Declaration Of Independence (For Cocks)

Man, you know what I saw on T.V. the other day? Another Cialis commercial. It doesn't really matter how clever they write the ads for any of the boner pills out there, every time I see them I get a little bit angry.

Now, don't get me wrong, I think it's great that I get to see commercials with middle-aged shlubs dancing around in public and singing the praises of their chemically induced hard-ons, maybe doing some sort of trombone pantomime with their penises. What irritates me, though, is the fact that we live in an age of men needing pills to even just be physically able to fuck their wives and/or girlfriends and/or alternative lifestyle partner and/or hapless barnyard orifice (I think that is the first time in human history that anybody has put those three words together). It seems to me that men just were able to get hard-ons without so much chemical dependency. Where along our evolutionary track did we lose that ability? I hate to think that someday I will be relegated to the same fate as some guy who feels it's necessary to Gene Kelly my way into the workplace singing about my schlong to my coworkers and getting high-fives for something as simple as increasing blood flow to my crotch.

I'm sure that those of you out there whom I work with, have worked with, or will work with are probably dreading the day that I twirl into work and fill you all in on how I got it up. Sure, I'll probably get fired for filling you all in on such matters and I'll probably get sued for sexual harassment by some of you sensitive types, but getting a stiffy is worth all the legal hassle and unemployment in the world.

But back to the matter at hand...

So seeing the Cialis commercial the other day made me think about the downfall of man. Quite literally a downfall when we're talking about hard dicks. And after some quiet deliberation and a lot of consideration I think I've arrived at the source of the problem itself. The problem is the hard-on itself. It used to be that back in the day a man could walk around with a hard dick all day long. He'd go into the corner store with his hat dangling from him crotch. He'd go to the supermarket and use it to weigh bananas. He'd prop open doors with it. Essentially, what men had was a fifth limb. And they could use it for sex, which was nature's way of rewarding such a versatile piece of meat.

Then, somewhere along the way, men were taught to be ashamed of their hard-ons. I can't pinpoint at which point in history that it happened, but suffice to say that if you walked into the corner store with your hat hanging on your naughty bit somebody would gasp like you just raped a donkey in the candy aisle. Basically, the world got itself really, really sensitive to the concept of a man having blood circulating to his cock. Years passed and men had to change their way of thinking. Instead of thinking, "Damn it, where's a fucking coat hook when you need one?" they started thinking "Oh man, I hope I don't get a hard-on because that would be so embarassing right now."

Basically our brains started to shut out cocks down.

Now we need pills just to have sex. How sad is that? The ghosts of cavemen, Henry Miller, and James Dean are laughing at us men right now. Some lot we turned out to be.

So, I have a proposal, more of a declaration of independence for cocks I suppose. Men, you have to change your way of thinking about things lest you wake up one day and need Cialis to give you a boner for 36 hours (I'm not even sure why you would want one for that long). If you think something dirty or you see a beautiful girl or you just need a coat hook or a door jam, just let it happen. Societal norms be damned! Fucking political correctness is ruining the species! The less you try to stifle a hard-on when you don't need one, the more likely you'll get one when you want one, and without the fucking pills.

Your cock, the cavemen, Henry Miller, and James Dean will thank you.

One Of The Coolest Music Videos I've Ever Seen

Click here.

The link goes to a site that contains what can only be described as an interactive (go ahead try clicking Win's hands and face while he sings) music video for the Arcade Fire song "Neon Bible." I just thought I'd pass that link along to you because I just watched it for the first time and it blew my mind!

Ghosts I-IV

If you're like me you're trying to buy a download of Nine Inch Nails' latest offering "Ghosts I-IV" today. It's available for download only through various Torrent sites or you can go to the official website and purchase a download for as little as $5.00. Musically, it's 36 tracks of instrumental NIN bliss. Right now I've got it playing on the website's player while I wait for the download to complete.

The reason why I'm writing any of this right now is because the Nine Inch Nails servers are packed to the gills with hungry fans wanting the new albums. Packed to the gills means that the downloads are sluggish to say the least. It took a long time before I even got the download started. It's been downloading the .zip file for roughly ten minutes now and I only have 2% of the thing done. It'll be a bit of a wait before I can get it over to my iPod.

I just thought I would give you a heads up in case you were thinking of getting the album for yourself. Be prepared for a digital line-up at the till. In the end, though, it will be worth it. I'm very excited.

New Poem: "Futility"

On March 5, 2008, the Raving Poets return to their cozy little Yianni's basement, The Kasbar. Details of the next reading series we're doing can be found at the Raving Poets' website. I hope to see all of you there. It promises to be a great feat of literature. In the meantime here's a new poem. It's short and sweet.

Futility
I mailed you a tin can.
It should have arrived by now.

I'm very sorry;

the postman made me cut the string.

-Michael Appleby
February, 2008

It's Official: Everything You Do Is Killing The Environment

Click here.

Government officials are now citing drinking bottled water as immoral. Some of you are probably drinking a bottle of water as you are reading this and, you know what, you are monsters!

It's about damned time somebody came out and said it. Every time I see some jerk cracking open a bottle of water I vomit emotionally because I know that Mother Nature is getting raped repeatedly for her sweet, sweet mineral water.

Okay, now seriously, what exactly can we do that won't destroy the planet tomorrow?

It's getting to a point where I'm thinking that since there's nothing that we can do to promote a healthy viable planet with healthy, happy people we just need to go balls out in the opposite direction. Instead of drinking a bottle of water, for instance, just go ahead and dump used motor oil in your neighbor's garden.

What? What? What? What? How can you promote such a morally reprehensible act?

Oh it's quite simple really, if the state of affairs is so bad around here that we have to dismiss drinking bottled water as being just as evil as arson, puppy dog tossing, and bread-loaf sodomy, we need to start doing things to make drinking bottled water not seem so bad, comparitively speaking. So go ahead, start dumping oil. Go take a dump in the hallway of your nearest hospital. Go punch a baby. Give it a few weeks and your government officials can put bottled water in it's proper moral category.

Sure, a bottle of water may not move you to the head of the line in the Mother Nature gangbang to oblivion, but at least your not out there punching babies or peeing on hobos.

