"I loves it that way, I ain't jokin'. Grab my belt, and gets to chokin'." - David Carradine, 1994

It’s starting to look more and more like David Carradine died of Auto-Erotic Asphyxiation, a practice where you choke yourself while jacking off. If you time it right and  stop choking yourself right when you have an orgasm, it apparently feels fantastic. If something goes wrong and you keep choking, you obviously end up dead.

I’m always looking for an excuse to talk about “The hilarious killer”, and this is as good a reason as any.

It’s always tragic when someone dies, even if it’s in an incredibly comical way like this, but this is not the first time that something like this has happened; the estimated fatalities in the U.S. due to auto-erotic asphyxia fall somewhere between 250 – 1000 every year.

Every time someone dies this way, I find myself thinking one thing: I need to try auto-erotic asphyxiation, for one simple reason: It HAS to feel fantastic.

Think about it this way: Suppose that you’re sitting around in your living room and Satan suddenly appears in a puff of smoke, probably playing an electric guitar. You ask him what he’s doing there, and he says “I’m here to grant you one wish. Anything you want.”

It’s Satan, so obviously you’re all like “What’s the catch?”, and then he cackles and says “There’s a slim but measurable chance that instead of getting your wish, you’re going to choke to death, and when the cops show up, they’ll find you lying there with a belt around your neck with your pants around your ankles clutching your penis. There will be some pornography surrounding you and probably a few sex toys. There’s also a good chance that you will have crapped your pants.”

Now, if you do decide to go ahead and make that wish, it’s going to have to be for something pretty awesome, right? With risk like that, you’re not just going to ask for Satyr legs or to be able to shoot lightening out of your dick. You’re going to want to make an incredibly kickass wish, because it has to be awesome enough to offset the chance of dying in one of the least dignified ways possible, right?

EXACTLY.

I don’t know what it feels like to have an orgasm after choking myself. I’ve never done it. What I do know is this: People are doing a cost-benefit analysis between that feeling and a premature, feces-smeared, semen-crusted death, and after weighing the risks, they’re like “Get me a belt, some wine coolers and a couple of dildos. IT’S GAME TIME!”

It’s a little bit hard for me to understand. Getting caught masturbating sucks enough as it is. Getting caught masturbating and dead seems much worse to me. That’s the last memory people will have of you. I don’t know if I want ANYTHING badly enough to risk that, but these people have their pro/con sheet, “Humiliating death” is listed on the con side, and they’re STILL up for it!

Unfortunately, I think I’m too much of a pussy to ever find out. Normal auto-eroticism has been doing the job just fine for me, and even if it stops working as well, I think that I’m too afraid of dying to ever try spicing it up in a potentially lethal fashion.

Who knows, though? Maybe someday. Maybe someday.

I need some sippin’ whiskey and a belt.

P.S.: The new “Arsonists Get All The Girls” album hits hard. I would almost risk dying while masturbating to listen to it. Fortunately, I don’t have to.

P.P.S.: In the newest Bill Simmons mailbag, one of his readers makes an excellent point:

Q: If Michael Jackson’s memorial had ended with him jumping out of the casket and performing “Thriller,” would that have been the best moment in television history? I think so.
– Rick, New York

SG: Yes! One hundred times over, yes! I will go one step further: Once I found out his body would be at the ceremony, part of me was sitting there for two hours thinking, “He’s gonna jump out of the casket. He’s gonna jump out of the casket.” Can you name another celebrity in our lifetimes who would provoke this reaction? We are talking about a scenario in which A DEAD GUY WOULD HAVE JUMPED OUT OF A CASKET AND STARTED SINGING, and I wouldn’t have been totally surprised by this. Hell, I was a little disappointed when the ceremony ended. Crap. I guess he’s really dead.

(Ladies and gentlemen, the Michael Jackson era! We will never see anything quite like it again. And maybe that’s for the best.)

Have a good weekend, everybody.

Another thing to add to the list of things that I hate about Summer:

I don't really feel like putting pictures of spiders in my post, so here's a baby raccoon instead. Get that handsome little devil some trash!

