Who Wants Some Fucking Nesquik?

Because I've been feeling kind of blah the past few days I'm going to point in the direction of 5secondfilms. I really like how they do the whole internet sketch comedy thing blended with the ultimate in brevity. If you watch a sketch that doesn't seem that funny, hey, that's okay, it was only 5 seconds long, move on to the next sketch. So far, though, this one is my favorite. If you see me quoting it please punch me in the liver.

Copyright © 2008 5 Second Films. All rights reserved.

Something About This One Gives Me A Case Of The Warm Fuzzies (One, Two, The!)

Coming to the Sundance Film Festival this year is a little Norwegian horror movie called Dead Snow, and after having had a chance to watch the trailer for it on YouTube, I can honestly say I have a pretty good feeling that this movie is going to be the drop-dead-gorgeous-woman-whose-t-shirt-just-spontaneously-rips-open-to-expose-huge-globous-breasts-that-god-never-intended-to-be-concealed of motion pictures this year. I mean, holy shit, it has zombies, and nazis, and Norwegian women, and zombies, and chainsaws, and a German tagline that beckons people to the multiplex for some foreign cinema gold.

Speaking of the German tagline, if you watch the trailer I just embedded for your viewing pleasure (go ahead and watch it right now; I'll wait), it kicks in at about the 1:30 mark. In German it reads: "Ein, Zwei, Die!" How awesome is that? Oh wait, you don't speak German? I speak it Ein Bisschen (that's German for a little bit), which makes me that much cooler than most people, so I'll translate it into English. In English, that tagline goes, "One, Two, The!" Those Germans, always with the postmodern taglines to their zombie movies.

That kind of reminds me of one of the better episodes of The Simpsons, in which the movie Cape Fear gets spoofed. During a scene that features Sideshow Bob at a hearing to see if he should be paroled for prison this exchange takes place between Bob and a prosecuter...

Prosecutor: What about that tattoo on your chest? Doesn't it say die Bart die?
Sideshow Bob: No, that's German
[unveils tattoo]
Sideshow Bob: for 'The Bart The'.
Parole Board Member: No one who speaks German could be an evil man.

Indeed Parole Board Member, indeed. That's why I think the Nazi zombies in the movie Dead Snow might actually be misunderstood from just watching the trailer. I have a feeling that these Nazi zombies might actually be here to help us.

One, Two, The!

A Sure Sign Your Actions Are Influenced By Jackass

Hey there, long time, no see.

So, today I was at work. Dutifully, as usual. And something happened today that more or less scared the shit out of me. It wasn't scary in the sense that a psycho killer with a meat cleaver and a necklace of children's teeth was leaping out from the shadows telling me that he wanted to butt-rape me, though I'm not really sure why I just put all of those elements together in a single sentence, but I will just roll with it. And, now that I think about it, the idea of being stalked by said psycho killer is definitely scary and I will probably have to watch myself at work from now on especially when I am going into darkened areas of the building. But, anyway, where was I?

Okay, so I did get scared at work today. And it was scary in the sense that when I thought about what happened I got scared not because of anything around me, but rather an idea that I almost, almost, almost went through with. And when I tell you this idea that I had you're going to think that I'm an idiot and you'd probably be right, especially if I had actually done this thing that I thought I should do.

So, there I was, doing my rounds around the casino floor, looking for slot machines in need of assistance, customers in distress, beautiful women who only go to casinos on the weekend, psycho killers with meat cleavers and an ass fetish, etc. etc. I found a particular slot machine that had a faulty door. That is to say the machine itself was reporting that its door was open when if you look at the machine you not only see that the door is shut, but if you try to open the door it's definitely shut and locked. This happens from time to time. Slot machines refuse to work properly if it thinks that a door on it is open somewhere. And, to top it off, there was a customer at the machine waiting to play it. So this one had to be fixed.

Usually, to fix one of these problems all one has to do is simply open and close the door and it's kind of like reminding the machine what an open door actually looks like or something like that. I suspect it's more complicated than that. Actually, it is more complicated than that, but if I told you I'd kill you. Not that I'd kill you because it's privileged information, but I'd kill you from boredom because it's a bunch of technical jargon that goes nowhere and really has little bearing on my story or utter fear. Just leave it at when I open the door a team of leprechauns, mounted on unicorns swoop down from atop Mount Bullshit and whisper a special message into a bluetooth headset (leprechauns like to keep up with all the latest technology; I'm not making this shit up) that lets the machine know, "Hey my shit is closed up so let's behave like it is."

So that's what I did with this particular machine. And sure enough, leprechauns and unicorns and bluetooth goodness and the slot machine started working again.