Natural Selection Is Working Just Fine. Stop Screwing With It, Glomobi!

So I was watching television the other day and saw an ad for a Glomobi service. Glomobi, for the uninitiated, offer a range of services for cellular phone users all over the place. Text message the word "JOKE" to blah, blah, blah, blah and you'll have trouble not crapping your pants from getting the funniest jokes in the world sent directly to your cell phone! You know the kind of service I'm talking about. Or you'll get asked a suspiciously easy trivia question for which you have to text a multiple choice answer to a number and you'll win a ba-jillion dollars in cold, hard cash (that's probably even a direct quote from one of their ads). Am I an annoying fuckwit wasting your valuable time with painfully obvious questions? Text A for Yes or text B for No to 55555 and you might win 14 zillion ba-jillion buck-a-roos in solid gold coins!

Anyway, now I'm rambling...

So, there I am watching television and this Glomobi ad comes on telling me to text the word DOUCHEBAG to some number and I would, in turn, be sent the latest and greatest pick-up lines to wow the ladies with. Was I sick of being a dweeb sitting around in Bullwinkle boxer shorts and masturbating to Girls Gone Wild infomercials? Was I ready to (gulp!) approach a living breathing girl with actual breasts and naughty bits armed with pick-up lines that will leave her practically ripping her clothes off before I could finish saying my first sentence? Damn straight I was!

If I could rewrite the alphabet I would put U and I beside each other.

Girl, your feet must be tired because you've been running through my mind all day long.

So just text DOUCHEBAG to some weird phone number that has no area code and make sure you pack lots of condoms!

Alright, that's probably not verbatim how the ad went, but it's pretty close.

The point isn't the commercial itself, though.

So what's the point?

Well, in the natural world we have this thing called natural selection. The best traits you have get carried on and augmented further in the next generation when you reproduce and the worst qualities get weeded out slowly the same way. Darwin came up with this theory and it's worked rather well. So now all those dweeb who sit around in their Bullwinkle boxer shorts and set their VCR's to record Girls Gone Wild infomercials (why do we need so many Girls Gone Wild infomercials anyway? Another topic for a blog, perhaps?) are going out and getting laid, and, probably, reproducing.

This is not a good thing.

The whole notion of the species adapting for survivability is being fucked up by guys who text Glomobi and get the latest and greatest pick-up lines to totally score on unsuspecting women with.

I'm new in town. Could you give me directions to your apartment?

Aren't we supposed to keep these idiots from reproducing? The last thing we need is a new generation with the social grace of wet potato sacks.

And women: why do you go to bed with anybody who uses these lines? And don't say that women don't go to bed with these guys because somebody has to be going to bed with them. If they weren't successful using these lines there would be no return customers to the Glomobi service.

These guys walk up to you, cell phone clutched in their meaty paws and they say, "Hold on a sec." Then they text DOUCHEBAG to 55555, get their opening line sent to them and use it on you. And you sleep with them!

Meanwhile, guys who don't use their cell-phone as a crutch for coming up with conversation openers fall by the wayside in favor of these dorks!

It's enough to force a guy to never leave his house and never change his Bullwinkle boxer shorts.

The Roar!

On September 21, next Friday to be more informal, the third annual Roar literary festival takes place here in Edmonton. Click the picture will take you to the official website for the festival. You would do well to go to the website and check it out. There are a ton of great shows going on that night if you are into poetry.

My own little part to play in this year's festival happens at Three Bananas (9918 - 102 Avenue, Edmonton) at 8:00 p.m. I am one of the four poets featured in the "Fabulous Leprechaun Burlesque." The poets in the show recently had a meeting to discuss our plans for the show and I am pretty damn excited to be part of this fanastic show. Aside from me there is Patrick Pilarski, Nicole Pakan, and Adam Snider, all poets whom I am in awe of every time I hear them perform. This is going to be a great show.

If you're looking for something to do next Friday night, do check The Roar out. It'll will shock and enlighten, entertain and enthrall.

Thoughts On Being Explicit

So tonight, after I got home from work, I thought that I would kick back and listen to the latest Garner Andrews podcast. After opening up my iTunes and starting the latest podcast I found myself looking through all of my downloaded podcasts and noticed something that made me smile.

As some of you out there may know, or maybe not, I was featured in a couple of episodes of The Raving Poets' podcast Live At The Kasbar. It's an accomplishment that I'm actually very proud of because now when I introduce myself to strangers and such I get to say, "Hello, I'm Michael Appleby. Yes, that Michael Appleby, Mr. Podcast." What made me smile as I was looking at the listing for The Raving Poets' podcast was that it had been labelled explicit, which is iTunes' way of warning potential listeners that somebody in the podcast has a potty mouth or is saying something that may be offensive.

And I smiled.

I kind of like the idea that something I did has been labeled explicit. Now, it may just be something that Randall Edwards, the man who puts the podcasts together, did in the process of uploading the podcasts. You know, kind of like Apple asking people who are podcasting if anything in their podcasts is objectionable in the slightest way please check this box and, voila, you now have an explicit tag. Or, hopefully, somebody somewhere far off in some internet bunker deep in the crust of the earth listens to each and every podcasts and decided objectively whether or not an offering is explicit before labeling it accordingly.

Either way, though, I like the idea of being explicit. It kind of makes me feel a little more dangerous than I really am. I hope that parents shield their kids when they see me because they just don't know what that crazy Appleby character is liable to do. He just can't be trusted.

He just can't be trusted.

It's a liberating feeling. As though I am liable to do anything at any given moment.

If you want to feel better about yourself just do something that is scary like that. Be explicit. It's wonderful.

Oh, and if you haven't checked out the podcasts yet go to link I provided or just click here.

World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War

I very recently finished reading Max Brooks' novel World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War. I had read his other zombie book The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead some time ago and was quite impressed with how thoroughly Brooks approached the subject of a zombie apocalypse. In the survival guide he expounded, at great length, on various strategies for surviving a zombie attack, but what really struck me was how a lot of the examples he provided in that book would make excellent premises for novels. He was giving little glimpses into really captivating zombie stories. In World War Z he goes one step further, instead of siting examples of how survival strategies worked during a zombie infestation he writes about characters who give their accounts of how they coped in a world going through a zombie apocalypse.