During this time of year, all of the spiders in town decide that they should be hanging out in my room. They apparently hate the heat just as much as I do, or maybe they really like metal or think they’ll score some really sweet bugs in here that are better than the ones outside. I don’t know their reasoning behind the decision. I’ve never asked them and they’ve never told me. All I know is that when it starts to get hot, parts of my room start to look like the set of Tales From the Crypt.

Spiders kind of freak me out, but I’m willing to tolerate their presence to a certain extent. They just want to hang out and eat mosquitoes, and I can respect that. Mosquitoes don’t scare me, but they do like drinking my blood, which not only pisses me off, but causes me an actual problem, unlike the spiders. Because of this, as long as there are only a few webs in my room, they’re not near anything and appear to belong to tiny spiders, I tend to just let them do their thing.

In one of my behaviors that proves that I probably have some kind of brain damage, I also tend to talk to the spiders. If I notice that one has set up shop in a windowsill or a corner that I have decided is okay, more often than not I find myself telling it that if it stays there, it’s cool, but if he heads near my desk or my bed, he’d better hope that there are plenty of bugs in my toilet, because that’s where he’s headed.

You’re reading that correctly – when I see spiders in my room or bathroom, I attempt to make a verbal agreement with them.

Seems like a solid, but more importantly, rational plan, right?

Guess again. Believe it or not, some of the spiders have not been honoring our deal, which has been pissing me off.

"Uncle Reggie"

I remember when I was growing up, my uncle Reginald T. Castle always used to say terrible things about spiders.

“Never trust one of those slimy fucks!” he would yell at me at the dinner table, as I would roll my eyes and mutter “Here we go again!” under my breath.

“NEVER make a verbal agreement with a spider!” He would say, “Always be sure that you sign a legal document with a lawyer present when making a deal with one, because those backstabbing assholes will do anything they can to nickle and dime you! They’re not even human, in my opinion!”

He would always rant and rave about the more progressive neighbors down the street who allowed those “uppity spiders” to “just waltz around like they owned the place.”

At the time, I was appalled by his blatant prejudice. For years I tried to forgive him for his ignorance and just accept that he was set in his ways.

Lately, however, I’m beginning to think that maybe there was a kernel of truth to what he was saying.

(Side note: I can already tell that even though I think this part of the post is a good idea right now, after getting a full night’s sleep I’m going to be incredibly embarrassed that I put something this stupid on the Internet. We’ll just call the previous section “Exhibit B” in the “I have brain damage” evidence file.)

There have been two intruders on my desk in the past couple of days that were immediately murdered. A couple of interlopers decided that they could catch more bugs in the shower. I don’t know how many they caught, but they ended up getting flushed down the drain with scalding hot water.

Tonight was the last straw, though.

I was sitting at my computer, because that’s what I do when I’m not asleep, and one started crawling on my monitor.

After accusing the spider of disrespecting me, I killed it, and then had another of those “When I listen to myself talk, I realize that I say some really stupid, crazy things” moments that seem to happen frequently. I mean, I’m telling a spider that he’s disrespecting me for breaking a verbal agreement that we had to stay away from my stuff.

I’ve had it with this shit, and as far as I can see, there’s only one solution: Invest heavily in hedgehogs. Look at these little motherfuckers:

No Mercy.

You can tell from the look on their faces: They’re just waiting for a spider to piss them off so they have an excuse to eat him in front of his family as an intimidation tactic, then maybe eat a few raisins and take a nap.

Unfortunately, I don’t really have the money to buy hedgehogs right now, so I’m going to have to wait on that. Until then, if I see a cobweb, it’s coming down. If I see a spider, I’m going to kill it. They’ve crossed me for the last time.

Now have a good night, and enjoy this picture of a hedgehog dominating a carrot.

I think every post I’ve put up lately has been a little bit dumber than the last. I’m putting up ads on craigslist, attending (and enjoying) Kid Rock concerts, and now I’m talking to spiders. It’ll be interesting to see how stupid this gets in a few more weeks. I’ll probably just start scanning “Nancy” comics in and hitting “Post”.

