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A Brief on Boxers

Posted on by Frank
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   Hell of a morning to try posting anything here.  Crummy night’s sleep as rest attempts were pulverized by contorting and kicking children.  Elsie’s robust, barf-inducing night cough landed her in the big bed with mom.  I bunked with Jacko who slept like a giant, bony starfish. When Elisa got up early I limped my crooked back back to my bed which proved just as violent an experience. My tiny 3 yr old’s version of snuggling involves climbing, burrowing head-first beneath me and kicking daddy in the jimmies.  I oughta go to bed plastered so I can sleep through these assaults.  Or at least fight back with snores and flatulence.

   Nevertheless, I got up in a fair state of mind.  A cup of coffee and I was whistling the soundtrack to a happy day.  Did a little writing, had a little breakfast, said nice things to the kids and decided Hey, I’m gonna blog some shit!  I finished the end of a post handily.  ‘Cause it was cut & pasted from something written ages ago.  When I shot for some opening sentences, however,  those slumbertime demons became the Hadean goblins of writer’s block. 

First it was all the “happy screaming”.  You can’t let that go on too long since it always presages ”mad screaming” which invariably leads to “She/He-kicked-me-in-the-eye screaming.”  I got flat out ignored when telling them to cool it a bit. They had filled a little pop-tent with every pillow in the house, embedded themselves within and were trying to roll it around my room.  Pretty cool, I thunk for a second. But the screaming hadn’t stopped and since Jack was blasting his baby-talk at the top of his lungs I lost it. My own barking included a nice string of invective; adult words my little boy might now use in place of his baby-blabber.

   A cigarette was called for. I’ve been quitting again, down to a few a day.  But nicotine fits run in direct proportion with frustration so I stomped into the garage, ripped open the Parliaments with my teeth and jammed a fag into my face.  Except that it couldn’t be lit because there wasn’t a goddamn lighter to be found.  My neck was about to rupture from the tension and I started to dig my nails into my skull, thinking about tearing it open to let the insanity out. I was gonna shave the heads of my precious bastards and looks for the Mark of the Beast, because it was certain that Satan was in my freaking house and he was dicking around with me big time.

   All that just to write a ridiculous little piece on underwear….

   In the previous post there was a tangential mention of my view on boxer shorts, which caught the attention of a reader. It felt like it deserved an expansion. The whole notion of the Boxers v. Briefs argument seemed awful silly once upon a time. It’s just underwear, yes?  You wear whatever you want or what the girl you’re into says she prefers.  Since the chicks I’d been swinging with never laid out a preference I just kept on with my comfy favorites – briefs. Boxer briefs, that is, though they should not be confused as a hybrid.  I was at peace with my panties in my early 20′s until a friend called that choice into question:

   You still wear briefs?! Jesus, how old are you?

   Crap, yet another indication I was failing to mature.  I even considered switching, for a couple of minutes, before concluding my pal was a jackass. On his way to law school; and lawyers are all connected by serious character flaws. At least the male ones, who suffer from a frat or beehive sense of the world. No matter how creative they are when shredding law they can only see the rest of the world as they’ve been instructed to.  The best music is what the radio plays the most; the best wine is the most expensive; and you wear boxers because the upperclassmen clones at Chi Beta Jerk wore them. 

   Lucky for me, I soon moved into an apartment with best friend and his boyfriend.  Among the many things I learned from gay men it was that boxers were not only for clones and idiots – they we were meant to be worn by the fat, the ugly or the nerds.  My lawyer buddy was probably right in the idea of boxers being a mature choice as well. The mature, mid-life crisis guys in the gym locker rooms all wore them.  They wore them austerely even though their over-stretched, pendulous testicles dangled past the lower hem. Gravity got them because their undies failed to protect them.