No longer would I have to try to imagine for myself how stories in that zombie-ravaged world would go down. Here it was, at greater lengths than the examples provided in The Zombie Survival Guide. Mind you, the stories aren't all that long because the fictitious Max Brooks is interviews many survivors and compiling their accounts of what happened from their points-of-view. That's how the book is presented: a series of interviews chronicling different stages of the war with the zombies, from the onset of the plague to the pushing of humanity to the brink of extinction to the war to reclaim the planet from the zombie oppressors. This manner of telling the story really provides a broad scope and I was really awe-struck by how meticulous Brooks was in exploring facets of how a zombie apocalypse would affect the world. He was finding stories that you just don't see in zombie movies. It was fascinating to see how global the war really felt in World War Z. That is this book's greatest strength and something that I wish makers of zombie movies will learn from.

I love zombie movies. They provide an excellent platform for suspense and for social commentary. The genre lends itself to social commentary so well by virtue of the fact that zombies, by nature, are usually depicted on an epidemic scale. There is never just one zombie, or if there is, that number balloons to epic scales. Naturally, it becomes more than a problem that one person deals with and becomes more of a problem that large groups of people address, opening the door for all that great food-for-thought on societal topics. World War Z takes a lot of that much further than zombie movie has ever gone.

Sometimes, I found the messages and morals were heavy-handed, but I can't really find fault with it since, if these are to be understood as interviews, transcripts really, people tend to be heavy-handed in communicating their viewpoints in their story-telling. I can let the heavy-handedness slide. Other than that, sometimes the really engaging stories just were not long enough for my liking, as though in my mind I was saying, "More, more!" Again, nothing I can fault Brooks with really because that could very well be me loving the book too much.

This is a book you should definitely check out even if you're not into horror books because the way in which this book is presented, the horror of the face-to-face encounters with zombies isn't so much the focus of the stories as the transition of the world in turmoil and the changes in its inhabitants. It's as entertaining as it is thought-provoking. Do check it out. I insist.

New Poem - "Affront"

Here's another poem that was performed at the last Raving Poets series that I'm finally getting around to posting. I think this one is more in my loveable scumbag mode of writing. It's called "Affront." Enjoy.

Affront
It had to be said.
It had to be whispered
how much I wanted to fuck you
while we sat in church
at your nephew’s christening

because I didn’t want to disturb
the rest of your family
with the sudden rush of blood to the wrong head.

You looked at me
like I was Lucifer himself,
whoever he is,
and angrily whispered back,
“You can’t talk like that in church.”

And to be honest
I got a bit mad too
because I saw it
as more of an affront to God
that he could read my thoughts
and know what I was thinking,
but he couldn’t hear me
speak honestly about what I was thinking
because that was just wrong somehow.

And to be honest,
what I was thinking
was a lot more graphic
than anything that I had just whispered
and God could see it all.

This church was his house.
My house where I always talk dirty to you
was his house.
My own skull was his house too.

I think he would prefer that I tone it down
and omit details like the misplaced banana,
the feather duster, confectioner’s sugar,
and the jar of honey.

As opposed to just
putting it out there.
Every detail
frankly vocalized.
I was doing him a favor in his house
with this minor bit of censorship.
But it had to be said.
It had to be whispered.

-Michael Appleby
May, 2007

New Poem - "Spark"

Sorry that I haven't been posting very much lately. I've been a busy boy of late. Lots of living life away from my keyboard. It's not that I haven't been writing, but I've been really distracted from getting to my beloved blogging. Here's a poem that I actually performed a while back in the "Rapture" series with the Raving Poets. You'll notice that it's dated for July and that's because I just did some revising to it and it feels like a busier poem to me now, a little more dynamic than its first draft. Oh, and I've learned how to indent text using html. I never bothered to learn that before, so yay for me! I suggest reading this out loud while listening to the song "A Tender History In Rust" by Do Make Say Think. That's the song I was listening to when I first drafted this poem and I think it makes a great soundtrack. It was meant as a sort of companion piece to "Lamp Men Of Midnight" in that I was going with that same nocturnal feel. I love the night. I love it. Anyway, enjoy it. Feel free to leave feedback or just tell me how much of a pretentious boob I am. It's all welcome.

Spark
Nocturnes after midnight and I am looking for a spark in a square mile of darkness.

X-Rays of the Man In The Moon came back negative. Nothing is broken. Not a lunar banana bone is out of place.

All us creeps and sidewalk crawlers walking in the Black-Out City, no electricity the media will say, “crippling,”

all us sullen solipsists and recreational somnambulists are children again, barefooted, open-eyed, jaws yawned in awe of the suddenly apparent spectacle of night, pinholes in black construction paper appearance of night, diamonds on witch’s cat’s ass.

Milling from lit candlewick to tea light to tiki torch, matches in hand, flames as bees on pollen bends,

drunk on boxed win, remembrances of the last great time we heard a Billie Holiday record, incandescent light bulb light

and sodium glow in our neighborhoods after dark.

I am holding your hand.

Your name is on my sleeve along with my heart and your name is in the roots of my hair and the tip of my tongue, at the foundation of 27 different marriage proposals that find comfortable silence beneath the shelter of my breath—

vespers at best.

Just waiting for the moment to be right,

the breeze to part your hair a certain way,

or headlights reflecting halogen crystals in the whites of your eyes.

And the city, turned a bible in and ink well is silent enough that the choruses and choirs humble themselves

to whispers and whistles of songs we recognize, but not quite recognize

or muted bits of laughter cobwebbed between intimate friends

the way you laugh when I hold up a lighter, waving it back and forth, quietly calling out:

Freebird! Freebird!

Somewhere Van Gogh is sighing. His Starry Night is alive in concrete, bronze statues of men on horses, workmen on city benches treating themselves to immortalized lunches, bicycles launched perpetually over the fountains in front of city hall frozen on a time line, cyclists always amazed.