Oh hell. Why wait?

CLASSIC!!!

HA! IT’S FUNNY BECAUSE IT’S…Well…because it’s…hmm…how the hell did the author convince anyone to publish this thing?

Seriously. There’s either a gas leak in here or I have a brain tumor.

Goodnight.

Six months ago, my old roommate (let’s call him “Tom”) told me that he was going to see Kid Rock at the Independence Stampede and that he thought I should come.

This seemed like a bad idea. Let me tell you why:

1. I don’t like the Independence Stampede. Every year in the week leading up to the 4th of July, they set a bunch of shit up in town for “The Worlds Largest 4th of July Western and Rodeo Celebration”. What this loosely translates to is a hot, dusty area where there’s always country music playing, stands selling cowboy shit, carnival rides (which are, so you know, operated by carnies), overpriced food and teenagers who think that stuff is cool. The one exception to my dislike is the Demolition Derby, which is the most kickass thing I’ve ever seen. Granted, it’s possible that it just seems cool because I’m so angry from paying five dollars for parking and listening to Big and Rich while I’m walking past giant belt buckles and cowboy hats that by the time I’m in the stadium, watching cars fuck each other up seems way cooler than it otherwise would.

(P.S.: They still don’t play Pantera during the derby. I know that I harp on this every year, and I do it because it’s a great fucking idea. Pantera kicks ass. They’re from Texas. It would be perfect! For Christ’s sake, look at this video:

Let me point out three things:

1. The name of the song is “Cowboys From Hell”. It has “cowboy” right in the fucking name!
2. The guitar player is wearing a cowboy hat.
3. His guitar has a Confederate flag painted on it.

Can I make it any clearer? This is a match made in heaven! Now, I can already hear all of you Negative Nancys trying to rain on my parade, saying things like  “You’re the only person in town who would think it was cool!” or “The band is broken up and the guitar player is dead!” Whatever. Moving on.)

Bawitdabaw.

2. I don’t really like Kid Rock. I remember listening to Devil Without a Cause in 1999 (about a year after it came out) and thinking it was kind of hoaky. In 1999.

IN 1999.

In 1999, I loved Limp Bizkit, Staind and whatever other music that white guys who were mad at girls released. If rap metal is trash, then I was an angry 19 year old goat; If you made a rap metal album that I wouldn’t listen to, you had dropped the ball (in fairness, Devil Without a Cause went platinum seven times).  After making a couple more albums like that since then, Kid Rock has mostly backed off of the rock rap and switched to a more country sound, his most recent hit being “All Summer Long”. What I’m saying is that he started out with a sound that I didn’t especially like, took out the aspects of his music that I did enjoy and then replaced them with country, a genre with almost no screaming or double bass drums. Other than joking with one of my friends that he should start hosting a children’s rock and roll television show called “Kid Rock – with Kid Rock”, I haven’t given him any thought.

To review: I don’t like the Stampede. I don’t like Kid Rock. So, naturally, when “Tom” asked me if I wanted to go see Kid Rock at the Stampede, I said yes.

I figured that I could go and enjoy it ironically, something that I claim to hate doing but secretly love. I planned to show up, watch a bunch of Kid Rock fans freak out while Kid Rock played his greatest hits and maybe try to get into it myself. I was even planning to grow a mustache and dress up in appropriate attire (I was thinking a trucker cap, aviator shades, jean shorts and a sleeveless t-shirt advertising NASCAR or some type of alcohol).

Then, I completely forgot about it. A few days before the show, “Tom” called me and reminded me that I had paid money to see Kid Rock on Friday. I forgot to stop shaving in time and never made it to goodwill to score the appropriate attire, so I had to show up clean shaven and in my normal clothing. I did make sure to do a fair amount of drinking before the show, though. It seemed likely that if I was drunk enough, this could be a lot of fun.