   So I eschew boxers. With that we arrive at one of the few philosophical constants to my worldview. Men wear them to their peril either as fashion fuck-ups or under misconceptions of mature manliness. It’s an ugly mistake which will see them slurping crybaby soup through weakening teeth as their testicles reach mid-thigh by middle age. The retention of elasticity is paramount not only to the waistband of your undies but to the scrotum they protect. Nuts enjoy cradling in the restful restraint of briefs and, dammit,  I will pull my dick from the slot in my skivvies when I want it out – not because some flimsy underwear fabric can’t keep it in.

Pulling Your Courtesy Muscle

Posted on by Frank
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   Bad gym etiquette. People are inconsiderate everywhere but when it comes to the gym the bad manners and disregard for others really sears my hiney. It has for decades. Maybe it’s the time constraints we set to work out, or perhaps the increased testosterone flow from exercise, which turns one jackass leaving a newspaper on a Nautilus machine into my desire to smash teeth and shinbones with 45lb iron plates.  I try to be mindful and respectful; it’s the way I was raised by my mother, a character trait which has been reinforced by the eternal memory of a veiny gargantua with bowling ball biceps and powerful forehead muscles. Back at the dungeon-style gym where I first took up weight lifting as a teen I’d walked away from my hundred pounds left on the bench press and got barked at from across the room, Hey punk, you better put that fuckin’ shit back on the rack! So I’ve had a nearly 30 year history of putting weights back where they belong, wiping sweat off things I’ve touched or asking anyone within a few feet of something I’d like to use if they’re already using it. And when I am finished with a treadmill, weight machine or a bench – even if I’m just between sets – I wipe it and move away to broadcast that it’s available for anyone else hoping to exercise.

    What incited this latest prolix seethe was a little encounter with the passive-aggressive discourtesy of a lady at the YMCA. A sour-pussed, middle aged barracuda with a boy’s prepschool haircut doing some mat routines near the lateral row machine. She was giving me wary glances as I approached. I saw why as I sat down: a water bottle and a book on the floor beneath the bench. Ah, place holders. No matter what anybody thinks there is no such thing as that – if you’re not actually playing with a toy then it’s fair game for all the other kids in the room. I politely slid her crap away so as not to step on any of it. Caught a scowl for that but less than a minute later the set was done and I was off before she’s even finished her business on the mat.

   Now the proper response in a public joint would have been to take note of others’ need to use the equipment and move her things along as she alternated exercises. Instead she took the route of putting her stuff on the bench itself while she stepped away to perform her goofy, pointless, Euro-style floor calisthenics. The book she had, incidentally, was titled Lift Like a Man, Look Like a Goddess. Don’t know what the book actually says to do but she was working out more like a self-involved dipshit and looking like the Goddess of Androgyny and Constipation.

   These jackasses have always existed but they’ve been proliferating alarmingly over the years, part of the general trend of Americans becoming more discourteous to each other. Only yesterday I’d put a nice, sweat-absorbing towel on an incline bench a moment before a woman put one on the flat bench next to it. The dumbbells I needed were a bit further away and while fetching them she grabbed a pair of little weights and began her routine right in front of my bench. My, my, what a douchebag. Anyway, with a pair of 75lb bells in my paws and Slipknot roaring through the headphones her maneuver hardly warranted a “I’m sorry, is it okay if you scooch a bit back towards your own goddamned pile of shit?” I just slid behind her, sat and let her decide whether or not she wanted to get broadsided when I bumped the weights from knees to my chest. She scooched voluntarily. Where does this all come from?  Illiteracy? There are signs all over the place – Please wipe down machines…No longer than 20 minutes when there are members waiting…Please return weights…Please move along when finished so others… Yet all that goes down right beneath the posters. It’s just that pervasive self-centeredness which has been infecting our culture. Dummies doing Tae-Bo flapdoodles w/ tiny weights in front of the weight racks, dimwits reading People on the fly machine, fucknuts setting up living rooms over three benches and thoughtless weenies leaving dumbbells on the rubber rugs. For fuck’s sake, if you can’t put your 30lb dumbbells back on the rack then they’re too heavy for you – don’t touch them! 

