MFM
I don't know who or what I am, but then again, neither do you.
The background music of my childhood is the same as the background music playing as I write this. As awkward as that sounds, it makes sense because the music that I’m talking about is SportsCenter. ESPN’s daily mostly live sports news program brought a new wave of clever sarcasm to the genre. It still airs, often comprising at least half of ESPN’s daily programming and this has been the case since I knew what television was. At age 22 I can sit back and reflect fondly on those mornings spent in the white Upstate winter, in the military barracks, listening to my dad cook breakfast while watching SportsCenter and offering a running back and forth commentary on all the accumulated highlights of another absurd day in football. My teenage years were spent in a suburban hinterland with nightly ESPN sessions segueing into slumber. It was a routine ingrained in me like that of 80 year olds and Jeopardy. The turbulence of a long day was soothed by the repeated airings of SportsCenter late at night.
The lonely ritual has been omnipresent in my life, serving as a hypnotic escape into a world where nothing but sports exist. Finite dramas of points and strategy and raw athletics repeated on a nightly basis. SportsCenter always seemed to understand that absurdity and while anchors maintained a healthy respect to the sports they covered, they employed a sardonic and subversive sensibility to their delivery that was distinct from anything else in journalism at that time. On top of serving as a metronome of my life, the early work of duo anchors Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann was inadvertently what inspired me to pursue journalism and comedy. They planted a seed and for that, and quite a few other reasons, I do not apologize for continuing to watch essentially the same shit every single day.
Thank you, Disney/ESPN for making this show. Despite being completely drenched in obnoxious advertisements for beer and car, and increasingly dull while increasingly profitable, I still very much enjoy it now, and will actually use this as an excuse to finish this entry so I can watch some fucking SportsCenter.
September 11th 2005 was the day I went mobile. The vagaries of house phone life came suddenly crashing to a halt when my mother presented me with a gift my entitled little punk ass thought was long overdue. Like most of my birthdays since 2001, the day was a little gloomy, but that gray was broken by the free-with-a-contract Nokia phone I now called mine. Even then, 16 year olds with cell phones were a common sight and I was happy to become one more person in the faceless sea. Little did I know I was embarking on a frustrating journey equally as expensive as it was beneficial.
Our mobile devices are our little black book, our diary, our best friend and our worst enemy. It is the first thing we see in the morning and the last thing we see at night and it garners more attention than we give to ourselves and others. Cell phones offer a window into a social world of your own making, offering a brief and addictive respite from uncomfortable situations and overwhelming boredom. My first two years under the trance of 3G were for naught, my phone was only equipped with the capacity to make phone calls. This disappointed a young man with visions of nude photos and full inboxes. It left me ill suited to the cycle of finding a charger, since my phone would stay alive for days due to inactivity. Those early days were colored by the unreasonable demand for ringtones. Phones were transformed into Hit Clips players as calls from anyone at anytime would result in a mini pop concerto featuring the most stripped down of tinny, polyphonic interpolations. Candy Shop by 50 Cent cost my parents a ridiculous $2.49. Text messaging wasnt always unlimited then, and ten cents everytime you hit send was a chilling reminder of that fact.
As I got older, the appeal of a cell phone was expanded from merely possessing one to possessing the newest, brightest model. I will never forget the expression on the face of one of my snowy, Hollister clad classmates when she opened a gift box containing the newest iPhone. Cell phones were no longer merely ambulatory telephones with half the fidelity of landlines, they were now pieces of a person’s identity, a talisman of personalized cool that said as much about who you were as it did how much discretionary income you had at your disposal. Cars and houses began as functional necessities and evolved into cultural signifiers and cell phones have not diverted from that track in the least.
Though many criticize the onslaught of text messaging and social networking, I feel that people are underestimating the sheer benefits of increased connectivity. Mobile technology has done nothing but improve our lives, whether it be for emergencies and GPS, or for Twitter and sexting. Social cross pollination occurs inside of our phones now. They have also democratized photography and made it easier for people to capture important memories. A lot of times, the chief criticism is that cell phones distract people from being in the moment. But who are you to tell anyone what moment they should be in? Personal choice in whether to engage with present reality is one of the more radical functions of smartphone technology, but one that is benign if harnessed correctly.
I curse the day that I became a cell phone user, not because of what has happened since, but because it took so long to come. The forefront of technology is in our palms, being tapped away at. Let us embrace it for all its flaws, and continue to use our technology for making deeper connections with other human beings. And get some good nudes if youre lucky.