And I’m sighing. You’re sighing. We’re sighing,

sinking down easy on park lawn over riverbanks, waves of hazy navy blue and purples that border of pitch.

Maybe the right moment never arrives,

but I’m at ease with the waiting and the pacing, bellows breath, almost asleep, time and welcomed darkness,

meandering the way that people might or riverbanks do,

realizing that sometimes no spark at all

is all the spark you’ll ever need.

-Michael Appleby
July, 2007

New Poem - "Lamp Men Of Midnight"

Okay, not exactly new, but a poem that all but six people have seen in some manner of print. I just thought I would post it finally. I wrote it back in April and performed it at one of the Raving Poets nights pretty much right after writing it. I really like writing these sort of noctunal type poems. Enjoy.

Lamp Men Of Midnight
I

am

home

among the lamp men of midnight, the
shadowed faces cutting headlight eclipses,
silhouettes of the broad-shouldered, chisel-jawed
sucking cherries at the tips of their black cigarettes,

behind the backlit curtains

over street lights,

over the gaudy strips, neon-sign-tin-can-and
candy-stripe alleyways,

over pyrotechnic downtown towers and

over the moon.

We are drinking tea out of eggshell cups with
deft fingers surgeon-like in dexterity (they
play pianos in contemporary speak-easy’s and
carve pornographic legends from scores of sexual
conquests in anonymous doorways and elevators), and
are counting down the finite moments before dawn on
clumsy face watches, infinite estimating, Stephen
Hawking debates that pull intellectual cards never-ending,

making ourselves the extinguishing breed of romantic.

Resigning always, each apex of the morning sun to the
grimness with grimaces that all our hearts calcify
just a little,
we will cease to be musicians, painters, and poets,
Ernest Hemingways or Ernest Borgnines, raunchy
Jesuses and peyote Jim Morrisons,
we will dawn simian suits and
troglodytic postures,
slough our compassionate smiles and arm ourselves
against a sea of disinterest with
stainless steel briefcases and I Hate Mondays oversized coffee mugs.

And

this

is

when you come into the picture, the soft
lips from last night that say until later, mon chere on a
brandy breath that I could hold a lighter to for a torch and
read you Neruda by it, the wisps of hair
that frame a face sinuously, gracefully, echoes from
riverbanks, stirs dreams of velvet Elvises and
being the last loon on a darkened lake,

into daydreams

into the idleness of these balances,

into Hotdogstandia, mall-kiosk-LED-light-keychain-and-
grand-land-of-malcontents pedways,

into pyrotechnic downtown towers and

into the sun.

We were drinking tea out of eggshell cups and the
remembrances of your fingers pulling ghosts out of my skin carefully (they
were regrets accumulated in past lives, jaunts with the chupacabra, the
pig men, the dog men, hash marks on the bed posts where lost loves
were lost, never to be heard from again), and I fell to my knees,
clean, hoping to elicit kisses from your mouth and closure of
your eyes to futility; time was not on our side. It
was clumsy and inaccurate, had to be measured and debated,
had to be quantified instead of qualified,

made ourselves the extinguishing breed of romantic.

Cyclic nature is cyclic nature and the sun goes down as
steadfast as it rises, French kisses the horizon, draws tower-tops in,
puts the factory steams to its belly in billowing clouds before cosmic
fellatio, swallowed whole by the turning of the earth, and these
stuffed collar types, these button-down morning-ham-and-eggers, TPS
report sluggers, walking manilla folder fuckers, well,
they’re all renewed of their romances, given leather devil wings for
another go at immortality, lamp men of midnight, and

your brandy-candy,

pillow-mint mouth of breath is

free

to be mine all over again.

-Michael Appleby
April, 2007

Bulls On Parade

As most of you out there know by now, I work in a casino. In that casino we get live entertainment each and every weekend. I say "live entertainment," but trust me when I say that entertainment isn't always what you get. The bands we get are a mixed bag. Some are actually pretty good and others are pretty bad.

How do you cope with having to remain in that place when a bad band is booked to play?

Good question, internalized voice.

Well, quite often the bands we get play mostly covers. Many of the songs that the bands cover are the same. That is to say, they're from a rather short list of songs that have been known to be crowd-pleasers. Off the top of my head I can think of songs like "Stuck In The Middle With You" or "We're Here For A Good Time" or even "Margaritaville." That kind of music. So if a band is particularly bad one trick I do is to simply try to remember how the original recorded version of that song sounds and play that over in my head while the cover/butchered version is being pounded out on stage. Pretty simple.

Or...

And this one is a lot trickier, but definitely my go-to method of coping with the horrible music. I try to imagine the band getting up on stage and just going right into "Bulls On Parade" by Rage Against The Machine. And being almost surgically identical to the original version of the song. Why that song, you ask? Well, I think it's because it has the ballsiest guitar riff in the world. I liken it to an atomic bomb loaded with a payload of rusty chainsaws and angry yellowjackets. I imagine people running, actually running away in fear of the monstrous sound. I think one day I would like to see that happen.

I wonder who does the booking for the bands for our casino and if they've ever tabled and offer to Rage Against The Machine.

They should get in touch if they haven't done so yet.

Rant: An Oral Biography Of Buster Casey

So today I finished reading the home stretch of Chuck Palahniuk's latest novel, Rant: An Oral Biography Of Buster Casey. Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while now or know me personally know that I have a very deep reverence for Palahniuk's work and that I probably spend a tad too much time championing his work. He is my favorite author. Naturally, I was expecting to really love Rant.

It's very safe to say that I was not disappointed.

The novel is the story of a man by the name of Buster Casey and it's told in a series of interviews with the characters who knew the man and interacted with him. The fact that the story is told in this manner is something that I was having trouble coping with early on as I had to train myself to pay attention to which character was saying what, but that was a minor obstacle to overcome. It's also interesting to read a book that unfolds its story in such a way. It shows that Palahniuk is willing to take risks with his style. His prior novel, Haunted: A Novel was a series of short stories told within the framework of a larger encompassing story much like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which is a style that you don't see very much at all in contemporary literature. At least not in popular literature. I don't think that the oral biography is a style that will suddenly become a trend, but it's refreshing to see something stylistically different.

