It takes a skilled wordsmith to spit a real good poem these days. Without a hot beat and an auto-tuner, you’d better be saying some real shit if you expect anyone to show for it. But it takes a truly loquacious litterateur to painstakingly construct some of the worst poetry ever.
Verily, Bad Poetry
verily, i say unto thee
thy poetry causes me
woe to read
Howdy Timewaves, welcome to the sixty-seventh apocryphon of HACK. If you’ve made it this far, will this be as far as we can go?
It’s The Crew has known about the 12/21/12 “prophecies” way back when most of you were still mocking the Y2Kers. In our sphere of influence, we were the only ones talking about the proverbial Mayan end-date, Terence McKenna’s Timewave Zero, the coming Earth changes, and the impending spiritual ascension of planetary consciousness. Everyone else looked at us like we were crazy. Ten years and one shitty blockbuster movie later and suddenly everyone was crazily feeding into whatever end-of-the-world scenarios fit into their singular reality tunnels.
By the way, what exactly does “end-of-the-world” mean? Because see, even if there’s global nuclear detonation and Earth becomes a charred ball, Earth will still be here. So really, when people talk about the end-of-the-world, what they really mean is end-of-humanity or end-of-the-world as we know it.
Actually, my favorite 12/21/12 “theory” is my own: convincing everyone that 2012 is a hoax IS THE HOAX and something WILL ACTUALLY HAPPEN.
But I’m not here to prophecize or proselytize. As far as I’m concerned, there IS a spiritual shift in collective consciousness happening. It has been happening all along and it will continue to happen well past this Friday. If current accounts are correct, 12/21/12 is just a temporal marker, the end of a cycle. At any point after that shit might really get crazy. Who knows? I certainly don’t. Which is why, back in 2009 during the writing of Heroes and Hierophants, I had some fun writing the piece below. I hope you enjoy reading it. READ MORE »
I have a few more relevant things to write about that I haven’t yet. The once-promised “I’m Done With Presidents.” That’ll probably be next week. A few others I won’t mention in case I never do them. In the meantime, here’s yet another look at some more obscure Batman villains I think deserve some more shine.
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Well it’s October again. Which means, like every year, that it’s time for BREAST CANCER AWARENESS FEVER! Pinktober, y’all! Buy special pink versions of household products and GIVE TO THE CURE. And, it’s October again, so it’s time again for me to be the lone voice from the wilderness reminding everyone that other cancers exist, and it’s a little ridiculous how much hype breast cancer gets. It’s not the most deadly. It’s not the most common. It’s not the hardest to treat. It’s not even the only one with a special “awareness month.” And yet, Breast Cancer Awareness Month (which for retailers seems to run between September and November, if not just year-round) just keeps getting bigger and bigger every year.
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It’s a tough call, but Mysterio might be Spider-Man’s lamest well-known villain. I specify “well-known” because a decades-old hero like Spider-Man has accumulated SO MANY lame villains over the years that you could argue over who’s the lamest and come up with dozens if not hundreds of names and still not get anywhere near Mysterio. But of all the “classic” Spidey foes, the ones that got established in the first year or so of Amazing Spider-Man and a few of the more recent ones (like Venom, mostly) who have earned that status since then, Mysterio’s got to be the lamest. There’s nothing to the guy, except a faintly ridiculous outfit punctuated by a goddamn fishbowl.
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May 2007:
I was angry when I realized that mice were getting into my snack drawer from under my bed. So duct-taping a cardboard cover over the open back, cutting off their access, wasn’t enough for me. I set a mousetrap. READ MORE »
(The Lost Month continues with this angry essay I wrote in January of 1999, within hours of paying money to see the festering bull-turd called Patch Adams.)
Friends and family members, people whose opinions I value, told me I should see the movie “Patch Adams,” the true story of one man’s unconventional battle to return humanity to the medical industry. And, after returning from this movie, I am convinced of one thing: these friends and family members are part of a COMMUNIST PLOT TO SEPARATE ME FROM MY EIGHT BUCKS. Why else would these intelligent, reasonable people with good taste, all of whom have a pretty good idea of my tastes as well, recommend this turkey to me?
I mean, what can you say about a movie so shamelessly emotionally exploitative, it makes “Titanic” seem subtle and restrained in comparison? A movie so determined to stack the cinematic deck in favor of Adams’ theories of medicine that it makes “JFK” look unbiased and balanced? What can you say about a movie that was sad when it tried to be funny, and funny when it tried to be sad? Well, I can say a lot, I guess.
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(This week’s I Don’t Belong Here was written 11 years ago on September 14th, 2001. It is not necessarily to be taken as the author’s current opinion on the attacks of 9-11-01. That can be found here.)
September 11, 2001. It’s noon, I’m sleeping late again. Someone is knocking, pounding, on my front door, pausing only to frantically ring the doorbell. “Please don’t let it be our landlord,” I mumble as I get dressed, find my glasses and stumble downstairs. (It’s a well-kept secret from my super-clean landlords that my house is a total pigsty, the unpacking still incomplete six months into my lease.) Instead, it’s Tom, my brother-in-law, neighbor, and former employer, not necessarily in that order.
“Don’t you ever answer your phone?” He asks, in that what-fools-these-mortals-be tone he adopts only most of the time.
“I was sleeping. Didn’t hear it.” Half-truth. I heard it a few times during the morning, opting each time to go back to sleep. Usually it’s a telemarketer, or worse, the Baltimore Sun.
“Terrorists crashed jet airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The World Trade Center is totally destroyed.”
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Here’s a view you don’t hear often. The slow, useless, incompetent people that are seemingly everywhere these days — and by “these days” I mean probably “always” but I can only speak for the time I’ve personally seen — they steal your time, my time, and we’re not getting it back. And it’s not right. Society isn’t structured with the view that time is a commodity with value, which is crazy because time is the only thing that there is a natural limit to. Benjamin Franklin said the only sure things were death and taxes. Except taxes are a human innovation, while death is an integral part of life. You can skip out on your taxes if you’re clever or really rich. You can’t skip out on death. Not yet. Maybe never. You’ve got a finite amount of time. You don’t get it back. It’s not like taxes. When I die, I don’t get some time refund check in the mail. It’s not like there’s St. Peter up in the Pearly Gates with an adding machine.
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Bear with me. I know this seems like another one about Batman but it’s deeper. I’m trying to say something important. A carpenter views everything in terms of nails, so… Batman.
(This is like maybe nine years old. I could check the date if I did the research into my files but fuck it, it’s late and that’s not the point. Original content to resume, eventually.)
“Those who come together for no good reason will part for the same.”
— Chuang Tzu
This is it. No Great American Novel, no scribbled sheet of pseudonyms, no hope to get the point across. Just this. Cheap catharsis and a prayer for closure. None of this story is true. READ MORE »