Osceola county, located in Central Florida just south of Orange county, lies in the meager shadows of Disney World and Orlando. Osceola county is a place where dreams go to flourish for few, a glimmering oasis to the immigrant parents who bring their children here to taste freedom, and an inescapable cesspool of paltry service industry wages and drugs to those same children who grew up with stars in their eyes. Now the dimmed bulbs that replaced their pupils are flanked by a glassy red expanse of white, half closed and unseeing past the next blunt or bitch. Osceola county has one of the country’s thickest populations of Puerto Ricans with the majority of them coming from poor backgrounds in the Northeast, primarily New York. With them, they brought gang affiliations, very poor grammar and hygiene and a general lack of decorum consistent with what you would see in a Bronx housing project. Couple their expanding existence with the entrenched generations of southern whites, and you have a simmering cultural tension that leaves ‘tweeners like myself in the middle. What these two groups arent aware of is that they share an affinity for teen pregnancy and crime. They both enjoy shitty alcohol. They are both slightly evolved past neanderthal, and I use the term “slightly” in as generous a sense as my mind allows. Growing up as an aspiring artist of sorts in this kind of community has inspired a sense of wanderlust more than justified given the lack of resources locally. The total lack of investment in education both at the state (47th in the country, thank you Rick) and municipal levels is ultimately what is to blame for the phenomenon of endless dropouts and pregnancies, though that was never helped by the proliferation of kids who themselves were raised by pregnant dropouts. Just walking down the street anywhere here is a primer on how broken the American dream is. You will inevitably find a half foreclosed housing development with a generic name like “Cypress Pond” or “Whispering Oaks” full of potheads and strung out, overworked parents. The landscape is flat, and hot and humid, with the visual monotony broken only by strip malls who feature seemingly the same barbershops, dollar stores and nail salons. The apex of success is defined locally as posessing a diploma while physically not being in jail. Sometimes I wonder if there is a place in this country as hopeless and devoid of value as Osceola county. I doubt it, quite honestly, and I will always curse the day I unwillingly became a resident of this hell stricken wasteland of shattered youth. Some places, some people are worth saving. This county is not.
A handjob is something inherently unsatisfactory to begin with. Imagine getting one from satan. I mean, it would be pleasant to some extent, because you would be presumably be reaching ejaculation assuming the handjob were completed to its actual definition. But you would still, even in mid orgasm, be saddled with the thought that an infernal, mythical evil being is tugging you off. How does one cope? Or does one cope at all? A friend once told me that sometimes things are a little too fucked up to fully process, so it all ends up being a sort of colon cancer of spackled brain shit, the contents of which emerge when we’re drunk. I’m not saying I’ve gotten a handjob from Satan, but that summer was goddamn close enough. Poopie doopy.
When I was 5 years old, my parents made a grave mistake. At some point, during some day, in some suburb of San Antonio, Texas, in 1994, a cable man stopped by a modest Spanish style home and connected each of the three TV’s in the home to the American smorgasbord of premium entertainment. Lost in the dulled, house-wide stupor that this occurrence inspired was the fact that this cable man had connected premium cable into the television of a room that was occupied solely by a child. This was the mistake my parents made, on top of a slightly smaller mistake that compounded it. The smaller mistake was that they went to bed very early, and would take my shut eyes as a valid indicator of slumber every night. They had no idea I was staying up and watching hours of TV in solitude every night, balancing my cartoon consumption with copious amounts of Froot Loops and Cheeze Whiz toast. Their folly in giving a kid such unfettered access to so much programming, coupled with their bedtime indifference and the fact that we had all the “movie channels” led to one of the most important and profound discoveries of my entire life. For those acquainted with HBO and Cinemax’s programming in the nether hours, you can probably surmise what I might be referring to here. For those who have resided in the basic cable realm and haven’t sampled the bourgeoisie saccharine available a few scrambled channels up the dial, this might shock you. Sitting cross legged, on that wooden floor, in those pajamas, years ago, full off of sugar and lactose, I discovered pornography.
At first it was breasts. I was captivated by them. Just a few years removed from having suckled on the maternal teat for sustenance, I was now watching images of other teats for I didn’t really know why. I felt as if watching these spherical globs of flesh was a matter of urgent importance, ironic given that they were objects that didn’t even exist to me prior to having seen them unadorned by brassiere. HBO had a creatively titled monthly sex magazine show back then called “Real Sex”. If you could imagine a 60 Minutes type program featuring nude people of roughly the same age, in roughly the same increments, then you have a rough idea of what “Real Sex” was like. The main difference was that this show as, as you might have figured, all about sex, more specifically, different, exotic forms of sexual expression. The show was formatted with three or four segments that were separated by “Man On The Street” type interviews with random New York city dwellers who would answered sexually focused questions with surprising candor. The actual segments themselves involved in depth looks at places like an S&M club in Chicago, or a group of retirees in Washington who engaged in food sex. Sometimes they would have more graphic segments that involved full frontal nudity in lieu of the usual titty over here titty over there. Very seldom did they include anything resembling the current hardcore pornography we’re all used to, and it would be years before I saw any kind of penetration , but regardless of how tame it was, this whirlwind was my first exposition to the concept of titillation, nudity, sex and sensuality.