We went through the usual routine of paying too much for parking, walking through all of the cowboy shit in the heat, and then piling into the stadium.

Okay, so some metal girls are hot. Psych! This is that dude from Tokio Hotel!

The first thing I noticed is that country has a lot more hot female fans than metal does. At a typical metal show, you have about 20 girls, 15 of which have been dragged there against their will by their boyfriends, the other 5 of which resemble Harry Potter with a terrible glandular problem and a $500 dollar a month eyeshadow habit. The gender ratio was about 50/50 at the Kid Rock concert, with a normal distribution of them being attractive. They also were excited for the show, instead of sighing and glaring around the room while they grudgingly held hands with their boyfriends. It was nice to know that there would be some fun gawking to do even if I had to listen to “Cowboy” to do it.

The second thing that I noticed was that on either side of the drum set, there were kegs with strobe lights on top of them. That seemed promising.

Finally, the lights went out and Kid Rock came out … and put on a surprisingly kickass show.

He was pretty good at working the crowd. There was a lot of jumping around and at least giving the illusion of rocking even when he was playing another radio-friendly summer jam.

There was also plenty of flame, and an abundance of sparks. In fact, looking back on it, I’m pretty sure that there were a lot more pyrotechnics than any other concert I’ve been to (Take notes, Slayer. You’re being outperformed by Kid Rock.) Here’s an example:

See what I mean? There’s so much shit exploding, it almost makes you forget that you’re listening to “Bawitdaba”.

Almost.

He did a fairly good job of making the music rock, all things considered. Sure, there were some ballads and all of the songs were Kid Rock songs, but he had the common decency to do some things like back “Wasting Time” with the tune from “Paradise City” and play that one song that uses the sample from “Sad But True”.

Like I said, they were all Kid Rock songs, and I probably won’t be going to another of his concerts anytime soon, but I showed up with low expectations, an open mind and a really high blood alcohol level, and I ended up having a pretty good time.

It was all in the performance; I’ve tried listening to his music since the show, and I don’t like it any more than I did before. I have to hand it to him, though: He puts on a good show.

Okay, HERE's an attractive metal girl. Gotcha twice! It's the Tokio Hotel guy again!

One thing that did piss me off was that I got the feeling the guitar player was kind of bored and felt like he was too good for the Stampede. At the time, I remember thinking “Easy, bitch. You’re the guitar player for Kid Rock. You’re not too good for any venue.” I know that the Stampede spends a lot of money on the bands that it brings in, but I always associate playing at fairs and rodeos with milking the few remaining dollars out of the twilight of your career.

Then, I did a little bit of research, and it turns out that Kid Rock is doing just fine. I guess his latest album just went triple platinum, and he’s headlining a two day concert in Detroit in a baseball stadium that sold out in about twenty seven minutes. (One of the opening bands is Cypress Hill – more evidence that Kid Rock is probably cooler than I give him credit for).

The bottom line: I paid money to go to a Kid Rock concert and ended up having a pretty good time. In fact, my enjoyment of it was far less tongue-in-cheek than I would like to admit. I should probably just be happy that I had a good time, but I can’t stop feeling that I just woke up in bed with a really, really ugly chick after a night of binge drinking.

Oh well. It’s all good, and it’s all in fun.

NOW GET IN THE PIT AND TRY TO LOVE SOMEONE!!!

I hate myself so much right now.

I hope you all had a good 4th of July.

First of all, my little sister was upset that in one of my older posts that had a picture of Tom Brady getting showed to the turf by Al Wilson that you couldn’t see the handsome, chiseled features of Brady’s beautiful face.

I hate Tom Brady. Other than choking in one playoff game, Brady has brought me nothing but pain and suffering. He beats up on my team, and then adds insult to injury by making all of the women watching swoon.

