Weekend Genderbender

Lesson learned this weekend.

NEVER leave a copy of your May 2000 edition of Mojo Magazine lying around on your bedside table when you leave your apartment to a female friend for an evening.

This particular issue of Mojo features an in depth expose of exposed rock stars in all their raunchy backstage nakedness. Like it's any real suprise that this more sultry side to rock n' roll exists. The article triumphantly proclaims: "From 'Shake and Roll' to 'Get It On' rock n' roll has always been a sex thang." It also boasts a full frontal nude photograph of Iggy Pop in all his withered schlongness. I guess this is where the setting gets unsettling. Not exactly the kind of browsing material you really want to unwittingly stumble across when invited to sleep over in a friend’s bed I suppose.

Oops.

Apparently this was found to be “disconcerting” to my female friend and I suppose I can’t blame her. If I were a girl and I were ever to find an 8x12” glossy of a naked man by a man's beside, whether it be Iggy Pop or whoever, I might have serious deliberations about his masculinity too.

However, dear readers, rest assured to you all that I am innocent on all suspected charges. What’s the big deal anyway? So I have a picture of Iggy’s dick within reach of my bed…it’s not like it was lying next to box of Kleenex was it? It's IGGY-fucking-POP! Not some lewid beefy calender model. Iggy is the Godfather of Punk not Pansy. This is the same dude that gave us 'Fun House' and 'The Idiot' - two of the most monumental balls-out rock albums of all time! So he has a penis. Wasn't that a given already? It honestly doesn’t bother me in that Iggy's body is basically one big walking hardened vein anyways…one more exposed before the camera's eye isn’t anything to get excited about.

Of course, if the magazine had featured a cover photo from the inlay of ‘Electric Ladyland’, or 'Blind Faith', or maybe something from a Led Zeppelin hotel room instead, there would have been no instant concern that I’ve been rubbing out kittens to aging punk stars. Oh no, I would have been just another pervert short on the Jergen’s lotion.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Me

Okay, I’ll bite.

It appeals to my innate love of making lists. I couldn’t complete each and every list that people have either sent me or that I have read recently, so I’ve included a sampling of those certain lists that interested me the most in no particular order or formatting for anyone who gives a shit about these kinds of things:

Seven Things You Plan to Do Before You Die:

1. Get that gag photograph of Mickey Mouse being shafted from behind.
2. Play guitar in front of thousands of screaming people. I would even settle to play the electric triangle.
3. Piledrive Patrick Swayze.
4. Climb Mt. Kilimanjaro and snuggle up to a mountain gorilla.
5. Publish my life’s manifesto: “Life, Universe & Why I Hate Everything In It”.
6. Solve the scientific formula for turning broccoli into gold.
7. Retire to an isolated island in the middle of Georgian Bay and dedicate my life to the study of feline behavioral psychiatry and M*A*S*H reruns.

Fifteen Albums I Would Take to a Dessert Island (Plus 5 more because I couldn’t decide):

1. John Mayall – Bare Wires
2. Van Morrison – Astral Weeks
3. Talk Talk – Spirit of Eden
4. Primal Scream – Screamadelica
5. Rolling Stones – Exile on Main Street
6. Byrds – Notorious Byrd Brothers
7. Miles Davis – Jack Johnson
8. Happy Monday – Thrills, Pills & Bellyaches
9. Spiritualized – Live at Royal Albert Hall
10. Tom Waits – Closing Time
11. Blue Rodeo – Five Days In July
12. Rheostatics – It
13. Verve – A Storm In Heaven
14. Jimi Hendrix – Electric Ladyland
15. Johnny Cash – Live at San Quentin
(honorary mention: Vince Guaraldi Trio – A Boy Named Charlie Brown)

Seven Physical Traits I Look For In the Opposite Sex:

1 boobs
2. boobs
3. boobs
4. butt
5. eyes
6. panties
7. and, oh yeah - boobs. (does this make me shallow?)

Five Favorite Movies:

1. Little Big Man
2. High Plains Drifter
3. Jaws
5. Fear of a Black Hat
6. American Flyers (Added not for any great cinematic significance, but simply due to the fact that I have seen this shameless mauling of an early Kevin Costner role more times than I’d like to admit.)