Running off at night after my parents would go to bed to watch my blessed boobs was also where I first experienced the later deafening pangs of sexual guilt that would come to define my early Evangelical teenage years. Though I there was no way I could actually explain why it felt bad to watch these images, it felt as if I was indulging a gluttonous urge. There was never a sex talk from my parents, just a blissful indifference that I suppose was to imply the same on my part. In the household I was raised in, sex did not exist. It wasn’t forbidden or shunned. It was a unicorn, or a jolly green giant, or something big and mythical and fictional, it didn’t exist. I had to figure this all out on my own, and there was so much to figure out. Why were there tufts of hair in between everyone’s legs? And beneath that hair, what in the fuck was that…or those? What was stirring in my insides, making me feel tingly and bizarre?
Four years later, I figured out exactly what that was. Now, those with that special combination of attention to detail, basic math skills, and an imaginative mind might jump to some conclusions after reading that last sentence. I wasn’t molested, nor did I engage in any kind of sexual activity at age 10. What did happen, however, was that I finally bit the bullet and used one of those shitty AOL free preview discs on the new desktop my now single mother had purchased for myself and my two brothers using the kind of riches that claiming several family member’s children on her taxes would bring back in those days. The fresh out of the box HP Pavilion was soon connected, and after a dial tone, some noises that cannot possibly be accurately transcribed, and a loud buzz, I was on the internet at home. The internet was something shadowy that all my teachers used to try to get me to use in elementary school. Most of the time I’d be wondering where the games were, or if the internet actually did consist entirely of the Osceola County School District Homepage. A small part of my mind however, even at those tender beginnings of my foray into double-digithood, wondered “Where the titties at?”
The titties, it turned out, would go on the backburner. The internet was not the repository of softcore pseudo-humping that made up the majority of Cinemax’s post witching hour offerings. The internet was a wide open wild wild west of debauched insanity. What on god’s earth was a cum shot? The very first time I accessed porn on that infamous dial-up connection, it was as my family was waiting downstairs for me to tie my shoes and join them in the Toyota Carolla for a weekly trip to Tuesday church. As my AskJeeves search for “tits” loaded, I wondered what I was going to see next. A black woman filled my screen, clad in absolutely nothing, beckoning me to “enter” the website I had somehow gotten to, if I was “18 or older”, which, on that night, I magically was. Titties took a backseat to the window after window after window of skin filled pop ups that populated my screen in that five minute span that night, and the loud horn bleats I heard coming repeatedly from outside the house only hastened my speed in X’ing them all out. I ran down the stairs in the same state that many people emerge from their first sexual awakening in. Slightly disheveled, stirred up, a little sweaty and with a raging kid boner.
If this were a post about masturbation, (it is not, thankfully), I’d go more into depth about what I eventually did about that, and many other boners. The internet, for me, kicked off what would be ultimately one of my biggest shadow influences. A lot of the material I’ve used on stage, or in my writing over the years draws from an ethos learned from repeated exposure to pornography. Learning about genuine sexuality in later years helped ultimately frame the way that pornography affects me now, giving me an enriching dose of reality to contrast with the contrived exchanges I was used to on film. The mistreatment of women, the constant encroachments into fuzzy gray areas regarding sexual abuse and the fact that pornography does encourage, if not overtly, “unhealthy” sexual behaviors are all factors I’ve since become cognizant of and they have also served to color my opinions on the genre.
My experiences are similar to that of this generations. Our formative years occurred in the tail end of the analog age and at the beginning of the digital one. We saw VCR’s turn into DVD players turn into Blu-Ray before our eyes. Our dial up turned to broadband, our seventy channels turned to seven hundred. The boobs became vaginas and the pictures became videos and the sex went from cinematic lovemaking to wiping off the camera on a “BangBus”. We went from children to adults, living our high school years in seemingly endless prosperity and trudging through college in the midst of economic malaise. I don’t even know where I’m going with all this. Maybe we’re just a fucked up age group. Either way, I watched porn as a kid and that is partially why I’m so loopy now, is basically what I’m saying.
SNAKE
A trickle of water streaming slowly from the gray stone
Dripping softly onto my cracked coated lips
I squeeze again and again into the rock
As I the snake curl slowly around the porous solid
Wrapping every dull crevice with my scaly pallor
The echoes reverberate in the empty, you are a gutted
Husk, a breathtaking façade of window dressing
Vibrant paint and hollow whispers garnishing your
Otherwise lifeless corpse. What have you become
I slither until the gray is unseen.
My tongue tastes the moist air around you
A vain call for a dampness sprung forth from
Something other than my own succession of medallions
You are a stone, I am flesh blood bone and color
Contracting. Thrusting forth into the impenetrable
On and on, what stupendous delusions you inspire
From the very tip of my nose to the pointed end of my tail
I envelop you in my rough hewn, inhuman viscera
Willingly unwillingly a friendly hostage
A hostage nonetheless. I wish Stockholm upon you
I beg through masked hisses, your ears endlessly deaf
You remain dry, as dry my bones when time comes for me
When your solitude ceases. Emerging as stone, unturned
Unmolested, unmoved by the petulant, vile, sincere
Exhortations of I the snake.
- Christopher Nigger