I have to watch my little sister’s back, though, so here you go:

I have to be honest: After looking at this picture, I’m thinking that if Tom Brady asked me to have sex with him, I’m not sure that I’d be able to say no. He really is absurdly good looking, to the point that I kind of feel like he’s selling himself short by settling down with a Victoria’s Secret supermodel. The man has to be making plenty of money from the Patriots and from advertisements, he’s arguably the best quarterback in the NFL (And, some argue, in the history of the league), he’s got three Superbowl wins and two Superbowl MVPs under his belt, and he looks like a fucking male model. If you gave almost any woman that I know a knife and told them that Tom Brady would sleep with them if they cut off their hand, their severed limb would be falling to the floor before you even finished the sentence.

And yet, the man just lays low, avoids the media for the most part and spends quiet time with his girlfriend and child.

I think if I were Tom Brady, I would ride around town standing on top of a limo in a fur coat and some bejeweled oversize sunglasses screaming “I’m Tom Motherfucking Brady!” while firing a shotgun into the air. Who’s going to stop you? You’re Tom Motherfucking Brady!

Okay.

Picture of Tom Brady? Check.

Explanation of how much I hate Tom Brady? Check.

A couple of paragraphs that essentially amount to a love letter to Tom Brady? Check.

I think we’re done here. Enjoy the rest of your weekend. See you all on Monday.

Here’s one more for the road:

Good lord that man is handsome.

So, at six PM, I went over to a friend’s house to watch a couple of episodes of season 2 of The Wire. I figured I would watch them, maybe hang out a little bit after that and then head back home.

I did watch those two episodes, and decided that season 2 is highly underrated, but then I ended up hanging out for a while longer. Eight hours and what seems like seven or eight gallons of cheap beer later, I finally stumbled home and sat down in front of my computer.

I have this problem when I drink; at first, I get a little bit loopy. Then, I get kind of drowsy and start slurring my speech.

Finally, I become completely convinced that I need to complete stupid, unimportant tasks.

Not on my shift motherfucker!

Case in point: After coming home at 2 AM, I decided that I HAD to trim my nose hair and start a load of laundry. Why? I have no idea. I have plenty of clean clothes. My nose hair was a perfectly acceptable length before I cut it. Certainly not long enough that I couldn’t just wait until I was sober to take care of it. Nonetheless, I decided that there was no way that I could reasonably go to sleep with medium length nose hair. It had to be trimmed and it had to be trimmed RIGHT AWAY.

It looks fantastic now, but that’s not the point. This happens every time I drink, and it doesn’t make any sense to me. I’m a lazy, lazy man who has trouble motivating himself to even put on a pair of pants, but give me some alcohol (which, for those of you who don’t know, is a depressant), and before you know it, I’m re-alphabetizing my books by title instead of author or frantically detailing my next door neighbor’s car at three in the morning, all with the kind of urgency and intensity that I would normally reserve for a burglar or a house fire.

And now, there’s something else that I’m super-intense about: Sleeping my ass off. Because of that, I have no choice but to end this post and hop into bed. I’d write more, but I’m already so tired that I’m a little bit worried that my bed isn’t structurally sound enough to handle the full-contact slumbering that I’m about to engage in. Honestly, I’m afraid I might sleep that son of a bitch in half, and if I get any more tired, I might end up damaging the foundation of the house.

I’m not really sure what I’m talking about right now. I think it’s time to step away from the keyboard before I embarrass myself any further.

Oh, I’m a little bit late jumping on any wagon that doesn’t involve metal, but Kevin turned my onto The Bad Plus. I’ve been enjoying them ever since he told me that I should start listening to them.

Here.

Good night.

Good lord my nose hair looks AWESOME.

I don’t know if any of you have heard about this, but Michael Jackson is dead.

Suck it, Tom. Those boyish good looks can't help you now.

First of all, if you’ve been frustrated with the media’s nonstop coverage of his death instead of other news and you don’t follow football, now you know what every off season has been and will continue to be like for me until Brett Favre dies. I hate you, Brett. Make a goddamn decision about your career so I can go back to reading about the Broncos slow, steady collapse.

