bones of blog

Where will my blogs go once I stop updating them fifty years from now? And where will they go if the Interweb stops working, crashes, or is wiped out by virus or alien invasion? When elephants feel death approaching, researchers say they often remove themselves to secret areas littered with the bones of their pachyderm forebears, graveyards piled high with the massive skulls and valuable tusks of these smart, lumbering beasts. My blogs, I fear, are not much different: when their time is up and their duties have been served, they will either retreat quietly into the digital forest, randomized clusters of ones and zeros waiting to be re-born as a toddler's social media account, or they will sink forever into the shiny black carapace of some server tower humming away dutifully in the climate-controlled warrens of any one of countless South Asian server farms.

All the writing this author posted on those blogs will be gone if they themselves go: there are no hard copies of his body of work; no printed copies of the Grigovian fairy tales he composed; no tactile versions of the vituperative barbs he hurls at politicians and powerful persons alike; his legacy is 50% ethereal and 49% vacuous, and the few items that do exist for real resemble the ruined detritus of a foolish nonce who cowers in the dark shadows of the past while cursing the skies for making thunder and sending rain. No, his artistic effort will vanish when the systems crash, when the sky-brothers return for gold and human women, or upon the Singularity, whichever comes first, and he wouldn't have it any other way. Huzzah.

mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥

on balls on cars

Living in rural south-central Pennsylvania, I see many different things. A number of these things are strange; others, unusual; and some, even, are downright sad. Among the most sad of the things I see are pairs of plastic (or metal) testicles hanging from the undercarriages of cars. When I see such a Ride With Balls, my first reaction is to assume that the testicles of the person driving the vehicle are so small, inadequate, and insignificant that he had little choice but to go out and attach fake balls to his vehicle in the invariably unsuccessful attempt to compensate for his glaring male deficiency. More often than not, such fake testicles are attached to the rear struts of modified, raised pickup-trucks, vehicles sure to be driven by men with massive inferiority complexes, insignificantly-sized balls, and length- or girth-challenged penises. Occasionally, however, I see fake balls attached to the bottoms of beat-up sedans driven by scruffy, thuggish-looking persons with poorly executed prison tattoos who, since they seem to be always slumped into their seats in the same awkward fashion, apparently suffer commonly from a certain type of spinal injury.

One reason for hanging artificial testicles from the back of one's car could be to signify to other persons that the car – possessing as it does of massive, brass-coated fake bull's balls – is so powerful, so souped up, and so very fast off the mark that to even dream of challenging it to a race would be to beg for swift defeat and assured disappointment. However, since serious racecar drivers work diligently to shave as much unnecessary weight off their vehicles as possible, this argument does not favor the person who feels the need to hang a four pound, cast-iron scrotum from his car. Perhaps the artificial-sack-danglers act in this fashion out of a deep, unconscious yearning for the Olden Days, back when conveyances ate straw, shit manure, and actually had balls that they used to inseminate their species' females, but, given that most of males I see overcompensating for their shriveled, tiny nuts in this way are under the age of thirty, they cannot possibly have been alive during the time of horse and buggy. A final reason for a person to hang with a bent coat-hanger from his automobile's bumper a lump of plastic shaped like a set of well-veined testicles could be that he is a funny-man, a laugh-riot, the kind of guy who comes into a room and has everyone in stitches with the first phrase out of his mouth. As I have spoken briefly with but a few persons who owned a Ride With Balls, I cannot speak to the extent of their comedic craft, to the well-honed delivery of their witty, sardonic comments, or to their overall side-splitting hilarity, but I doubt that anyone who would pay good money to have his truck jacked up so that it sticks up in the air and wastes precious fuel because of its horrible aerodynamics, I doubt that any such person would have much of a sense of humor, let alone humility, self-loathing, or tact.

Please, fine citizens of America, good readers of these posts, please try not to mock too badly persons who dangle fake nuts from their cars, for they appear to be simple-minded, foolish individuals whose own testicles are so awesomely small that they need to hang a Real Pair from, of all things, their cars. Perhaps we should all just mock them later on, quietly, and in private, together.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on running on rock

A legend survives in the world of running: that asphalt is softer than concrete, and that it is better for one's knees to run in the street rather than on the sidewalk. Whoever first spread this myth was not an avid or longtime runner, nor did he or she physically test (as with a hammer or other solid object) the springiness or bounciness of asphalt (compared, for example, to dirt) in order to make sure what he or she was saying was actually true.

This myth – although it is widely popular – is not true. Please, runners seeking to avoid bodily injury, please do not run in the streets, for if you do, you risk being hit by passing cars, and you cause disruptions to the flow of vehicular traffic. Please, runners seeking to protect knees or hips, please do not run on concrete, pavement, asphalt, stone, macadam, or any other hard and unyielding surface; individuals seeking yielding, joint-friendly running trails would do well to run on grassy or earthen tracks.

I no longer run regularly, nor do I currently chair my local municipality's Department of Street Works; therefore, I do not know if a procedure for making joint-friendly asphalt has been invented, and whether or not every street in America has been repaved accordingly. A side note: I often see persons running on the edges of busy streets, with traffic. To run – or to walk – with traffic is to all but beg for bodily trauma, general physical paralysis, and a slow, painful death. When one walks or runs in the same direction as traffic, one cannot see cars coming from behind, and, therefore, one has no warning at all of an impending collision. Alternately, when one walks or runs in the direction opposite of traffic, one has at least a few milliseconds to jump out of the way should a car happen to veer outside of its lane. While the logic of moving against traffic seems sound, I am nonetheless dismayed that, unlike the illogic of running on rocks, it has fled from the minds of those evidently self-respecting, otherwise healthy individuals who strap on go-fasters and get out for a nice jog.

I shall, however, stop worrying about the poor life-choices made by other people, and start looking for a bright side in all of this: the self-removal of unthinking fools from the general breeding population. Please, dear friend, stay safe out there by staying smart, keeping your head on a swivel and a song in your heart. Mahalo.




場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on B.I.B.L.E

  Last night, in Hollywood, I saw a bumper sticker that read: B.I.B.L.E – Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth. Next to this statement was the NOTW gang sign of those loosely affiliated neo-Christians who do not consider themselves to be part of this world. A book more than a thousand pages long, a work so self-contradictory that within the first few paragraphs it makes two separate and conflicting claims of how this world was made, the Christian bible is not simple, basic, or easy – it is a confusing monstrosity too easily used to keep the weak and the spineless in line, too easily manipulated by incorrigible and vile televangelists. (Furthermore, if the supposedly faithful were to follow the orders of their Yahweh, they would be killing homosexuals and sodomist in the streets, as they are told to do in subheading 20 of a chapter called Leviticus.) I despise the NOTW crowd primarily because they lack the courage to just kill themselves and get to their Other Place already. If you can read these words, you poor born-again fools, you are of this world, and not song nor prayer shall change that.

場黑麥 ioanni elymucampus fecit