profanity

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Obama: Run the Goddamned Option!

August 18, 2009 | 2 comments

The following is text I composed for the “Additional message to President Obama” field, after I had signed my name to CredoAction.com’s petition “Tell Obama: The public option is not optional.” I urge all of you who read this while the health care reform issue is still current to do the same. Unless you don’t agree with me. No, fuck that — if you don’t agree I still want you to sign it.

Health care reform has been the issue of greatest concern to me for a long time. Therefore, in the following I will make every effort to temper my vehement language and trust that you will pardon me if a mild profanity or two do creep in.

If you punt on the public option, this whole initiative will have been in vain. All that would be left in the bill would be the window dressing. Window dressing, without a bloody *window*! Read the rest of this entry »


Do Yourself a Favor and Shut the Fuck Up

June 20, 2009 | 2 comments

How is it that I still occasionally think that I’ve seen it all? Specifically, with regard to the reflexive disingenuousness of partisan political idiocy? My hope for the reformation of our national miscourse keeps feeling more and more audacious.

At this point I feel compelled to alert you, my esteemed readers, that the remainder of this post will contain expressions garnished with no small amount of profanity. If this does not suit your taste, I hope that you will keep in mind that 1) you were alerted beforehand, and 2) it’s my fucking blog.

As I was saying… today’s attempt to make my head explode comes courtesy of Stephen Hayes and William Kristol at the Weekly Standard:
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George Carlin, 1937-2008

June 23, 2008 | 3 comments

George Carlin is gone. Damn it. I never got to meet him.

carlinPeople who know me well will attest that in a normal conversation, it’s quite common for me to quote George Carlin. It’s no accident: he was so prolifically funny and insightful for so long that he covered the majority of topics relevant to our lives at one time or another. More than any other individual source, George Carlin’s stand-up formed the basis of my comedic sensibility. He showed me what comedy could be—that its full effect extends well beyond what is merely funny. His wit was restless, impatient; it tugged persistently at the uneven corners of our society.

When I was about 11 or 12, his 1972 album Class Clown became the first comedy recording I ever owned. I brought that LP home, listened to it, and then listened to it again. And then again, a few more times. Soon his brilliant riffs were committed to my memory (where they remain), and I returned to Tower Records in Mountain View to repeat the process with another opus from the Carlin catalogue. LPs gave way to cassette tapes – easier to store, useful for my new, bitchin’ bright-yellow Walkman, and good for comedy recordings because the eventual decline in audio fidelity didn’t matter so much.

As I’ve mentioned, his penetratingly funny insights are too numerous and wide-ranging to recount. Here’s just a few, off the top of my head. George, forgive me if I paraphrase.

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Pete Needs Teflon Tape

June 2, 2007 | 2 comments

All I thought I’d do was reply to this email, and the next thing I knew I just got all into it. I guess I’ve had some angst built up around the issue of shopping at Home Depot – you be the judge. Afterward I figured as long as I typed that much, it might as well be a blog post.

The author of the original email is Pete, a member of the Fantasy Football league I’ve been in for the last six years. The email conversations between the ten of us in the league aren’t just your average profane trash-talk. I doubt, in fact, that one could easily find such creative, unpredictable, even erudite trash-talk anywhere in the world of fantasy sports. Pete, for his part, regularly cracks my shit up with a style of obscenity unlike that of anyone else I can think of. As you’ll see, he doesn’t always limit himself to fantasy football-related subject matter:

SUBJECT: Re: complaint

Seriously, Home Depot and Loew’s suck moose knuckle.

I’m just trying to find a nice simple roll of Teflon pipe thread tape, and neither of those cockmeister companies carry it. Lowe’s even has an online “project center” where several plumbing-related projects call for the use of Teflon tape, but you can’t buy it from them. Fucking assbags.

P.
–
“I just beat the asses of three thousand men. The hell you leave me alone” – Rodney Leonard Stubbs, Great Outdoor Fight Champion, 1973

My reply:

They have it at the Home Depot on Balboa and Roscoe in Van Nuys*… at least they did a couple of weeks ago when I needed to put on my new shower head. It was kind of on one of those little afterthought-like consoles that they put onto the end of the aisle – the end by the aisle halfway back in the store, so it’s not like you can just walk in, go 15 feet over to the end by the cash registers, grab your teflon tape and turn around. Because that would just make our life too goddamned easy.

Of course, then you have to try to guess which fucking line might move fast enough to get your 1 item rung up in less than half an hour. And don’t think it’s the slick new self-checkout registers, either – at least two, if not three of the four always have an “OUT OF ORDER” sign taped to the screen, and the one remaining LCD panel has some clueless geriatric standing in front of it, brow furrowed, index finger held semi-motionless in midair eight inches from the screen, as though it’s some kind of fucking transactional Ouija board whose unseen force will any moment now magically guide their finger to select the right form of payment. This withered stooge still hasn’t figured out how to use the DVD player he got two years ago, and yet he’s rolled his cart straight into the self-checkout line, because darn it if he won’t get a kick out of making that barcode scanner thing do that “BEEP” noise. Dear God, deliver us from Depot. You can forget about the self-checkout-register-monitor kid in the orange apron untangling this situation anytime soon – she might as well get out her Sharpie and and start making her “out of order” sign. I swear, the lines at Costco might be longer but at least they fucking MOVE.

Hope you have a super rest of the day anyway, Pete. Is there a True Value nearby?

Best of luck!
Derek :-)

* Pete lives in Florida; I live in Los Angeles


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