing the joys of sunday or not knowing the joys of queso, which one would you choose?
Jenny: god that is hard
i really like queso but i would be very sad without sunday
i’m going to choose sunday
i had a dream last night that i threw her in a lake to see if she would swim and she almost drowned
i jumped in and saved her
me: how fat was her face in your dream?
Jenny: she was actually a different color brown with white spots and her face was not so fat
me: she’s cute
if you could eat anything right now, even though you just ate cereal with berries, what would it be?
Jenny: um some creamy soup like broccoli cheese soup or like cream of asparagus
me: would you use the vitamix that my mother gave me?
Jenny: oh yeah
i really want to use it
i want to make mayonnaise in it
me: i want you to do that, so i can eat the mayonnaise
Jenny: i think making homemade condiments is cool
me: if you were a ghost-spirit alien who had to assume the life, body, and identity of an artist to survive on our planet, which currently living artist would you assume the life of?
Jenny: thomas kincaid
so i could kill myself
me: good answer
how do you feel right now, and is there anything you need me to get you?
Jenny: no, i feel pretty good
i wish i had time to get some yoga done
me: i don’t know what else to ask
Jenny: um
ok then i’ve got questions for you
me: okay
i will do my best
Jenny: if you could only record one tv show on our tivo, which one would it be?
me: rob and big, i think
maybe something stupid and older
oh!
realsex
easy
Jenny: hmmm
i’ve seen all of them
they kinda gross me out
me: yeah, they are horrible
i saw one yesterday with this girl who picks things up with her vagina
Jenny: see, gross.
if i had to cook the same thing every night, what would you want it to be?
me: shrimp in butter, and some sort of healthy pasta
easy for you, and tasty
Jenny: no veggies?
me: sure, veggies all over it
dip the shrimp in veggies
Jenny: good idea
me: we could kebab some veggies
what is our name for any place that serves italian, american, and asian/fusion cuisine on one menu, with kooky shit on the walls?
Jenny: fuckers!
love that place
me: what emotions do you feel inside of a fuckers?
Jenny: anger with a touch of fun!
what emotions do you feel?
me: sadness, mainly
i feel complete
Jenny: that’s a good way to put it
me: what would you order if we were at fuckers right now?
Jenny: nachos or a fried onion thing with sauce to dip and maybe a pasta dish
but i think a themed burger sounds good too
me: like the one with the fried cheese wheel on it, or like a salsa burger?
Jenny: like a chili burger
a burger with chili and onions on it
me: if you had your own fuckers, what would the eggrolls have in them?
Jenny: they would be “southwest themed” with black beans, corn and chicken and a spicy chipotle dipping sauce
and have like a fried tortilla wrap around them
me: new mexico in your mouth
a mouth full of little new mexicans
Jenny: yes
“the flavors of the south come alive in your mouth at fuckers!”
me: man i love fuckers
Jenny: i like that chat tells me that fuckers is an incorrect word
me: chat hates boneless buffalo wings and bottomless softdrinks
man i could go for some boneless buffalo wings and bottomless softdrinks
i’m going to go make some mud
Jenny: ok i’m going
good luck with the mud
<3
me: <3

when wendy’s announces that it has a burger named ‘the baconator’, fucking listen to them. fucking listen, and drop everything when that announcement is made, because the baconator is not going away. the baconator will consume your life. the baconator will consume your home, your furniture, and, eventually, that book you own with pictures of topless pot smoking women. it is the baconator, by wendy’s. it is six strips of bacon over two massive burger patties. the baconator has four fucking slices of cheese, and no vegetables.
when you realize the baconator is coming into your life, you have to make new plans. it is the baconator, and the bacon will be served, regardless of your original weekend plans to get drunk and water ski and shoot guns in the forest. ‘there is only bacon, and it is here, and fucking shit… fucking oh my god,’ you will say out-loud, like nine times, to yourself. and, with this, this introduction of the baconator into your life, your stomach will go all pussy and you won’t have a solid bowel movement for a week.
everything, always, goes all pussy under the massive, ass-crushing butt-weight of the baconator.