The story itself revolves around Buster Casey, as I already said. The character of Buster Casey reminded me a lot of Tyler Durden from Palahniuk's most famous novel Fight Club in the sense that he is an outside-the-box thinker and, at times, a bit of a revolutionary, but he's not nearly as outspoken and his perpensity to preach is minimal. Palahniuk does seem to draw a little bit from biblical references to draw parallels to Buster's life and it becomes more and more apparent as the story draws closer to its end.

Buster becomes the leader of an underground demolition derby circuit known as Party Crashing and knowingly spreads rabies to just about everybody, making him a quite effective serial killer. He's an interesting character who exists only in the interviews of the book and for most of the book I found myself very intrigued by his wealth, his rapport with the other characters, and just how a man of his particular background really becomes a legend. He seems to have a really disgusting background, growing up with his limbs stuck down holes in the ground a lot of the time, baiting unseen animals for a bite, hence the source of his deadly strain of rabies, but he's given color in a habit of chewing road tar instead of bubble gum and having extremely heightened senses of taste and smell, which some people may read about and be offended by, but I won't spoil it too much for you. It is a bit on the colorful side. Palahniuk has a great eye for the vulgar and he handles it well in his writing. A lot of detractors say that he goes too far, but I think in this book at least, it's a baseless argument given that the story shifts quite dramatically as it evolves from a story about underground demolition derbies to a story about time travel, legends, and immortality.

And if there is one thing that Rant suffers from it's a plot line that becomes difficult to follow near the end. I think that with me, personally, I had trouble understanding the ins-and-outs of the notion of time-travel as it pertains to the character of Buster Casey. I could tell what was happening, but I had trouble understanding why it was happening or how it was happening. The story gets a bit esoteric when it comes to time travel and it left me, at times, trying to deal with concepts like the Grandfather Paradox and the notion of Holy Trinity of Buster's Father Chet, the history Green Taylor Simms, and Buster himself. I think I would have liked a bit more space devoted to explaining the phenomena, but as it was it did keep the plot going.

Truthfully, I really wish I could tell you more about the latter parts of the book, but I really think that it's best for you to read it and find out what I'm talking about for youself. It's a great book. If and when you get around to reading it talk to me about. Tell me what you think. I really liked the book, but it's fodder for thought and discussion. I need to discuss this.

Anyway, I just thought I would let you know that you need to read this book so that I have something to talk about with you.

You, Sir, Are A Master Debater

The other night I was privileged enough to bear witness to one of the great debaters of our time. For free! Can you imagine it? It was sort of like going to a local outdoor basketball court and finding Michael Jordan shooting hoops or like going to a local hockey rink and getting a chance to watch Wayne Gretzky play shinny. It was that rare of an opportunity! For the few brief moments while I got to watch this man at the height of the debating craft I was in awe.

But wait, I should back it up a little bit and give you some premise.

So there I was on a Friday night in the casino. It was actually a slower Friday than what we in the casino biz are used to. I welcomed it, though, because it made for a more leisurely and pleasant pace in which to toil away.

At one point in the evening one of the cocktail waitresses on duty approached me to tell me about a customer who was being quite rude with her every time he placed an order for drinks. Because of his continued rudeness she decided that it was in her best interests to refuse him further service, which meant that if he wanted to get a drink he would have to go up to the bar to get it himself. Stuff like this happens from time to time. Customers who have been drinking can become a little ornery and unpleasant to have to deal with.

As the cocktail waitress was telling me the story about this man who should approach us where we were standing? That's right, the very man in question! Fireworks were about to fly. You could just look at the situation developing in front of you and just know this was two great pugilists about to do some mighty verbal battling over a refusal of service.

The man starts in with something like, "Hey, did you bring me those beers that I ordered?"

I should note that most of these quotes aren't verbatim because my memory isn't photographic.

The cocktail waitress then explains to him, "No, I did not bring the beers you ordered because as I already told you I'm not going to serve you any more."

"Why not?"

"Because you were quite rude to me."

And this was the moment in the little verbal exchange when you could see our man's eyes light up. She left an opening in the lane and he was coming in for the slam dunk to end all slam dunks.

Now this part is verbatim because you can't even willingly wipe these sorts of counterpoints from your memory even if you tried.

He came back at her explaining to him that he was rude to her with, "Well, whatever, you're ugly."

OHHHHHHHH SNAP!

I'm not sure how our cocktail waitress found the intestinal fortitude to refuse him service after a counter-argument like that, but she did. I guess that goes to show the power of her conviction. You just don't fuck with her like that. She'll throw down!

But seriously, guy, "Well, whatever, you're ugly?" How the hell is that going to convince the waitress that she should continue to serve you drinks? Is this some sort of transcendental form of reverse psychology that you picked up in your years and years as the captain of your high school debate club?

Now, if you had, say, apologized for being rude earlier. Maybe even tip the girl for her trouble. Don't you think that would have gone much further than insulting her in regards to getting her to bring you beers? Then again, I never was big on debate in high school, though, trust me, "Well, whatever, you're ugly," is now going in my big book of utility comebacks for arguments all shapes and sizes. It's comeback gold. Believe you me.

Secondly, I'm no expert on ugliness, but I'm pretty sure that if I had polled the people in the casino which person was more attractive, you or the cocktail waitress, I'm pretty sure that all the men would find her more attractive. And the women too. It's one of those pot calling the kettle black kind of stories I guess.

And, just between you and me, if you considered letting the blue jeans ride a bit lower than 4 inches below your armpits you might have a more successful time with the ladies in general. They weren't blue jeans, they were an adventure.

Go To Hell, Petitions!

Click here.

If, like me, you are shock, outraged, completely discombobulated...

Am I the only person in the world who giggles like a schoolgirl when given the chance to use the word "discombobulated?" It's one of those words in the English language that has its dictionary meaning, or as we in the biz call it, denotative meaning, but it has this sort of allegorical meaning, a hidden meaning, and that is, "Look at me use a fucking six syllable word! Please, please, please look at me!"

