I still wanna bathe in milk...

But on a gentler note:

I'm a big geeky fan of that lovely warmth we call nostalgia, and some of the memories I like to indulge in when feeling particularly nostalgic concern memories of my grandparents from when I was little... It's nice to occasionally just sit down and let all the random memories spill through your fingers like water. Here's a few of my favorites...

Grandma & Grandpa Kosarko

Strawberry Nestle Quik and different color ice-cream cones;

How their plastic cups always smelled sour;

How the squirrels would eat nuts right out of my Grandma's hand;

Having to repeat everything twice for my grandpa because he was hard of hearing;

Kimmy their dog;

Watching Bernie Kosar play football over their house (on the television);

My grandma's killer chicken nuggets and her penchant for ice cream;

The presidents set that they had which was basically just a styrofoam platform with attachable styrofoam pillars upon which you placed little plastic versions of the presidents in order from oldest to newest;

Her sweet McDonald's playset;

Throwing up all over the bathroom sink over their house because my parents kept telling me that I WASN'T sick and was perfectly fine to go over there while they went out;

Playing sweet songs like the theme to THE GODFATHER on their organ, sometimes to a rhumba or tango beat;

How she gave us about 6 of the exact same Malibu Kens over and over as presents b/c she got them on sale at K-mart;

Sleeping in the yellow upstairs bedroom;

How whenever we left her house after visiting, she would always manage to slip a roll of quarters into our hands without my dad noticing, and the weight of these quarters in my purse when I finally went up to Southgate to use them on frozen coca-cola slushes and toys.

Grandma Rose

Going to Lake Plata with her in the summers:

Catching frogs with my friend Annie and then accidentally dropping them in the pool;

Having her teach me how to swim AND dive;

Watching all the old Hungarian men hit on her in Hungarian and buy us Klondike bars so we'd leave them alone;

Eating raw green onions as a snack;

Doggie-paddling with her while we'd both sing "I'm walking... down the street... I'm talking";

The time she took me out for ice cream and I was walking on the cement curbs and fell, busting up my glasses and giving myself a black & blue cheek;

Sitting on her lap when I was really little and playing with her gold necklaces which were always so pretty to me;

Her blue glass mushroom that used to sit in her window at her apartment and her cuckoo clock;

All the paintings on the walls of her apartment and her cuckoo clock;

Her kielbasa dinners.

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I wanna bathe in milk...

Eat grapes...
Robert Deniro sit on my face.

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Insomnia...

So yet again, I had a godawful night's sleep. I don't know what's the matter with me.

I DID, however, have the weirdest dream I've had in a while.

I dreamt I went to the movie theater to see a new M. Night Shyamalan movie. Like other movie-dreams I've had (it happens fairly frequently), I simultaneously was watching the movie and part of the movie as I sat there.

The movie began with folks in a bar drinking it up and whatnot. E was there. As was a dude who looked remarkably like Kevin Smith. Somehow or another, the Kevin Smith dude gets attacked by a very large snake which begins biting him on the eyes and arms and everything. Everyone stands around helplessly until it starts to slither away and someone grabs it and starts beating it into the ground until it's dead.

I am freaked out and realize we need to get the Kevin Smith dude to the hospital (he's suddenly turned into this meek-looking nerdy skinny twerp of a fella and you can tell he's suffering). I'm trying to get his medical information but can barely make sense of him. So I'm looking up the phone number of his hospital in the phone book and can't find it. I return back to the bar to get more help only to find all the people I'm there with sitting around and having a good ol' time, boozing, laughing, etc. I'm furious (especially at E) for totally ignoring the fact that this kid is dying and start fuming at them. I stomp off and the ambulance comes.

I'm sitting in the ambulance with this kid, feeling slightly claustrophobic as my head keeps hitting the roof as we swerve along the streets. I suddenly get the sense that things are not as they seem--that I am in something very akin to the movie THE GAME where this might all be some sorta set-up b/c the driver looks like someone at the bar.

Suddenly the movie (and the dream) takes this complete left-turn and switches over to a sort of Gothic horror movie. (I'm thinking to myself, "Oh, M. Night. You and your silly twist-endings.") I am outside on some craggy cliff and am trying to get away from this youthful beautiful vampiress who is slicing my throat over and over with her fingernails and teeth and gorging on the blood. She has ice-blond hair that is dyed a brilliant blood red at the roots and in the bangs. She is one of the doomed.

We spend lots of time flying around outside a very large gothic castle, contemplating our doomedness. We are upset by it, though the flying is kinda nice.

Some other random vampire comes and tries to attack us. He does not succeed. I don't know what his motivations are.

