Yellow shirt + shag hair, detached snare, left arm flies up, stick to ceiling, as right arm darts under to hit hi-hat: not showy, just practiced and graceful.
T-shirt grips torso and upper arms, deals glancing blows to hi-hat like he’s flailing, like he fucked up and his arm flew off to the side. With the same practiced grace and timing he bounces an inch out of his chair on certain tom hits and cymbal crashes.
Once upon a time, I got to lay “semen” in a game of Scrabble.
In my blogger’s capacity as Directory of Online Things, I would like to alert you, the internet, to the fact that I have this song stuck in my head real viciously:
Today I was sitting on the couch reading Beowulf when the left lens popped out of my glasses and fell onto my crotch. I plucked that oval of glass off of myself and tried to shove it back into its frame, but upon examination I found that the frame had snapped a little bit above the nosepiece. I tried to superglue it back together, but the glue wouldn’t hold, so then I tried to tape the lens back in using bright orange tape, but my girlfriend made fun of me and then stole the glasses and hid them so I had to go put my contacts in to finish Beowulf.
The moral of the story:
There was no pressure of any kind being applied to my glasses, so what the fuck?
“…this flesh and bone so many inches high and wide, and the nose sticking out and the . . . the punctures of nostrils, and your lips and I . . . and those two things that are eyes, and I . . . why should that be beautiful, anyhow.”
[this post is part 1 of an ongoing series, "On Badasses"]
This is the first badass I’ll be examining, and I’ve chosen to start with him because if they made a team of badasses, Ricky Ho would be team captain.
Things Ricky Ho can do:
Meditate
Draw strength from deep breathing
Play leaf-flute
Break tombstones on his chest
Believe in justice
Hurt you just by punching in front of your face
Casually trip people so that they fall eye-first on spikes
Point his fists and face at the sky and shout “BASTARDS!”
Commit arson
Flail his fists wildly in rainstorms
Frolic and giggle while flying RC planes
Break out of concrete after it has settled all over his entire body, just by flexing
Break out of torso-thick chains just by flexing
Survive being buried alive for a week
Still be able to play leaf-flute while he’s buried alive
Incite riots
Teach people to stand up for themselves
Shove guys through meat grinders saving only their heads as trophies and holding them above his head and yelling about it so everybody knows
Give flutes to kids with their tongues cut out
Throw himself through steel doors, prison cell bars, and brick walls
Throw other people through steel doors, prison cell bars, and brick walls
Take punches from massive construction equipment
Punch through:
-Fat guys’ stomahcs
-Regular-size guys’ stomachs
-People’s heads
-People’s fists
-People’s arms and legs
-Riot-cop shields
-Elephants
-Tigers’ faces
-Tanker ships
-Various walls
Taste his own blood before getting serious about fighting
Have great abs
Walk in slo-mo
Get shot in the chest five times and keep the bullets inside him as souvenirs
Uppercut through someone’s neck so his fist comes out their mouth
Doesn’t afraid of anything
Anecdotes:
This one time, Ricky found out that these guys were growing poppy plants to make opium, and he was like, that’s not cool, opium kills, you guys are merchants of death, and so he sets all the plants on fire and then hides inside one of the burning buildings until the guys show up because they saw that their opium plants are on fire and then Ricky kicks the door down from the inside and poses all tough, and gives this little speech about how it’s not cool to grow opium because opium kills, and then one of the guys does this kung fu move that stops Ricky’s heart but Ricky re-starts his heart by punching himself in the chest.
This one time, Ricky was being tortured by these guys who want information from him but he won’t give it up, and they put him in this contraption where he’s being poked with a bunch of sharp metal bars, and they’re beating him in the face with a wrench, and one of them stomps on one of the bars so it jabs right into Ricky’s penis, and then one of them shoves a bunch of razor blades into his mouth and then tapes his mouth shut and slaps his face back and forth a bunch of times so that the blades are sticking out of his cheeks and then he takes the tape off to see if Ricky is ready to talk yet and he just spits the blades out so they stick in the dude’s cheeks.
This one time, Ricky was fighting this guy with a whole bunch of tattoos, and the guy pulled a knife on Ricky, and the sheath of the knife was full of powdered glass, and the guy threw the glass in Ricky’s eyes and then sliced the tendons of his right arm, and everybody was like, oh no, is Ricky gonna die? but Ricky was like, “No, I’m not,” and he broke into the water main with his elbow and washed the glass out of his eyes, and tied his tendons back together with his left hand, and the other guy was like, “Oh shit, I’m fucked,” and he stabbed his knife into his own belly, and Ricky, caring about this man’s life even in the face of his lack of respect for Ricky’s, runs over to him and is like, “Don’t do it, dude!” but the guy reaches up into his belly and pulls out his own intestines and tries to strangle Ricky with them but Ricky just punches him right in the face, and then picks him up, and throws him up into the air, and punches him in the face so hard that his face BREAKS. Ricky Ho broke this guy’s FACE.
Conclusion:
Ricky Ho is the world’s foremost living badass, in my opinion, because not only is he super-strong and pretty much unkillable and prone to feats of ridiculous violence using only his body as a weapon, but he is also deeply concerned with justice. While you or I might abuse Ricky’s power, he uses it for good. Though he doesn’t hesitate because he knows it must be done, every life he takes pains him, and though he could snuff out any human life like swatting a fly, he manages to maintain a reverence for the lives of the innocent. Ricky just wants to do what’s right, and to teach others to do what’s right, and to kill those who don’t do what’s right. Kill them by punching right through them like they were paper. Paper sacks filled all the way full with spurting blood. And that’s fucking badass.
[Ricky Ho is the subject of the documentary Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, and of the work of comics journalism Riki-Oh: Violence Hero.]