For

exactly

two

spins

and then back to not working because it is saying that it's main door is open. It's at this point in time I did that thing that Curly from the Three Stooges did whenever he got frustrated with inanimate objects, that sort of self face slap and whine. So I try to open and close the door again, this time with a little more force so as to summon a few extra leprechauns, this time with bluetooth megaphones (oh, you better believe they have those). And, as before it started working again

for

exactly

two

more

spins.

And more Curly reactions. More frustration. I definitely wanted to help this customer spend all his money.

And then I get to the scary part. Prepare yourself, folks.

So, obviously, opening and closing the slot machine was not a good enough repair job for this particular problem. So what does a logical guy do? Well, I suppose a logical guy would go and find somebody who knows a more permanent fix for the problem. Seems reasonable. What does a weirdo like me do?

Well, I sort of looked around, sizing up chairs in the vicinity and after having determined they were all kind of short I looked at the customer who was waiting to use this malfunctioning machine and I was this close, this close, to asking him, "Sir, how tall are you?"

Why would I ask that, you ask? Well, for a split second, I thought that my next course of action, you know, after opening and closing the door on the slot machines a few times, would be to deliver a flying elbow drop like Randy Macho Man Savage from a great height. For that split second I thought, Okay, I'm just going to get this guy to hoist me up on his shoulders. Then, I'm going to jump, but I have to get some air on the jump and then I'm going to stick my elbow out and smash it the fuck down on top of the slot machine. I mean that would work, right? Logically speaking, that is. It goes: try the most logical thing to fix a problem and then, if that fails, deliver the elbow drop from the top rope a la Randy Macho Man Savage.

Michael, that's not even scary. How is you thinking like a moron supposed to scare the bejesus out of me?

Because the amount of time I was in this idiotic mindset was disproportionately large. Here I am, a man with a university education, giving careful consideration to delivering a flying elbow drop to an inanimate object from atop the shoulders of another man. And this, with a university education! What the fuck?!?! Who does that?

Don't worry folks, I didn't actually go through with it, but after fixing it (I turned the machine off and then back on again, not quite the force of flying elbow drop, not quite the dramatic oomph) I was walking away and that's when I got scared. I almost slapped myself, not like Curly from The Three Stooges, but full-on face slaps going, "What in the hell were you thinking? You can't actually consider a flying elbow drop to a slot machine you're trying to fix! When does a flying elbow drop actually fix anything?!?!"

And what's really scary is that if I can consider this course of action once what's to say that I won't consider it the next time or the time after that? It's keeping me up tonight, folks. It's keeping me up.

So if you're visiting the casino where I work one day and you round a corner and you hear some grown man with a university education exclaim, "Oooooo yeah!" followed by the crunching sound of an elbow shattering inside its sleeve of meat and muscle and bone, you'll know that I finally settled on the most logical step after trying to open and close the door being the elbow drop.

Sleep easy, everybody. An idiot is born.

Michael Appleby's Theory Of Relativity

Somewhere along the way, culturally speaking, older women got a whole lot sexier. That is to say, you watch television, you watch movies, you put on a Madonna album, or you read something by Anne Rice, and older women seem to be depicted more and more as being sexual deviants. You know the old lady who looked after Tweety Bird in the Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner Show? She probably got her kink on with that umbrella she always seemed to be carrying (the fact that she carried it even on sunny days was a dead giveaway). It's a sick world where old ladies do nasty things that some pornstars probably wouldn't even touch with a ten foot pole or they would touch a ten foot pole sexually, but not the acts that old ladies perform with said sexual ten foot poles. Where was I going with this? I forget in the mental haze that is comprised of pornstars, ten foot poles, and old ladies...

Oh yeah...I was talking about old ladies. Thank god for back tracking.

Don't mention it, Michael.

So anyway, the reason why I mention all these older ladies with their sick, sick perversions is because the other day I saw a man wearing a t-shirt that read: I Love Cougars. I didn't pause to ask him if he was referring to the kind of cougars that play with balls of yarn and eat mountain goats or the kind of cougars that play with balls of semen and eat mountain goats only not in the way that the other cougars eat mountain goats.

Excuse me while I pat myself on the back for that last mental image.

Much better.

Okay, so I took it to mean that he was referring to cougars who were not felines.

Damn it, Michael, would you come to the point already? What do MILFs and crusty, old tavern wenches have to do with relativity?

The guy who was wearing said t-shirt was easily in his mid-40's. Relatively speaking a cougar to him should be eating earth worms instead of mountain goats, or, more accurately, be getting eaten by earth worms only not in the way that she ate mountain goats which was not the way that those other cougars eat mountain goats. Relatively speaking. Did he really love cougars in his mid-40's? Was he, in fact, some sort of necrophiliac? Or was he a furry? Why did his pants have so many stains? Why were his fingernails yellow? How many rhetorical questions can a guy ask in an essay about bingo hussies before it gets annoying?