SECURITY BRIEF

SECURITY BRIEF

   There, the rant is done! Now time for some useful tips and sane advice. Do you lock up your gear at the health club? It’s a wise thing to do; people have been robbed at all varieties of places I’ve worked out at – with the exception of the aforementioned gym-cavern back home. The rippled ogres there were a self-policing force and they had a better sense of honor to begin with. As for me, I’ve rarely used locks on lockers as I have difficulty with them. I lose keys, forget or lose the lock itself or just lock the keys inside the locker. And I have never been robbed! This could solely be the virtue of twenty-something years of dumb luck but I like to think it has more to do with my “system”. Safe Valuables are maintained is this manner: put the stuff you want to keep deep in the locker, either at the bottom or in a bag on the back hook. Next, as you undress pile/hang your clothes over said valuables, finishing with your socks and underwear. Make sure your undies are prominently covering your stuff, so that they’re the first thing staring anybody in the face if they open the door. Nobody wants to paw past skivvies to look for a couple of bucks or a cell phone. Bring your oldest pairs to the gym; people are even less inclined to touch the dingy things. Once, back at BU gym there was a spate of thefts in the locker room. Still lockless, I amped up the safeguards by adding skid marks to my jockeys with a brown magic marker. To outwit a scumbag you need to have a sharper sense of scummy. 

   Finally – Hydration. Obviously, keeping fluids going into you is important whether you’re destroying your knees over four miles on crappy country roads or cleaning out the garage. Hydration makes you feel better all over, keeps you sharp. And when your water levels drop you can get awfully stupid, leading to this chunk of wisdom: Never, never, neeeeeeeverrrrr, ever drink anything you find under the seat of a family car. Last week I was shoveling up the wrapper/cracker/small toy/juice box holocaust in the car when I fished out an orange Gatorade from under the driver’s seat. That’s where all the Elsie-related flotsam winds up and it was nearly full. Classic Elsie – open, taste, recap and ditch. I gave it a once over and it looked just fine. And I was thirsty.

   Well, no, of course I didn’t take a sip. I found it under the seat, you see. Coulda been there for decades.

It went into the pile of stuff due to be discarded while I got on with the garage clean up. Dusty, thirsty work and there was the Gatorade, maybe it was fine – shouldn’t waste stuff…aw, what the hell was wrong with me? It was three feet from the garage fridge and lots of new, cold Gatorades. Purple ones, too! Better get rid of that trash heap along with the temptation; out to the bins – this in the garbage, that one too, this into recycling, that one is garbage, Gatorade gets opened and poured into my mouth…What do you know? My instincts had been right on all along. It was tasty, for the entire half second the liquid poured into my moron mouth before getting dammed by a gelatinous glob slamming into my teeth. Ackkkk!!! A sport beverage jellyfish! Immediately I horked everything out of my mouth and looked back into the bottle.  There were now little bruise-toned sea urchins of mold floating around like spiky eyeballs of the damned. Oh fucky, yet another reminder that I may harp on the lack of common sense on the planet but there are still tragic glitches in my own. At least there’s always a moral or three to be grasped. In this case it’s these: Always hydrate before cleaning out the car and keep your little daughter away from the sport drinks.

Next post: Saturday Morning Soccer Mom Slap Fights! Bring popcorn and a comfy pair of sweats.

We Wish You a Hairy Chest Wig

Posted on by Frank
13

 

Merry Yaksmas To All

Merry Yaksmas To All

The tree is up, garland is slung around the balustrade and I’ve even managed to string lights on the 20-ft hemlock outside without winding up in a wheelchair. There’s a fine Yule atmosphere, albeit a fatigued one, in the house and all that’s left to do is to perform multiple amputations on the holly bushes for swags and boughs.I probably should start in on making cookies to give the house a proper seasonal scent.And get some Velcro tabs to keep the damn electric candles from toppling off the window sills. Gotta get the Christmas cards out was well, find a way to keep the cat off the tree so there’s less pine needle barf to mop up and finally get a frame for the poster of “Yul Must”  with its squad of fat Swedish tomtegubbar getting tanked on some brown hooch.  So, I guess there’s still plenty left to do, but at least this is a season where making all these preparations has a sense of fun. And we’ve got a couple hundred holiday tunes spinning on the iPod deck to soundtrack the efforts everyday.