[Today is the day of my late cousin Andy's remembering in Austin, and I couldn't think of a better way to celebrate his life than showing you how much he celebrated it himself. He sent me the following letter exactly 13 months ago today.]

Gene,
Your outlandish twists have inspired me. I trudge to work as a high rollin buss boy at an anonymous, yet popular NYC restaurant riding the large silver cell transit vehicles through the viscera pathways that deliver us humans to our proper residences and contribution points. We are the fractions and small puzzle pieces of the greater mind and identity that is NY city, all that inhabit and ride the trains and cars and walk the sidewalks seem to make up the consciousness of the city with our many consciences and contributions. I have traveled to a great human synapse, where organic is the totally man made and trees can serve only as the artificial reminders of a foreign naturalness that is far away from here, different than as a distance measured in miles, but a distance measured in the density of thought and it all would not be possible if it were not supported by the small town nowheres and medium size metropolises that are the channels to which all economies and personalities flow through in order to create the energy to support this structure where they seem to terminate in a large churning spectacle of total human orgasm, and we try every day to clean it up. A human brain could be said to occupy a few square inches or a universe of endless thought and in this way the city can be measured by boundaries in miles but never in depth of impact…measured, yet immeasurable. We travel clad in the suits of our identity to our pockets and places within the large mass of earth tissue, nikes, cheap fifth avenue suits, or ghetto jungle outfits, some with blaring headphones to dampen the uncontrolled fractals of their own thoughts spinning ever outward with no interpretable meaning. We serve as the space between the peak and troughs of a bell curve simply to support the extremes broadcast to us through the metrobrain airwaves and at the speed of light on fiber optic cables drilled and laid in rock tissue networked to eventually reach our own brains and sensory mechanisms and to produce sex thoughts, love, depression, addiction, hate, lust, and even to affect the biological rhythms of your body on down to the consistency of this mornings unsatisfying terd in the pot. I am constantly affected in this place and there is no how or why to it, noway of truly guaging the impact of annything on my life is there? Blank faces on the train and an occasional breif connection through a glance or a word cannot be calibrated. So we sit in the silver box, surrounded by brown fake wood paneling, with chrome polls to hold onto, on orange and yellow seats that conjure up images of mcdonalds furniture and the architecture of an indoor playscape and ride ride ride to an eventual demise. We sit still and orderly, feeling each other riding the subway, sometimes trying to telepathically interpret the thoughts of others, sometimes knowing them. Together we inhabit the city, as daddylonglegs huddled together in a mass on the side of a cave vibrating together for some purpose unknown to us, but natural. I have reached the apex and now reside in the harry daddylongled armpit looking formation that is New York City. I ride the subway accompanied by the ramblings of william s burroughs’ naked lunch and your writings tickle my fancy as they swirl arround in my thoughts along with thoughts of mugwamps and interzone. And I agree with you, there’s inly one thing to do, tear it all down here together in an alcohol induced frenzy along with some spiritual recognition. I look forward to more letters and some time together here our bridges have not been burned but are still being built.
Love always,
your cousin Andy

This is a picture of me and my cousin Andy by my grandparent’s pool.
Andy was hit by a truck and killed yesterday. He was 25.
We both had so many hopes for each other. I was so excited about his new life in New York, and he was ready to see my novella. There were so many things I wished for him that this breaks me; I’m not only devastated in my heart, I’m leveled beyond beyond.
He had the fabric of our entire family behind him, he was our man – the glint of our family cloth. Mad and beautiful, my cousin had more of a soul than I can ever hope to hem. His death not only leaves a stain that is tragic and painful to everyone I love, but it rips my sense of mortality apart at the seam.
Andy was the type of man that you felt good looking up to – you felt like the world would slow when he’d step a half-step slower, and the winds would change if he held his breath. He had those kinds of movements, the kind that even a slip of his fingers had symbolic meaning and a simple undefinable grace.
A grace I don’t know how to define, but goddamn words.
Goddamn.