Later I stumble across a room in which there are some scientific individuals scraping away at old bones. They are telling me whose bones are all collected there and whatnot and that they are trying to piece the people back together whole.

Suddenly the movie is over and I'm walking down some railroad tracks in the middle of some grassy fields, kinda STAND BY ME-style. I bump into the young girl who plays the vampiress in the movie and lavish praise on her for being such a good actress. She smiles and continues down the tracks. I drift awake.





People shouldn't be forced to get up and go to work the day after they get the softiest most warmly fuzzy flannel sheets ever.

It's just not right.

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A Few More Thoughts About Pool...

The more I think about it, the more I realize part of the reason I enjoy shooting pool so much. I'm not a big sports person. Heh heh. I vowed once I got out of high school that I'd NEVER EVER touch a volleyball again, and I've stayed true to this vow. I don't dig the hyper-competitiveness. I am ridiculously uncoordinated. I am one of those people who ducks whenever a ball comes flying at her head. I hate team spirit and having to do stuff like pass to other people and hit the ball to other people and tackle other people. Competitive sports just do NOT do it for me.

But pool... that's a different story. It takes a lot of thought and understanding of angles and so much control. (*Please note that I am not implying that other sports do NOT require these things. But it's in a different sort of way...) There's no pressure because you don't have someone running at you full-speed trying to knock the ball out of your hands or something. (Note to self and sister, Lesley: it WOULD be kinda fun to have tackle pool sometime, or some other variation where you both are trying to get balls in the pocket simultaneously--must keep this in mind for future pool games.)

There's something beautiful about being able to swiftly navigate the angles and shots for pool, to get to that point where you don't have to use the stick to line up the angle between cue and ball to see where you have to hit it to get it in--you just KNOW. Your mind is able to read and synthesize the table in this miraculous sort of way...

That's why the whole pool/chaos theory thing intrigues me as well. There's such order and yet such disorder on the table each time you play. But it seems so transcendent to be able to make sense of the disorder and order so quickly, so easily, so simply, so gut-reaction and translate it into a sunk shot. It's a beautiful thing to be constantly placing order (and disorder) onto a set of balls like that. Like you're in charge of a constantly shifting set of constellations or something.

I likey pool.

"in the back room there's a lamp
that hangs over the pool table
and when the fan is on it swings
gently side to side
there's a changing constellation
of balls as we are playing
i see orion and say nothing"

--ani difranco ("untouchable face")

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Pool-Sharkin' It...

So last night I spent most of the evening shooting pool at a bar in Tremont with two lovely deviants...

I love pool. It's the only sport I'm actually good at.



And I whupped ass, if I may say so myself--Adam and Pattie never even knew what hit 'em.

Anyways, since I'm in post-geeked-up pool-mode, here's some shit for you all to read.

You can find some interesting crap on chaos theory and pool here.

And you can read more about the basic rules here and here.

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"Wanting to know absolutely...

what a story is about, and to be able to say it in a few sentences, is dangerous: It can lead us to wanting to possess a story as we possess a cup. We know the function of a cup, and we drink from it, wash it, put it on a shelf, and it remains a thing we own and control, unless it slips from our hands into the control of gravity; or someone else breaks it, or uses it to give us poisoned tea. A story can always break into pieces while it sits inside a book on a shelf; and, decades after we have read it even twenty times, it can open us up, by cut or caress, to a new truth."

--Andre Dubus ("A Hemingway Story")

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Yo Yo!

Last night I dreamt I was on "The Real World," flirting and macking and shagging just a bit.



L_____ S_____... Taking over the world one reality television show at a time!

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Things That Make You Go HMMMMM...

1. The advertisement for Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow--Movies' attempts to toot their own horns are just getting more and more idiotic. The newest preview for Sky Captain boasts the following:

"Everybody's talking about Sky Captain & the
World of Tomorrow including... The New York
Times, Gene Shalit, etc. etc."

Which, well, duh, is obviously true because anyone who WRITES movie reviews is technically GONNA be talking about Sky Captain since they're gonna have to review it. But who's to say that what they're "talking" about it isn't that it sucks like Monchichi in a sucking contest with a vacuum and a vampire? They could even just be saying "Sky Captain boob tit cunt!" and technically they're talking about the movie.
LAME! That's all I have to say about that.



2. Catcalling--the question still remains: WHY?!?

3. Chaser: the new hangover pill--Allegedly you can take this pill before a night of heavy drinking so that when you wake up in the morning, your head will feel light as a cloud and clear as a babbling brook. My thoughts on the subject: If you actually have gone out and purchased this item before, perhaps the problem is not so much that you get hangovers but that YOU'RE AN ALCOHOLIC?!? I mean, my god, if you're actually pre-planning your drinking bouts so extensively that you go out and buy pills ahead of time so you can drink 'til you're swimming in it, maybe the problem is not so much the effect that the alcohol's having on you in the morning but the fact that you're drinking so much so frequently that you actually NEED this pill.