 

I’m a sucker for Christmas music, having bought at least one or two new CD’s each year just to get the one or two songs I dig. Before the advent of iTunes and pirate applications you were cornered into buying whole albums of mostly bland stuff – cold oatmeal music – just to have a couple good, cinnamon carols.We have a big snazzy collection of jingly hymns as well as a serious back catalog of junk ranging from utterly forgettable through lamely goofy to pretty freaking atrocious.

 

Forgettable is what it is and I’m hard pressed to recall any of the songs in this category. I know there’s at least one Michael Bolton ditty that fits. That guy sucks up substantial tracts of eternity to get through a song, sometimes putting me close to sleep at the kitchen sink, shattering coffee cups or hypnotically sawing my wrist with steak knives. I have to remember to delete that bastard from the playlist before Christmas Eve. If a Bolton tune is playing when Santa comes it may just drone Donder and the whole team right off the roof.A backyard of groaning, broken reindeer and a crippled Kringle could have a negative effect on the kids’ morning mood.

 

Lamely goofy can go two ways. There are tunes which you just have to hear a couple of times each year to make the season feel complete. Lou Monte’s Dominic, the Italian Christmas Donkey ranks among the most sublimely stupid, yet perfectly joyous, novelty songs ever made.Bob Rivers’ Walking ‘Round in Women’s Underwearand Red Peters’ You Ain’t Getting Shit for Christmas are also sure bets to add some smiles to the holidays. But there are more misses in this category, songs which shoot for Christmas but only come up with enough cheer for Palm Sunday.Isaac Hayes’ The Misletoe & Me dulls out the vibe in three notes while the great tenor, Lucian Pavarotti, fucks up regally when he takes a crack at O Holy Night – in English.Sounds like an uncle from Palermo stinking of baccala, soused on Strega and crooning broken English into the Christmas Tree.O-ah Holy-ah a-Night, the stars-ah are-ah a-brightly… Sorry, Uncle Lucie, maybe Jesus can forgive you for that one but I can’t.At least Hayes and Pavarotti tried because there’s plenty of stuff which makes you wince for the lack of effort. I Saw Daddy Kissing Santa Claus is the classic loser here. It ain’t too witty, mostly just switching “Daddy” for “Mommy” in the lyrics and Mommy is there anyway as the song is a cop out. It’s actually Ma in the Santa suit and not some guy from the office giving Daddy a little real whisker action on Christmas Eve.

 

The list of atrocities would include just about every Christmas tune ever performed by a punk band (or at least those whiny little shits and retards who’ve been rehashing and sterilizing the genre these days). The notable exceptions here are The Ramones’ Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want to Fight Tonight), also the best Xmas carol performed by a Jew, and The Mighty Mighty Bosstones’ Xmas Time (It Sure Doesn’t Feel Like It). Although that particular tune ranks among the crazy-long roster of Christmas downers it is poignant, honest and beautifully performed. Can’t forget The Pogues’ Fairytale of New Yorkeither. Leave it to Shane MacGowan to turn alcoholism and failure into a gleeful ballad with an indisputable Christmas feel. After those it all goes back to rock stars writing crap and pop stars re-singing starchy versions of stale classics.

 

Perhaps the song I detest most of all is Do They Know It’s Christmas, written by Bob Geldof and sung by a hundred other self-righteous jackasses caught up in Live Aid Save-The-World-With-A-Song delusions.“…there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmastime”?Here’s some news, Bob & Sting & Bono: even if we bought enough of your pompously conceived discs to eradicate hunger on the Dark Continent it still isn’t going to fucking snow because… it’s Africa. The song is a pithy reminder that some very wealthy musicians, slow to reach into their own pockets, prefer to make us feel guilty about poverty and cough up the revenue for their task.We shell out 15 bucks for a charity album of which (after production, distribution, promotion and performer “expenses” are covered) about 35-cents makes it to the Ethiopian rice fund.Imagine the Christmas spirit they could spread if they each sold one of their mansions and delivered the profits, in food and medicine, right to Darfur themselves. Bono seems of the mind that a fashion shoot on a waterless African farm will do more good than buying the farmers some pipes and pumps and helping with the labor of irrigating the field without a film crew in tow.Such a visionary. Such a douche. He’ll probably get a Nobel Peace Prize.