L.L.D. – Healing This Motherfucker

Can’t tell you much about the experience. Tubes out my side, some Jello, nurses busting through like large-framed cattle, overhead. I slept a lot. MTV played a soft marathon of “Date My Mom,” a program that showcases inept mothers.
I’d yell at one that she’s a bitch, another whale-mother got no points for buying her daughter a vibrator, and, oh god, don’t get me started on the mom with the Beavis impersonation. Those women were sooooo embarrassing, OMG. My own mother, bored and also annoyed with MTV, insisted we watch “General Hospital,” in the hospital. I took a picture of this moment (above). Very cold and irony-laden.
Two teenage girls fought for their lives, writhing in the melodrama; hitting the button on the morphine machine over and over. One girl had a rare brain condition brought-on by making out with her boyfriend at the local pizza parlor. The other had heart problems brought-on by what I assumed was something as improbable as being tall and thin and young. I had tubes coming out of my chest that bubbled when I held my breath. We were all in it together. Me, and my soap-opera teens. Tenderly, in the flashing radiance of my morphine machine, we all slept.
The light was on – The big red light that flickered over my half-eaten sandwich, pressing down on a button that lifts my bed in strings and carries me somewhere, up and out of my window, over fat big-bodied nurses and around a set of gigantic dancing hole-filled lungs, to the place where minds and marionettes go when no one is in control. A place where all you really want to do is drink diet soda, and you can’t help but piss a goddamn bucket every thirty minutes.
I feel like a teenage girl again. Bless these drugs.

I’ve got a bum lung – my right lung’s a bust.
It fell once in January, and again about a month ago. Doctor says it’s nothing horrible, it just happens to really tall young men, it’s no HUGE deal, not forever-bad. Still, it doesn’t feel good when your lung spontaneously deflates in the middle of a Comp-USA. The true meaning of pain is a grievous injury around a team of computer nerds, helpless.
Makes me almost regret being born so tall and young and thin.
It just seems like being really tall and thin is the hardest thing in the world sometimes – I’ve got these damned lung problems, not to mention I’m always hitting my head on doorjambs and the hem on my pants is always too high AND it’s pretty uncomfortable to lay lengthwise on a loveseat. Yet I persevere.
I’ve decided to go ahead with a surgery that will lessen the chances of a lung collapse ever happening again two-fold (keep in mind, this is for my right lung only) – I get busy on Wednesday – going the as-soon-as-possible route. I’m scared, but when it’s time to get a party started, you pour the wine heavy and hold on to the dashboard. You gas it.
The problem is a recurrence of a spontaneous pnuemothorax (lung collapse) – the process to fix this is a fairly simple, albeit moderately serious one (seriously CRAZY!). They make two half-inch incisions between my ribs, one for the camera and one for the tool. My very kind and outstanding (-ly BADASS) surgeon, Dr. Khalil, will then rub the wall of my chest cavity with the tool, forcing it to excrete a natural protein that will adhere my expanded lung to my chest wall, like velcro or a tongue on a frozen pole.
I have faith that the process will be a success, but I know what’s going down is some hardcore shit (hardcore SO MUCH FUN!), so for the next few weeks, I’m stuck laying in a bed with a whole lot of pain killers(!), and a whole lot of Mamma Morgan’s BAD-ASSSSSSSS home cookin’(!!). That means I’ve got nothing to do but sit around all half-naked high on medication, drool slopping onto my brother’s X-box controller – blogging a storm the likes of internetdom has only seen two, maybe three thousand times before -
Get ready for the blog THUNDER peeps, get ready for: ‘THE LIGHTNING LUNG DOSSIER’ – A two week journey into the land of modern medicine, to congeal as modern medication sees fit. Good luck, me.