4. "February"--Why that first R?

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A Shivering Breath on Your Neck

I can remember the exact moment as a child when I KNEW I was gonna be a geek of horror stories. My mom used to be a big Stephen King fan, and one night she left her worn paperback copy of THE SKELETON CREW on our fireplace. She had told me many times before not to read her Stephen King books because they'd give me nightmares. So I of course had to pick it up and look through it when she wasn't around. I wasn't sure what the big deal was, so I was of course intrigued. I opened to a random page and started reading what I would later come to know as "The Raft," a short story about a group of teenagers who go night-swimming out to a little wooden raft to enjoy themselves. However, they find themselves trapped there with a gelatinous, shadowy water blob that keeps oozing itself in between the slats and destroying whatever it touches, even human flesh. (This sounds much sillier than it actually is--it's quite the creepy story.) Anyways, I started reading somewhere in the middle of it and remember being shocked and horrified (enough that I can STILL vividly remember the exact descriptive passage that did it) by the description of one of the teenagers who made an attempt to swim back to shore--he was described as "a human fire hydrant," blood shooting from both his ears and from his mouth as the blob surrounded him and started destroying him. I could barely sleep that night.

And it was those stories that I actively sought out once my mother said I was old enough to read them.

This weekend, waxing a little nostalgic, I nabbed a new book of ghost stories while I was at the library--The Dark: New Ghost Stories edited by Ellen Datlow. I haven't read a good ghost story in a LONG while, ever since my sister gave me a wicked cool book of 'em a couple years ago, so I figured I'd give it a shot. I've chowed down 300+ pages of spooky stories from this book since Friday and suddenly remembered why I used to be so smitten with them when I was younger.

What intrigues me about them (now moreso than when I was younger) is that they abide by such similar structures/formulas--kinda like pulp novels and whatnot--and yet THAT is sorta what's inherent in their success. When you start reading a horror story, you KNOW where the story's going to take you, perhaps not specifically with regard to the plot, but in its INTENT. This cannot be said for most other kinds of literature really... You KNOW that at some point, the rug's gonna be pulled out from underneath you, leaving you disconcerted and unsettled. And it's that knowledge, that sense of impending doom, that makes them so successful. At least if it's a GOOD horror story. And that's why you read them, you SEEK this out in them.

As with ANY genre of writing, there's stories that are only mildly successful, only tweak a smidgen of fright out of you, if any. And then there's the stories that leave you checking the shadowy corners of your room when you crawl into bed, that making you start at stupid little noises and sleep restlessly all night. THESE are the reasons why horror stories are so much fun to read.

Like "The Amicable Divorce" by Daniel Abraham (from The Dark) for example. This is a story about a man dealing with the death of his infant-son and the resulting-divorce. In this tale, the ex-wife calls him up with complaints that some sorta cat or racoon keeps getting into her house, and he comes over several times to help her out, finding blood smears and destruction from the floor to about 2-feet high in most of the rooms. His character is fairly well-developed and sympathetic one, yearning for the return of his happy past, his marriage, and his child. And yet at the end, when the final horror of the story is revealed, we are not only frightened by the supernatural, but by the man himself and what a quiet horror HE can hold within.

Admittedly, this one left me a little jittery at bedtime. I kinda miss that.

Favorite horror books from my youth that always left me jittery at bedtime:

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark--as I've mentioned before--these were DAMN gruesome stories for little kids, complete with sick and twisted illustrations;

Stephen King's Skeleton Crew and Night Shift--I am still a fan of both as they have some DAMN creepy tales in 'em; I cannot bear to trudge my way through his excessively and unnecessarily lengthy novels, but DO enjoy his short stories;

Anything by Edgar Allen Poe--my mom used to have the Collected Works of his, and I LOVED to sit and read all the horribly twisted stories; particular favorites--The Black Cat, The Masque of the Red Death, The Pit & the Pendulum, and The Cask of Amontillado;

John Saul Books--I went through this HUGE John Saul-phase, consuming mass quantities of his books (all of them up through the publication year of 1990).

I actually kind of miss reading horror stories and, with Halloween coming up, maybe I'll indulge a little. So feel free to leave any suggested readings in my comment-section. BOOOOOOOO!