There are three girls, and he grabs the first one at the knees, bringing her down under him quickly and harshly. The second girl gets out of the room, but the third is frozen in place, watching. He stands up and his body faces hers. She backs against the wall, face twisted, quivering voice saying, “Please, please. Please… don’t hurt me.” He smiles with his whole face, with his mouth and with his eyes, and he chuckles as though at a television screen, and then pulls words out of the laugh: “C’mere, gimme a hug.”
[this post is part 1 of a 156-part series, "The Twilight Zone"]
This is where it all began.
The place is here. The time is now. The picture is black and white. The footage is grainy.
Overlong synopsis, ripe with spoilers:
A man finds himself walking down a road, just dripping with amnesia, leaving globs of the stuff behind him like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs. He comes to a town, and goes into a diner. Everything is left on, but nobody is there. He gets himself a cup of tea and a sausage, and leaves some money on the counter. Investigating the rest of the town, he finds it to be in the same bizarre state of abandonment, as if everybody just disappeared in the middle of doing shit. And then, holy shit, a phone rings. He runs over to answer it but there is nobody on the other line, and he can’t reach the operator. Then it seems as though the door to the phone booth has been locked, and he bangs on it and yells a whole lot until finally he forces it open. He goes into the police station and finds a cigar still smoking on the counter. In the cells in the back, he finds a sink still running, and a shaving brush still thick and sticky with cream. As he examines it, the cell door begins to swing shut and he runs out at the last second. At the ice cream shop he makes himself a sundae and talks to himself in the mirror while he eats it. Then he wanders through some rotating racks of books, idly spinning them and talking to himself until OH MY GOD THERE’S A WHOLE RACK FULL OF COPIES OF “THE LAST MAN ON EARTH” JESUS FUCK! By this point he has vacillated between being convinced that he’s dreaming, that a prank is being played on him, and that he’s being observed by some organization. He spends the night playing tic-tac-toe by himself with a stick in the dirt. But then holy shit the streetlights turn on and a theater lights up and he goes into it and a movie starts playing and he yells, “FUCK, WHAT IN THE COCK SHIT ASS BALLS IS GOING ON!?!?!” and runs up to the projector room and that fucking thing is just running by itself and he flips the fuck out and runs head-first into a mirror and it breaks, but he gets up and runs out into the street and the camera is at all sorts of diagonal angles and he’s sweating all over the lens and panting suggestively and he trips over a bicycle and traffic lights go fucking nuts and then all of a sudden it cuts to a bunch of military officials watching him while he pants and groans, studded with electrodes, and IT TURNS OUT HE’S JUST HALLUCINATING THE WHOLE FUCKING THING HOLY FUCKING COCK-ASS SHIT! He was on a trip-to-the-moon simulator, shut up in a box by himself for FOUR HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FOUR FUCKING HOURS and then as they carry him away on a stretcher he looks up at the moon and says, “FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKER, I’M GOING TO COME UP THERE AND STICK MY DICK IN YOU JUST TO SHOW YOU THAT I CAN!” The end.
Awesome moments:
When he tells a mannequin, “I’ve always had a thing for the quiet type, know what I mean, babe?”
When he runs right up to the camera and yells, “Hey! Where is everybody?!”
[note: this post has nothing to do with vampire novels for young girls]
Take heed, oh internet: I am as of the time of this posting embarking upon a quest for knowledge, a quest which you will have a window into through this very blog! The sharper among you have probably already guessed at the nature of my undertaking because of the title of this very post, but for those of you who are somewhat slow, let me explain the parameters of the exercise:
I am going to watch and then write about each one of the 156 episodes of the original run of TV’s The Twilight Zone! And if I do my job acceptably (and when have I ever not?) you will feel as though you have watched all of those episodes yourself, my posts inducing a vicarious shadow-experience in you.
Updates will be made approximately weekly, but feel free to refresh this page every five minutes, drooling in eager anticipation.
The project so far:
1) Where Is Everybody?
2) One For The Angels
3) Mr. Denton on Doomsday
William Gaddis, writing about Christmas in The Recognitions:
“Tragedy was foresworn in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of that which the heart dare not surrender.”
David Foster Wallace, writing about a life in “Incarnations of Burned Children”:
“…and the child’s body expanded and walked about and drew pay and lived its life untenanted, a thing among things, its self’s soul so much vapor aloft, falling as rain and then rising, the sun up and down like a yoyo.”
William T. Vollmann, writing about skinheads in The Rainbow Stories:
“Whether it is a happy life or a sad one the Skinz live is of course unknowable to anyone watching them stride by, turning their bulging skulls greedily upon their bulging necks, trying to be pitiless, exclusive; not listening much to one another; but we can consider the question. The lone ones lean up against the restaurant windows, hunching their heads in like turtles at the same time they swivel their gaze in what might be anxiety or might be automatic street wisdom. They spend too much time waiting, but on the whole they are arguably happy, having their fights to look forward to. What more, after all, could anyone yearn for in his guts than the chance to hurt somebody else, jawkicking a soul into screaming subhumanness in order to reiterate that I live? — ‘Politics,’ I once heard a conservative say, ‘is the exercise of power. Power is the ability to inflict pain.’ By this criterion the skinheads are among our most spontaneous politicians. Let us assume, then, that being spontaneous they are light of heart.”
Cormac McCarthy, writing about the aftermath of slaughter in Blood Meridean:
“With darkness one soul rose wondrously from among the new slain dead and stole away in the moonlight. The ground where he’d lain was soaked with blood and with urine from the voided bladders of the animals and he went forth stained and stinking like some reeking issue of the incarnate dam of war herself.”
Charles Bukowski, writing about a woman in Factotum:
“She had a tight pussy and she took it like it was a knife that was killing her. She reminded me of a butterfat little piglet.”