Sorry for that aside. We now return you to our regularly scheduled program.

But, if, like me, you are just so moved by the latest saga involving Paris Hilton that you cry a little when you masturbate, well then I don't know what to tell you.

Okay, I probably just lost the half dozen or so of you out there who are actually trying to read this. You're scratching your heads and probably saying, "What the fuck is Michael trying to say? First he uses the word 'discombobulated' and then launches into Paris Hilton drama making him cry when he masturbates. This doesn't make any sense." Sorry about that folks. My ritalin prescription is in the mail, I swear. Let me bring you up to snuff a bit.

Paris Hilton was caught driving 45 miles an hour over a posted speed limit, without headlights, and a suspended driver's license stemming for a prior alcohol-induced reckless driving spree last September. The sentence that was handed down to her in court was 45 long, hard days in jail.

Alright, I know that after hearing how long her sentence is there are probably quite a few of you out there who need to have a seat if you were standing while reading that capsule recap of the story so far. Maybe you'll want to consider taking up smoking. I don't blame you. I'm thinking about taking up smoking right now myself. That's hard time. 45 days in jail will FUCK YOUR SHIT UP. I had to capitalize that last part because it needed emphasis. That's the miracle of the Caps Lock key in case you are new to keyboarding. Have you caught your breath yet? Good.

But the story isn't quite over, though. It seems that petitions directed at California governator Arnold Schwarzenegger for and against clemency in this one particular case. Hundreds of people have made the arduous journey to various internet pages where they can add their names to the growing petitions in hopes of either getting Ms. Hilton off the legal hook or, maybe even, getting the hook sunk in just a litte bit deeper.

And you know what?

Big fucking deal, that's what.

The pro-clemency camp seems utterly devastated by the prospect that Paris Hilton, the barely literate silver-spoon-sphinctered hotel heiress, might be sent to a Federal fuck-you-up-the-ass-with-a-shiv penitentiary for 45 days. Oh my god! This is terrible! This is the biggest miscarriage of justice ever! Didn't that Son Of Sam guy only get 12 days for his killing spree? Why is the penal system picking on Paris? Actually, idiots, Son Of Sam, was only sentenced to 10 days for his killing spree and he got out after serving eight of those days, you know, for good behavior. But seriously now, you're losing sleep over 45 days? I've taking painful shits that have lasted longer than 45 days. Paris just got sentenced to a mild bowel movement's worth of time. Boo fucking hoo.

That's not the point, mister. What if something happens to her while she's on the inside? She's not cut out for prison. She's a Hilton.

Then good for her. She needs to toughen up a little. One thing that has always bugged me about Paris Hilton is that, as far as role models go, she portrays this image of, "It's okay to be soft and fragile all the time." That's a stupid message. People like that get faced with a little adversity like a 45 day jail term and crumble like a fucking flaky piece of pussy pie.

Besides nothing's going to happen to her because she is, as those of us who are cognizant of the class system in the developed world would call her, filthy fucking rich and from a family of considerable influence. She will serve soft time for being soft yet affluent. Yawn! The real sentence for her will be missing out on the 12 or so pedicures she would get in a 45 day span had she been free the whole time.

Which leads me to the people on the opposite side of the petition coin, those people who are petitioning the governor to see to it that her sentence is served. To those people I only have to say the same damn thing that I told the people who cried bloody murder over the sentence. It's 45 fucking days! A month and a half. That's about a dozen updates on my website. It's over before you even knew it began. What difference does it make?

We want to make sure that the message that the public gets is that nobody is above the law.

Oh, don't worry, I'm sure that each day of that month and a half will totally show that the penal system is fucking rock hard when it comes to celebrity justice. Even if she serves the time, which she probably will, the message is still that she's above the law because, just between you and me, when she gets out of jail she can go back into the recording studio and record "music" and that won't at all be considered a violation of her parole.

45 days was a sentence that was more for the benefit of society at large. That's 45 days when we won't have to fear she's planning furthering her music career.

Either way you look at it, you're still splitting hairs over a stupid 45 day sentence.

The Latest Michael Appleby News

Last night marked the final game of the 2006-2007 FBA (Farmers Basketball Association) season. It was a good game to end the season on. Now that it's done, though, I'm going to miss playing Tuesday night hoops with all the guys in the league. I call it a league, but really there's only a handful of us and we play a pick-up game each and every week. Oh well, no FBA until October most likely.

Tomorrow will mark the first time I will ever host a Raving Poets show. Mike Gravel has a prior engagement and can't make it out for his regular hosting duties so I've been asked to step in. Just between you and me, I'm very nervous. I've seen the hosting of the show done so many time before, but I'm actually a bit intimidated by having to ad lib so much in one evening and try to remember to say all the things that are supposed to be said in addition to just introducing all the poets as they come up to the mic for their turns. We shall see how it goes.

Once again, if you're interested in seeing the show, it's happening at the Kasbar Lounge in the basement of Yianni's Taverna (10444 - 82 Avenue, Edmonton, AB). The doors open at 7:00 p.m. and we should kick the show off some time before 8:00 p.m. with a bit of luck.

Also, it seems that I've been featured in the latest edition of the Raving Poets Live At The Kasbar podcast, episode 21. The episode features a recording of my poem "Spectator Sport" or, as some of you know the poem, the blow job poem. If you are look for a good podcast to check out or you want to hear me read my poem in front of an appreciative audience do head over to the podcast website located here and I will also put a link to it on the right hand side of this page for your convenience because every update of that podcast is entertaining as hell. Even if you aren't into the whole podcasting deal because you don't have an iPod or iTunes you can still go to the website and check out all the episodes of the podcast so far in the form of streaming audio. It's available to just about everybody that wants it so there's no excuse for not spending some time enlightening yourself with some contemporary poetry.

I'll post again soon. Until then. Keep it real.

New Poem - "Loneliness"

This week's installment of the Raving Poets' series "Rapture" was one of the best poetry shows I can remember in a long, long time. We had a theme night, the theme being the blues. So for every poet who took a turn behind the microphone the band would play a blues song. What it led to, then, was quite a variety of interpretations on the part of the 16 poets as to how their poems would work around the theme for the night. There were even a few poets who bridged the gap between poetry and actual blues music resulting in some amazing pieces. I was the first poet of the evening and the poem I presented was completely new and it's one that I will share with you right now.