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Ain't Yo' Bitch

Since three of you asked me within a meager 10-minute time-span whether I was blogging today ("You love me, you really love me!"), I feel obligated to inform everyone of the following:

Like many others who have chosen the same path, I will henceforth only blog when I feel strongly compelled to, that way you will no longer have to read the lame-ass garbage I dredge up somedays just to fill space.

* * * *

That being said, I finally dragged my kiester down to MOCA and got my hands on the Cleveland Spencer Tunick pic of which I was a part.

Click here to see a copy.

I would point out where I'm located in the pic, since I'm actually discernible, but I wouldn't want to have you be distracted all day, staring and drooling at my supah-fine toosh. ; )

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Deja-Doo-Doo Part Doo

Hello. My name is Patrick and velcome to Funf-Dollar Bier, your blog for all things goth and food-related...



Today ve shall review food.

TOMATOES--overrated.

TURNIPS--Zay make my nipples hard.

ADAM--If I vere Homer Simpson, I'd be drooling right now. But I am not. Zo instead I shall vear black.

MCDONALDS--The elite say NAY!

ZE FLYING FIG--Makes me happy as a little giiiiirl!

In uzzer news, you can keep your eyez out for upcoming Subliminal Self shows at zee following site:

Subliminal Self Tour Dates

You can also drool over pictures of my monkey if you go here, here and here.

Vould you like to touch my monkey? Touch him! Love him! Liebe meine abst-monkey.

Until tomorrow, eat your brussel sprouts or ve vill hurt you!

Now is the time on Sprockets vhen ve dance.

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Deja-Doo-Doo

I took this about an hour ago from the roof of my apartment here in South Korea...



* * * *

And onto unrelated topics...

I watched Soylent Green this weekend and actually found it quite interesting. Amusingly, it was set in the "futuristic" year of 2002, complete with rampant overpopulation and even-more-processed-than-McD's kinds of foods. But what REALLY interested me was this...

In the middle of the 1970's, the United States of America was still in full swing with its anti-Vietnam turmoil. Dissent was rife and individuals were in thrall not only to the fears concerning U.S. involvement but also the inner-political turmoil that was causing the U.S. to eat away at itself. The rampant success of SOYLENT GREEN [1973] in this time period is not so surprising given its quite obvious commentary on cannibalism and American self-destruction.

Charlton Heston is a 'troubled' cop who has a problem with subjugation of any kind. He has a problem with not being able to get his hands on a piece of fresh fruit to eat, with being surrounded by overpopulation, with being surprised. Mostly he does not like being forced to eat human flesh. Human flesh "bugs" him. At first blush this could be taken as a normal anti-cannibalistic pic where fear of cannibalism is visible in the guise of "Soylent Green"; and while this is a valid analysis, it does not preclude all other analyses.

Charlton Heston is enraged because he has learned that "Soylent Green is people." The "normal" food he was raised with turns to bitter gall when faced with the harsh reality that he must kowtow instead to mass quantities of human flesh being fed to him and the rest of New York's population, unbeknownst to all of them. The rage of this realization coupled with the death of his "father figure" result in a manifestation of liminal uncertainty. He is just one more indication of American's slow-consumption of it's own best resource--its people. But nothing is resolved, leaving all questions in need of being answered, and leaving us hauntingly asking: Is Soylent Green people? Is Vietnam people? Is Soylent Green Vietnam? Is Charlton Heston EVER gonna be able to not be completely over-the-top dramatic?

Yet Charlton Heston cannot handle this realization either. He is left screaming to the world "Soylent Green is people!"--we are the cause of our own mass downfall. While the plot itself might seem rather straightforward in promoting anti-cannibalistic acts, it remains an allegorical warning that we will be the source of our own destruction, and that WE SHOULD NOT EAT OTHER PEOPLE.

A recap; Charlton Heston [as the "individual" in America] cannot cope with the realization that he is essentially the source of his own downfall and that the American population [as "America"] is slowly gnawing away at its own right leg, not even realizing that it's chewing on ITSELF for sustenance. The fact that SOYLENT GREEN was so hugely successful is evidence enough that anti-cannibalistic and anti-Vietnam kooks were right on the money and that America was scooting its ass along the path of self-destruction even back in the 1970's.

I report, you decide.

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Not So Cellular...

So I was gonna write about other things this morning, but then I had the CREEPIEST and most vivid dream in between snoozes... So I figured I'd write about that instead.

I dreamt that I was staying at my mom's house with both my sisters. They were both sleeping but I was up and getting ready for work. I was lumbering sleepily into and out of bedrooms, trying to gather clothes together to get dressed and that kinda thing. And I was trying to do it as quietly as possible (but getting nothing accomplished as usually happens when I have "getting ready for work" dreams).