(On a somewhat related note, I have decided to go with pictures of former Denver Broncos linebacker Al Wilson ruining people’s shit in lieu of  Michael Jackson pictures for the duration of this post. I know I’m talking about Jackson, but I couldn’t find a single picture of him fucking up Tom Brady.  )

Second of all, I’ve been kind of confused about everyone’s reaction to Jackson’s death. For the past twenty years, Michael Jackson has been in the news for one thing and one thing only: being crazy as fuck. He’s been hanging babies out of windows, doing weird things to his face and engaging in some pretty suspicious activity with young boys. He’s been a walking, talking punchline for a long, long time, and I thought that the public viewed him as a guy that made some really good records when he was younger but knew that he kind of ended up going off the deep end.

Strangely enough, the second he died, everyone seemed to forget every nutty thing that has happened between Dangerous and now; Facebook and Twitter were completely flooded with kind words for Jackson – nothing that has happened during the time I’ve been on facebook has elicited as much of a response. All of the media outlets spent all of their energy covering his death and throwing together montages of him.

That's right, fuckers: He can fly.

I don’t quite get it. Up until June 24th, people rolled their eyes a little bit or made a pedophile joke when you mentioned Michael Jackson, but after a fatal heart attack, it’s like his record was wiped clean, and I’m not quite sure why. It’s not like he died rescuing orphans from a burning building or flew his plane into an alien spaceship to save the human race, thereby redeeming himself. He didn’t reveal that he had been secretly living in Cancun incognito and that the pale guy with the weird looking face that everyone has been making fun of all this time was actually just a very, very poorly selected body double. He didn’t release a touching memoir that justified his actions and helped everyone understand why he did the strange things that he did. He just had a heart attack and died. I’m not saying that it isn’t sad. I’m just saying that it’s very strange to me that his death seems to have somehow completely purged everyone’s memory banks of everything that Jackson did after 1987.

Third of all, once he died, everyone everywhere shared a childhood memory of Michael Jackson’s impact on them, usually in relation to Thriller. After reading several thousand of these, I realized that I actually know less about Jackson’s musical career than I do about his melt down. I’ve heard his hits, and I enjoy most of them, but I’ve never owned a Michael Jackson album, or listened to one all the way through. I did a little bit of research and realized that there’s a reason that they called him the King of Pop – Thriller is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the greatest selling record of all time, and still sells about 130,000 copies a year according to always-completely-accurate-and-never-wrong-about-anything website Wikipedia.

God I love those goofy bastards.

I decided to give Off The Wall, Thriller, and Bad a listen, and they were pretty awesome. I have to say, if I were forced to make a record good enough to make people overlook the fact that I was probably a pedophile, that album would be Thriller. I don’t think you actually can make an album that good, but Thriller comes as close as possible. (Unless, of course, you count Slipknot’s Iowa. I don’t care about the goofy masks or silly fake-snow-and-spinning-drumset concerts or that music snobs and even metal snobs think they’re bad. I fucking love that album. If it couldn’t be a metal album though, I would go with Thriller.)

After listening to it for a few minutes and looking over the track listing, I realized that there’s a reason that I only know Michael Jackson’s hits: It’s because that’s all he made. There are only one or two songs on Thriller that aren’t immediately recognizable to anyone over the age of 20.

I think that the reason that people are able to completely forget that Michael Jackson was a nut is because a lot of people have separated late 80′s black Jackson and 90′s and 00′s Jackson into two separate people in their head. It’s probably pretty easy to do. They seem like very different people. They don’t even look the same. I even noticed myself doing it while I was listening to his music. It was like “Billy Jean” was somehow wiping my memory of all of the weird behavior he had displayed.

Why you shouldn't try to jump for a first down when Al Wilson is on the field.

The spell was broken, however, when “The Lady In My Life” came on and something about it weirded me out. After mulling over it for a while, it dawned on me that the only time I had ever seen Jackson appear to show any interest in women was in his song lyrics. For whatever reason, I decided at that point that 80′s Michael Jackson wasn’t any less troubled than the Michael Jackson that middle school kids make fun of. He was just better at hiding it.

I’m going to bed.