 

Damn, I hate holier-than-thou types so much it almost made me forget where the hell I was headed with this post. I did make it a point to ensure that that insidious Band Aid song didn’t transfer into my iTunes folder and, as long as nobody slips the actual CD into a player it won’t be heard intentionally this year.As for the rest of the questionable songs on the playlist, I try to delete one here and there when I think about it.I’m about to nix an Acid Jazz remix/dub of Jingle Bells at this moment.There is one tune, however, which I’ve yet to make the necessary effort to delete: The Cat Carol by Meryn Cadell.

 

I can’t tell if it’s just so awful, depressing or weird that I feel it needs to be retained as a fathom-marker for the obscene depths to which Christmas Music can sink. It might even be more depressing than the destitute dying momma in Christmas Shoes. It’s about a freezing cat trying to get back in the house on Christmas Eve. During a blizzard. The kitty meets a freezing mouse and digs a hole in the snow for shelter for them both. Then the thoughtful feline curls around the rodent to keep it warm. Then the cat freezes to death. Then reindeer arrive, start crying over the dead tabby but not even Santa can resurrect it (his life-giving gifts are limited to snowmen).But the rat is alive! Hooray! The cat had given it the most precious of gifts – life! Yippee, Christmas is awesome! There’s a frozen catsicle on the stoop but it gets to come back every year as a Cat Constellation so the mouse can look up at its savior/pal next time it’s shivering its ass of with hypothermia – Weeeeee! Hallelujah!!!

 

The issue with the song isn’t that it neglects to send Saint Nick kicking down the door to beat Xmas justice into the bastards who forgot their kitty on Christmas Eve.Though Cadell tries to come up with a redemptive finish – the “gift of life”, “cat in the sky” horseshit – the huge problem with The Cat Carol is that it rolls out so slowly, in such a weepy and mewling tone, you won’t even notice that there’s some sort of special Christmas message in it.You’ll either wind up feeling as rotten as the people who locked their pet out to die or you might just get suspicious that the joyless, fanatic morons of PETA managed to slip a track of misery into your Holiday CD.That thought has crossed my mind more than once.

 

I haven’t had to dwell on it too much, however. Even the iPod thinks it’s a crummy song and shuffles it into play rarely. But when it does come on I can’t help but wonder what kind of person comes up with such pathetic canticles and thinks it’s wonderful. Why the hell would someone even think it up? Cat Carol sure has the unmistakable air of a human-hating, Humane Society vegan freak.It even has some Indigo Girl flavor what with the Death To Happiness undercurrent. It’s also difficult to pinpoint the gender of Meryn Cadell. Sounds like a chick name. Kind of sounds like a lady singing. No, hold on…it’s a man, right? Naw, it’s definitely a girl.I don’t know – a castrato?What would the Information Age be if we didn’t have half a dozen trivialities to Google everyday?

Turns out that Meryn Cadell is a female to male transsexual.Go figure. But it saves me from having to wonder about the motivations of the person who wrote The Cat Carol. It no longer matters as I’m not going to pretend I have any insight into the mind of a tranny.Besides, you don’t have to be psychologically unique in the world to sing terrible Christmas Songs.You could just be Paul MacCartney. Or Bruce Springsteen. Or Madonna. Or John Denver (Please Daddy, Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas- yay!). Or Whitney Houston…okay, maybe you do need a few loose cogs to get into the carol-singing business.

 

So what’s the point? I’m no longer sure I’ve got one. But it’s been hard year on the world so I’ll just wish a Merry Christmas and happier times to Meryn Cadell and everyone else. Except Sting.