Two.

The guy really loves his sexually charged dynamos who shopped for support hose and sported the latest kerchief fashions straight from the dollar bin at Wal-Mart or Canadian Tire or wherever the fuck it is that really, really old women do their kerchief shopping sprees.

Mildred? Mildred? It's Mable, I just called to tell you that the pension cheque just came in and I have an inkling to spend it on itchy dresses, fake pearls, and kerfchiefs, lots and lots of kerchiefs. I'll call the geriatric wagon, let's go to Kinko's (or wherever in the hell it is us old ladies like to shop)!

That concludes the role-play portion of this essay, now back to the point.

"Cougar" is a term that is relative like a lot of things. Proof of this resides in the fact that when I was just a young sprout in the world I considered women who are now the age that I am to be cougars. I am the male equivolent of a cougar to young women. I'm sexually charged and I eat mountain sheep (they're female mountain goats, don't you know?) But now that I am the age of what I once considered the cougar cut-off line those women whom young sprout Michael Appleby would have considered cougars are just plain old women (sorry plain, old women, you just aren't that dignified to be labelled cougars anymore). Cougars to me, now, are women who are that age that their teenage children wander the malls and leave their sexy mothers home alone for the afternoon.

But you, sir with the t-shirt, you should probably avoid cougars now because they would be really, really, really old.

Or just buy a new t-shirt that reads: I Am Sexually Aroused By Women My Own Age. And then on the back you can put: Really Old. Ha Ha Ha.

I'm totally going to invent that t-shirt and become rich.

Or maybe you were actually a furry the whole time. In which case, kindly disregard all of this because it was all for naught. And seriously, you like mountain goats for real? Sick. Just sick.

I Have No Clue What To Tell You

Click Here.

You know, I tried to come up with a title for this blog entry that sums up what I found in the linked article perfectly. No matter what, though, nothing I could put together in words communicated it succinctly enough.

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

I'll summarize the article for you because the article itself is pretty short and easy to follow. Basically, in Vancouver, the police department has patted itself on the back and said, "Hey look at us! We're a bunch of clever shits!" Well, kind of, but what they did do was, get this, start deploying life-sized cardboard traffic cops on city streets to trick drivers into thinking that their speeds are being clocked. Hey! Look at us! We've irritated drivers without even having to physically be present on the city streets! We're fucking awesome! High Five!

And you know what? Good for them. I think if a person can find a way to accomplish all his/her goals at work by deploying a cardboard cut-out, that person is far smarter than me. I know that when I am at work there are times when I wish I had a cardboard doppelganger to stand in for me and have irrational insults thrown at it in endless barrages that seem to always reach the same points: I'm a crook and casino games are rigged and it's not even gambling unless the player makes money 100% of the time. If the cardboard Michael Appleby, superstud, could just stand there and take the verbal assault on the chin for me I could at ,the very least, double my productivity.

Really, though, I'm not too concerned with the police dotting the landscape with carboard cops. It's a proven fact that cardboard cut-outs increase urban tourism by 1.7% and provide much needed kindling to city transients. What I wanted to really get at with this little tirade of mine, is a quote from the article, which is as follows:

And these mock-ups are so realistic that while being tested on a Vancouver street this week, "a tow-truck driver pulled up and started talking to it," Staff Sergeant Ralph Pauw told a press conference on Thursday.

Really?

Seriously?

You're a tow-truck driver and you see a realistic cardboard mock-up of a police officer, drive up to said mock-up, and just start conversing with it? At some point during that conversation, which undoubtedly would be one-sided, if that sided at all (I like to imagine that the word "talking" referred to monosyllic grunts and the possible flinging of one's own feces), would you or would you not notice the total lack of a third dimension in the person you're "talking" to?

As a Canadian, one thing that I took pride in for a great number of years was our education system. I stood proud as a educated member of society and, given, the proper platform, I would boast about how intelligent and cultivaed we were as a nation. Then I read an article in which an authority figure describes how an average tow truck driver tried to strike up a conversation with what is, for all intents and purpose, a piece of fucking cardboard!

Hey Joe! Long time, no see! How are the wife and kids?

-Distant, blank stare from an image pasted to a sheet of cardboard.

What? Why aren't you talking to me? Was it something I said? Oh my god, it's your wife, isn't it? You got a divorce and it's still a really hard thing to talk about? Oh my god! I'm so sorry man! I had no idea! I feel for you. I went through the same thing not three years ago almost to this very day. It still pisses me off sometimes when dudes are coming up to me at parties without having been in touch with me for so long and they're all like, "Dude, man, how's the old ball and chain lifestyle treating ya? You must be having crazy married sex every day?" And seriously, when they say stuff like that it hurts me a lot. Even talking about it now gets me a little choked up. I'm so glad to have people like you around because you really no how to listen.

