Banana Malfunction

Maybe those emails are right...

The Ballad of Phuong Ly Qui

I love recycling day. Not because I'm an Earth nut or anything. I heard a rumor that they bring all your rinsed organic almond flax seed butter containers to the same landfill used rubbers go. They don't recycle those. At least not in my neighborhood.

I moved to a city where little old Asian women scour the landscape like carpenter ants on trash day, ripping open garbage bags looking for aluminum cans with a 5 cent deposit. 20 of those babies is a buck. A full stolen shopping cart renders...I don't fucking know. I never played the HOW MANY GUMBALLS game, and I could care less about GUESS CHAN'S CANS (I put the over/under on Bs. Broads are way flat.)

The fun started when the city got rid of the designated plastic/glass/paper green buckets. One day, a gigantic flip top bucket showed up. No more sorting, they say. The recycling bin poses a problem for the average four foot bottle snagger. It wasn't unusual to see a pair of two dollar sandals wiggling out of the trash.

When the 'no-sort' policy hit, the recycling dude's productivity went through the roof. All he had to do was drive up to the curb to utilize a forklift device, catapulting the contents into a large flatbed. Suddenly, the ants are on a time crunch. It's amazing to see how fast ants can sort when a recycling truck's on their ass.

Reminds me of JOHN HENRY.

Bumwrites

Did anybody else know Rufus the Stunt Bum wrote a book?


I was in a BORDERS bookstore during a store closing sale (funny how even after discounts, it was one of the most expensive joints around), and I caught those unmistakable knuckle tats on the cover out of the corner of my eye. I hadn't thought about BUMFIGHTS in years. I downloaded the whole thing from Napster. After downloading a few gay porn red herrings. Napster was like a box of chocolates back then, Forrest. People loved to mislabel shit and the best thing you could hope for is that the dehabilitating viruses stayed on the screen, not on your hard drive.

Though I only read the excerpt, Rufus' memoir almost ruins the memories I had of BUMFIGHTS. You can check it out on the LOOK INSIDE feature on Amazon where he talks about this incident:



The only thing I can compare it to is when I found out Santa and FACES OF DEATH weren't real. I felt bad for enjoying it as much as I did. The shame is almost enough to keep me from accepting a copy of BUMFIGHTS from anyone who may have it laying around.

hint hint

TWITter

When I took latin in fourth grade, I learned two things:

1) How to tell if a Catholic priest is blessing me or trying to throw game, and

2) You can tell a lot about a word by breaking it down.

Look, I'm getting older. Fuck you. You are too. But I don't wanna be that guy who has to pay the kid next door five bucks to reprogram my TV every time the batteries in my remote crap out. I begrudgingly opened a MYSPACE account just in time to see the digital UHauls disappear over the horizon. It was a hard way to find out how creepy and uncreative my friends were. Like FLUFFYLOVER77. You know who I'm talking about, BILL.

It was cute. I told everybody my favorite bands, my favorite movies, my likes, my dislikes(mean people *sadface*). I got a bunch of friend requests from half naked chicks who wanted me to check out things they couldn't show me HERE and metal bands from the Czech Republic who thought I should check out their shit since I liked SIMON & GARFUNKEL. I get disgruntled pretty easily (sometimes before a single stone is ever thrown), so I took my journal entry power to proclaim to the cyber ghost town that I was going to single-handedly bring everyone back to MYSPACE. Then I left.

The next day, I opened a FACEBOOK account, hunted down a couple schoolmates, and started my friend accumulation. The comment box on other peoples' walls was a perfect way to express myself in real time. Taunting my buddies for putting up pics of their families, giving me updates on how the laundry was piling up, and (my favorite) asking if anyone had any weed they wanted to sell. I would post a link to the description of THE PATRIOT ACT on their wall, hoping they could teach themselves to fish before they ended up in the belly of a whale.

But it's never enough, is it? As phones got smarter, we got dumber. Telling people when we went on vacation so one of our 'friends'(who was more likely a desperate token to help get your number up to look more popular) could take their sweet time burglarizing our house. When we went to work so your 'friend you have in common' could sneak over and fuck your 'in a relationship with' girlfriend. Life is a card game, and the more tells you have, the more likely you are to lose. When you TELL the world EVERYTHING, you should just hand the world your wallet. Save everybody the time and trouble.

Then comes TWITTER. The ultimate in live feeds. 140 character bursts of GPS worthy up-to-the-minute action coming at the speed of Matrix style binary code. Only instead of zeroes and ones, it's a flood of #s and @s. All TWITTER's missing is a dude with a dog's head holding a golden staff up to the sun next to some pyramids. I didn't have the first clue what was going on. I thought I hit the DOS button on my computer. They make TWITTER FOR DUMMIES books. I'm not willing to throw my hands up in defeat. I'd rather bash it instead.

After a couple 'tweets' (God, I feel dirty even saying it), I realized I was was out of my depth. People were @ing me, putting # signs next to my name. I didn't know whether to take it as a compliment or call the cops. People I never heard of started following me. I'm already paranoid as it is. The unsolicited attention made me go on a canned good shopping spree and warm up the bomb shelter.

Jesus only needed twelve followers (or was it thirteen? My research department is on vacation). In a stockpiling effort that would rival the Cold War arms race, people greedily make 'follow me and I'll follow you' promises. After making a few of those deals myself, I don't make those deals anymore. Blue balls hurt like a mug.