A couple of things before I delve into the new poem. Next Wednesday I have been asked to take over the hosting duties normally performed by Mike Gravel because he has another engagement to attend to. So if you're going to the Raving Poets show and you're wondering why the host next week is soooo lame... Now you know.

Also, I got a couple of poem published in the latest issue of the Blood Ink Literary Journal. Yay! Thank you to all parties responsible for me taking that important step.

Now onto the poem.

"Loneliness" was written over a couple of weeks. That's a bit misleading for me to say, actually, since I wrote half of it one week, almost forgot that I wrote that part of a poem for about a week, looked through my notebook, found that fragment, and said, "Oh shit, I totally forgot about this one." It looks at how loneliness can lead people to desperate measures, but it also tries to look at how a person can really become desensitized to an inundation of sexuality. The voice in the poem talks to a phone sex operator so much that he soons finds getting her speaking on any topic other than sex the sexiest thing she can do. I guess I'm trying to say that the whole woman is sexier than the sum of the parts, verbal or otherwise. Maybe the voice in that poem is coming to that conclusion.

For now enjoy "Loneliness." See you on Wednesday.

Loneliness
Desperate now, how it
came to pass that Cheryl, an
operator at
1-900-ASS-SLUT,
found her way onto my speed dial.

---And not just
Speed Dial 8 or
Speed Dial 9, but
Speed Dial 1. An
ass-slut who knocked my
mom down a digit on my Speed Dial list and
charges me $3.95/minute for her time.

Cheryl, Cheryl, Cheryl.

Cheryl who would describe
giving me a rim job so succinctly that
I could feel
her tongue making ringlets on the
insides of my eyelids.

Cheryl who through words
would go
ass-to-mouth-to-cunt-to-
ass-to-hand-to-mouth-to-
tits-to-ear-to-navel-to-
mouth-to-ass- to-ear-to-
ear-to-ass-to-mouth and
then hit her filthiest monologues
only after saying,
“Whew! That was a hell of a warm-up, stud!
Let’s get things started proper now!”

And I thought I hadn’t lived
until I heard Cheryl
telling me to put it in her ear.

The closest thing to a significant other,
a girlfriend,
a wife,
confidant,
I have
boasts she would gladly floss
with my pubic hair,
you know,
if that was my thing.

Maybe that was my thing
once upon a time.
Maybe there were days
in my past
when a watermelon with
just the right size of a hole cut into it and a
face shot of some supermodel
stapled into its husk
was my thing.

Desperate days.
Days a guy could wake up and
not even be able to fathom a
woman’s presence, a woman’s touch,
days when a woman might as well be a
unicorn, a jackalope, or a chupacabra,
just tighten your fist and let you imagination go ape-shit.

But it gets to be too much.

Listen to a verbal blow job enough,
listen to her scripted moans, her
$3.95/minute coos, and
it will all start to lose its effect.

Cheryl might describe licking sweat off my nuts,
but now, for her, for these late night pillow talk,
garbage bag talk, sessions,
hearing her evoke a tongue on my scrotum
is as tame as hearing other people’s
“Hello. How are you?”

Cheryl, Cheryl, Cheryl.

And lately, the challenge for me
has been to get Cheryl to talk about anything else.
You learn that all the dirtiest things you could think of,
it’s all just a shield to keep from falling for a filthy animal,
a man who would put 1-900-ASS-SLUT on speed dial.

She might greet me with a rusty trombone or ask for an angry dragon,
use her, abuse her,
but that’s not what she wants, what she really wants, and

that’s the challenge:

getting her talk about anything but sex now.

That’s the sexiest thing she can do for me now.

I call, and
try to steer the conversation to what she had for breakfast,
the last movie she watched,
her favorite book,
if she has a view of the ocean from where she’s sitting,

anything.

Nothing significant.

Just anything.

Desperate now, how it
came to pass that Cheryl, an
operator at
1-900-ASS-SLUT
found her way onto my speed dial

and the only way I get excited anymore
is if I’m paying her $3.95/minute
to hear her

talk about the weather.

-Michael Appleby
May, 2007

Birthday Wishes

Just a quick note. I want to wish a happy birthday to Nadine, Darcy, Ian, and Cory who are all celebrating birthdays this week. This weekend is going to be off-the-hook I think. It just sucks that I'm battling a terrible cold.

The Bottom Ten, April 2007

10.) 107 Wives- Click here. A 74-year-old man from Indonesia was recently put in jail for beating up his wife because he suspected her of infidelity in the marriage. I can't figure out why the fuck any woman would want to be unfaithful to a husband who has 106 other wives. That's not a typo. He has 107 wives in total. From those 107 wives he has 41 children and a small city's worth of grandchildren. This man has made polygamy an extreme sport. But why would a woman even dream of cheating on a husband who has 107 women to try to keep up with. Give the guy a break! Fuck. Imagine, you come home from work and all you want to do is put your feet up and relax, but nooooooo, 30 or 40 of your wives want you to do some menial chores, another 10 or so want to have sex, 50 of them want to argue with you over the fact that there are about 104 shades of lipstick on your collar, and the rest want you watch your 41 kids while they go out shopping with their friends. I mean how bad could a 74-year-old man beat a woman? A 74-year-old man who has had 107 wives for who knows how many years. Women sap men of their will to live. This man must have the physical strength of an anemic kitten with some manner of degenerative bone disease. I bet that when somebody opens a window in his house the breeze that comes through pins him against the wall. If you're getting attacked by this man all you have to do is blow him a kiss and he'll get a concussion. I almost think this man should get some kind of award for having the balls to marry that many nagging women.