Suddenly Jason Stratham (that dude from Snatch and that horrible-looking movie that's coming out called Cellular) busts into the house. And he's MAD-looking. Apparently he's come to kidnap both my sisters.

(All this is action is interspersed with me trying to get ready for work and failing miserably.)



I drift in and out of my sister's rooms, trying to console them and figure out how to get them out of this mess. Jason is in our basement, throwing together a couple suitcases of clothes for them before he drags their asses out. Both my sisters are their current age, and yet they have that sweetness and childlikeness of, say, 8 year olds. I am worried about them.

My sister Lisee looks up to me from where she's lying in bed and asks me plaintively (and like a little kid) whether or not I will crawl in and sleep in bed with her for the rest of the morning because she's scared. I explain that I will gladly, just not this morning because I'm running late. But I tell her ANY OTHER TIME her little heart desires, all she has to do is ask and I'll shmoosh up with her. This makes her feel a bit more reassured.

The dream continues to dip back and forth between me getting ready for work and Jason strong-muscling his way intimidatingly through a kidnapping. At one point, I'm trying to figure out a way to get my sisters out of the house and he realizes it. He throws my sister Lisee his gun and taunts her by telling her to shoot him. She keeps holding up the gun and pointing it at his chest but not shooting. We keep yelling at her, JUST SHOOT HIM! JUST SHOOT HIM! And she keeps trying to decide what to do. Finally she just lets the gun drop to the floor.

He takes off with them.

Later, through vague and unexplained circumstances, I find out that really, he's just practicing for a movie and that he wasn't REALLY kidnapping my sisters. This does not make me feel any better though because he was so SCARY about it all and I'm worried that he's snapped or something. I'm reassured that it's just for his movie and part of the movie begins to roll in my subconscious. It is a scene with two supermodels (apparently he is into kidnapping supermodels in this movie) and they are lurching around comedically as they die slowly. The scene makes me realize that this movie is a dark comedy, and I CANNOT possibly see how his interactions with my sister could link up to a COMEDY at all, as terrified as I now am from the scenes that took place while I got ready for work. I am reassured once more that it's all just a movie and then I wake up.

I did not sleep well.

GRRRRRRRR!

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Sticker Books n' Other Tidbits

I really miss having a sticker book. I was thinking this yesterday on my way home from work. Part of it's just a nostalgic thing--I hadn't thought about sticker books in a really long time. But also, what's kinda interesting about sticker books is that they sorta were a precursor to establishing one's aesthetic and sensual tastes.



I mean, the whole point of having a sticker book was to open it up at any time and be able to look through them and absorb their prettiness in a variety of different ways:

through touch--there were fuzzy stickers, there were stickers whose color changed when you pressed them;

through smell--everyone remembers their favorite scratch n' sniffs; mine were pizza and skunk;

and through sight--we could spend hours just gazing at how pretty they were, how the sparkly stickers caught the light just right, how that butterfly had such an incandescent blue in it.

We were developing our aesthetic tastes in the way that kids do--instead of looking at fine artwork, oohing and aahing over Picasso, or eating at a good restaurant and gushing over the quality of the tiramisu, we were funneling it into something we could understand. And that's really sorta cool.

* * * *

A couple interesting quotes from Jitterbug Perfume:

...The most intense spiritual experiences all seem to involve the suspension of time. It is the feeling of being outside of time, of being timeless, that is the source of ecstasy in meditation, chanting, hypnosis, and psychedelic drug experiences. Although it is briefer and less lucid, a timeless, egoless state (the ego exists in time, not space) is achieved in sexual orgasm, which is precisely why orgasm feels so good. Even drunks, in their crude, inadequate way, are searching for the timeless time. Alcoholism is an imperfect spiritual longing.

In a hundred different ways, we have mastered the art of space. We know a great deal about space. Yet we know pitifully little about time. It seems that only in the mystic state do we master it...

*

...Either because our data is insufficient or because our processing equipment is not fully on line, our own nocturnal processing is part-time work. The information our conscious minds receive during waking hours is processed by our unconscious during so-called "deep sleep." We are in deep sleep only two or three hours a night. For the rest of our sleeping session, the unconscious mind is off duty. It gets bored. It craves recreation. So it plays with the material at hand. In a sense, it plays with itself. It scrambles memories, juggles images, rearranges data, invents scary or titillating stories. This is what we call "dreaming." Some people believe that we process information during dreams. Quite the contrary. A dream is the mind having fun when there is no processing to keep it busy...



Discuss...

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I have a crush...

...on the Volkswagen Touareg guy!



What is the matter with me?!?

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