Five Last Books I Have Read:

1. David Sedaris – Me Talk Pretty One Day
2. Ernest Hemingway – A Moveable Feast
3. David Boyle - WWII In Photographs
4. Tim Willis – Madcap
5. The take-out menu for ‘Mary’s Chinese Food & Donut Emporium’

Three of Your Everyday Essentials:

1. My journal
2. Orange Pekoe
3. Green Onions (both the vegetable and the Booker T varieties)

Five Favorite Music Bands/Artists:

1. Grateful Dead
2. John Mayall
3. Tom Waits
4. Verve
5. Bob Dylan

Three of Your Favorite Songs (at the moment):

1. Little Feat - Fat Man In the Bathtub
2. The Beta Band – Dry the Rain
3. New Fast Automatic Daffodils – Fishes Eyes

Three Dream Jobs:

1. Author
2. Medicinal Marijuana Tester
3. ‘On Hold’ Soundtrack Compilation Specialist

Seven Things I Say Much too Often:

1. What the fuck?
2. Huh?
3. Dude
4. Fuckin-A
5. Pardon?
6. Told ya...
7. Blow me

Two Truths and a Lie (in no particular order):

1. I spent time in a Turkish prison
2. I own more than three Eagles albums
3. I once sneezed on Liam Gallagher at a CD signing and forcing him to cancel Oasis’ first planned North American tour due to a bad case of the sniffles.

Five Hobbies:

1. Blogs. What? Is nobody playing attention here?
2. Live music trading
3. Baiting squirrels across the street in front of cars with peanuts.
4. Mocking my fellow man
5. Perfecting the perfect peanut butter and banana sandwich

Ten Guilty Pleasures:

1. Judge Judy
2. My cat
3. Cracker Jack flavored rice cakes
4. Jim Croce
5. Survivor
6. Homemade scented soap
7. Emily Bronte
8. G. I. Joe comics
9. B-movie horror films
10. BBQ-ing naked

I feel so...ALIVE!

One Flu Over the Cuckoo's Breath

It seems like the good people at CNN have finally found their next great breaking story aimed at scaring the bejesus out of all its viewers. If you listen to Anderson Cooper, Larry King, Wolf Blitzer, or any of the other regular CNN media mandroids, we’re all poised to meet our maker at the hands of the next deadly overdue pandemic – the Avian Flu.

Reports are indicating that the world is overdue for another epic outbreak of something or other that will kill over %50 of the world’s population as quickly as a case of herpes through a Turkish prison. Of course, never one to be melodramatic, Mr. Cooper makes this next possible pandemic something that would make the Bubonic Plague seem more like the spread of Athlete's Foot at the local YMCA.

Hasn’t CNN given us enough to worry about already without raising fears about possible future outbreaks of diseases? I still haven’t finished digging the bomb shelter in my backyard after their last NYC subway bomb threat or taken the boards down off my windows after Hurricane Rita, Stan, Billy Bob, or whoever it was that was last reported blowing this way off the Gulf of Mexico. Now I have to contend with the fact that I may die a horrible death if my pet cockatiel happens to sneeze on me while I’m changing his cuttlebone?

Where does it all end? Where is the life worth living? If you were to believe in every CNN report, you may as well pull the trigger now and end it all before your toes drop off and your lungs begin to bleed out of your ears. Christ, the more I watch CNN the less likely it is that I will never leave my apaprtment again!

Everglade Gutbuster

Just in case I ever needed another reason not to venture into the Sunshine State of Florida, I read an incredible news story about a 13-foot Burmese python that had literally burst while trying to swallow a live, six-foot alligator whole. WHOLE!

Holy shit! That sounds more like the plot of some B-movie sci-fi flick from Monster Island – not the Florida Everglades for god sakes! Just when you thought it was safe to back to Walt Disney World.

It seems that pythons are periodically abandoned in the Everglades by former pet owners and have managed to survive just peachy. In fact, it seems that they have survived about as well as Dom DeLuise on a desert island of rigatoni trees and beaches of chocolate bonbons.

The gory evidence of this epic struggle, the fourth documented in three years, was photographed last week by a helicopter and wild life researcher. Of course, how exactly one manages to take clear nature photos while still piloting a helicopter above the remote swampland are beyond me…but that’s not what’s really cool here. The snake was found with the eaten gators hindquarters protruding from its exploded midsection like a leather cocktail wiener.

The real fear is that these displaced pythons are eventually going to pose a serious threat to other reptiles (such as alligators), otters, woodstorks, squirrels, sparrows, and possibly even humans who unwittingly stumble into their feeding grounds. Remember; this is a state of slow, elderly, retirees who's hobbies include laying in the sun and beating brush looking for lost golf balls. It's a veritable smorgasbord for the like of a hungry python!

It was originally hoped that the alligators would help control the populations of abandoned pythons. But this recorded example apparently proves otherwise and that these pythons are pissed and ready to bite off more than they can chew – literally! It’s bad enough that I’m waiting for Mother Nature to use me as a chew toy or that there are still terrorists and evil-doers lurking around every corner, but now I have to also contend with enormous ass snakes ready, set, and able to swallow me whole?

Fuck Disney World! This year I’m vacationing in the safe, python-free confines of my own locked apartment.

In fact, as silly a childhood phobia as it is, I may never be able to take a peaceful shit again without worrying about some mammoth python taking a melon-sized bite out of my ass.