9.) "Progressive Uniforms"- After reading my earlier rant on the topic of uniforms the bigwigs at McDonald's changed their signage to read that with employment at one of their fine "restaurants" comes "progressive uniforms." Progressive? Progressive? How the fuck can a shirt and pants be "progressive." Does that mean the uniform isn't even a shirt and pants at all, but forward-thinking leather chaps and pasties? Maybe a beanie with a motorized propeller on the top? A cleverly inserted banana? You fuckers should really do away with the corporate bullshit jargon nonsense and just say what you mean: employees will wear clothes to work that we tell them to wear. How difficult is that?

8.) The Magic Word- Okay, you ask somebody to do something and you carelessly, or maybe even carefully, omit the word "please" when you ask them. Six times out of ten people you ask to do whatever will just do it as long as you're not sounding rude or asking the impossible. Those other four people will stop to ask you, "What's the magic word?" Those four people can kiss my ass! The magic word is "You're wasting precious time between me and my goal with your cutesy etiquette games, you inefficient, ineffectual fuck-ass!" Besides, everybody knows the magic word is and always has been "Alla Kazaam" which has no bearing on your concept of politeness and common courtesy. If you're so desperate to hear somebody say a monosyllabic word because it's "polite" you are too easily satisfied by minutia and you keep the lowest common denominators in our culture on top. Politeness is something that can easily be implied without a fucking monosyllabic word. Example? When people do something that I ask them without fuss I'll give them oral sex. Sure, "please" might satisfy some people when it comes to etiquette, but oral sex will please everybody if it's done right.

7.) Cigarette Pack Warning Labels- Does any smoker ever look at a warning label on a pack of cigarettes and actually say, "Holy fuck, I should really quit smoking these things! Look at that cancer-ridden lung!" No, they don't! Why? They've lost their shock value. You can walk into a whole group of smokers, hardcore smokers, and not a one of them will even notice a warning label. The warning labels, then, only serve the purpose of nauseating non-smokers who were already smart enough to not start smoking in the first place. So what then? Two options, really. One, do away with the stupid warning labels entirely because nobody gives a shit. Or two, make the pictures on the labels even more graphic to re-establish the shock value of them. Instead of a mouth full of rotting yellow teeth or a black lung, why not a picture of a fetus with two cigarette butts mashed into the little hollows where it might one day have eyes and perhaps being sodomized by a lighter? Oooo Oooo...and you can have some rusty syringes being poked into its scalp for good measure! Syringes have nothing to do with smoking really, but if you're going to go for shock value you might as well go hog wild. If that doesn't stop a smoker from smoking, well then, that smoker is fucked beyond salvation.

6.) You Mean It's This Easy?- Click here. So if I ever really need to get laid all I have to do is make up a story about needing to apply medicative cream to my shlong and some woman will be gullible enough to believe it means I have to have sex with her, that it's all part of the treatment for whatever the cream is meant to do? Clinical or not, ladies, what would possess you to even be able to get stimulated enough by a guy who has to have ointment put on his penis to have sex with him? I hate to pry, but, guh, if a woman approached me saying that she had to have ointment applied to her vagina and then I was medically responsible to have sex with her I just don't think I could physically do it. Ointments are bad news. There just aren't any sexy ointments out there. The word "ointment" itself is proably enough to keep me soft for a week. Guh! But to think that all these years I was investing all that time into being a cool guy, a good guy, a romantic guy so that I might fool some woman into having sex with me and no success. But some guy can talk about a "condition" with his penis that require the application of "ointment" and he's knee-deep in nookie. Wow!

5.) WOW! This easy?- Click here. So instead of ointment and venereal diseases I can just save up a bunch of fake gold in a computer game and I can get laid? Dammit! What the fuck am I doing wrong in life?

4.) Jack Thompson- In the early hours of the CNN media blitz surrounding the massacre at Virgina Tech Jack Thompason was thoughtful enough to call in and give his two cents on the topic of the motives of the killer. His summation was that it was video games. Bravo, Mr. Thompson. Bravo. I wish there was an emoticon for sarcastic applause. You've done a bang-up job of placing the blame solely on electronic entertainment. For a while there I was worried that it was the guy with the gun, but I'm so glad, and enlightened, to learn it was the video game designers who were the real culprits behind the attack all along. Whew! Okay, if I can be serious for a second here, the psychological make-up of 99.9% of people is a lot more complex than "video games did it" will allow. If video games were really to blame then how does a multibillion dollar industry not churn out more killers? I'm willing to wager that a vast, vast, vast majority of people who play video games have never killed a person. A slight case of over-simplification? Oh hell yeah!

3.) The Disappearance Of Adults Only Rooms From Video Stores- As a kid growing up I was always fascinated by the room that I was forbidden to enter every time we went to the video store for movies. Then I grew up and there's nothing that could hold me back from entering the Adults Only room except the fact that there aren't any Adults Only rooms left in most video stores. And that's a shame. Not because I want to rent porn. I have the internet after all. It's just great to have a room in the video store where children and their crying to get the latest Pokemon movie can't disturb me. If there were more Adults Only rooms in video stores I would have more places to take the boxes of Pauly Shore movies to read up on their intricate plotlines. Those fucking movies are too damn complicated!

2.) Shoe Lace Nibs- Fuck. How old would you say shoe lace technology is? At least 12 years. 12 years ago some guy invented shoe laces (probably) and the shoe lace nib (most likely) and how far has the technology progressed since then. Velcro? Fuck velcro. But, seriously, shoe lace nibs are always cracking and falling off and then lacing your shoes becomes next to impossible. Why the fuck can't we create shoe lace nibs that don't crack and fall off? We have fucking titanium razor blades, why not titanium shoe lace nibs?

1.) Titanium Razor Blades- And since I'm on the subject of titanium razor blades... If you're a man and you need to use titanium razor blades to shave because the steel variety just aren't strong enough I don't think you're shaving right. You're trying to cut off the hair growing out of your face, not skin yourself down to your fucking skull? Note to the razor industry: who the fuck needs to shave so close that you can see their skull? That's not hot. That's not even in the same vicinity of smooth. That's a Halloween costume. Your efforts in pushing razor technology forward are misguided. Make a razor that just sits in my medicine cabinet and shoots at my facial hair with a laser cannon. That's an advance! Skinning me down to my cheekbones won't get me laid, not even for all the fake gold and penis ointments in the world.