-Distant, blank stare from an image pasted to a sheet of cardboard.

Well, aren't you going to say anything? Look man, I apologized for bringing up the subject of your wife. She was no good for you anyway. She was a total tramp. I saw her whoring herself out at that party that one time, going up to guys and like rubbing herself all up in there, you know? I was going around and I was all like, "Hey dude, don't be lured by the va-jay-jay, you know what I'm saying? She's married to Joe! And fucking around behind his back? That ain't right, man! That shit just ain't right! No way! No how! If Joe don't fuck your shit up with some traffic citations I'll fuck your shit up because I'm loyal to Joe!" I did my best, dude, but I mean there's no way for me to be watching out for your lady twenty four seven because I mean I got shit to do sometimes. That's just how it is. But I was looking out for you when I could. I really was.

-Distant, blank stare from an image pasted to a sheet of cardboard.

Goddamn it Joe! Say something! We're bros! Amigos!

-Distant, blank stare from an image pasted to a sheet of cardboard.

Fine be an asshole! You know what? You're a piece of shit! I fucking hate you. No wonder your wife practically raped me at that party! All you do is you sit there what with your radar gun just aiming all the time! I mean, when the fuck do you ever just put the radar gun down and interact with people? Huh? Seriously! This whole stoic officer of the law schtick? It gets fucking old real fucking fast!

-Distant, blank stare from an image pasted to a sheet of cardboard.

I fucking hate you! I don't even know why I took the time to pull over to talk to you. Listen to all these people honking their horns because I'm slowing them down just so I can find out what's happening with big city cop Joe. And what kind of appreciation do I get? None. You, sir, are a big bag of dirty douche! Fucking fall on your taser, you piece of shit!

Then the tow truck driver speeds off and the gust of wind that the sudden departure of his tow truck creates blows over the cardboard cut-out.

And... end of scene.

I don't know exactly where I was going with that one, but I think I threw it out there and somehow managed to bring all right back in at the end. Kudos to me.

I suppose I shouldn't abandon all hope when finding out that a tow truck driver can try to have a conversation with a piece of cardboard.

No wait. Before I continue I just have to say this again: Really? Seriously? A piece of cardboard? And you stop your truck to talk to it? Which cereal box did you get your driver's license from? What was the inanimate object saying back to you? Really? Seriously?

But, like I said, I should be able to salvage something out of this new-found knowledge about where we stand in the scheme of things. Canada against the world. All that sort of mumbo jumbo.

And I guess it's this. Maybe the idea of a cardboard cut-out of Michael Appleby, superstud, isn't such a wacky idea after all.

Semi-New Poem: Every Time You Pass

Okay, so for those of you who were in the audiences at the Raving Poets reading series "Heart Beat" this will probably not be a new poem for you because I read it over a month ago. Mind you, I'm neglectful of my little blog sometimes and so I'm finally getting around to putting up some new poetry and, of my new poetry, this is some stuff that got pretty positive feedback (or at least I thought it did). The poem is called "Every Time You Pass" and it's one that all started with the idea of cupping the smell of a woman with one's tongue for safekeeping. Odd, I know, but it was something that just sounding interesting to me when I tried putting it to words. Enjoy.

Every Time You Pass
I had to hold the smell
of your perfume
in the roof of my mouth,
for fear of losing it
permanently.

Draw in the big breath.

Hold it.

Keep holding
until the room
turns to floaters,
ghost splotches
over egg-shell white,
over off-white,
white noise,
static from a ceiling fan,
helicopter blade beating
drums in circles
into oblivion.

This is how

you

are always fleeting.

I had to hold it
with my tongue
in the shape of a cup
where the red delicious’s
couldn’t drown it out
in apple
and the peaches
couldn’t seduce it
into being something
that it already
transcends.

I ensconced it with
memories of mornings
that hung with
my suit jacket over
the back of your chair
while suns slinked
through your windows
with birdsong.

Your blue leg:
a tattoo of trumpeter swans
taking off
the way rockets do
leaving a visible
spectrum of
tumbling dahlias,
blue as watercolor and
daisies that make
yellow ellipses
between their white petal
sentences
of: “Stay, stay behind my knee.
Kiss my shin
until your lips
are calcified by the bone.”

The whole time
holding it in,
sheltering it,
reveling it

waiting for the room to spin into black,

passing out

every time you pass.

-Michael Appleby
April, 2008

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.