terminator 2: burning questions

ok, in 'terminator 2', it is indicated that in the future, both the risen machines and the revolutionaries have access to the sort of time-travel technology that makes it possible to send a terminator back in time. so refined is this technology that at least one side is able to send a force back to a very specific time -- hence, two opposing, and naked, terminators being birthed from lightining-spheres in random spots in LA at the exact same time. great. i get it.

i know what follows would render the need to make terminator 2 pretty pointless, which would be awful. but still...why not just send one terminator just a little further back in time? this is the obvious comment that will inevitably come up, and yeah, sure. why not? or is that just a waste of a terminator? if john connor only needs protection from, like, bobby budnik and being influenced to smoke weed because he's listening to too much GnR, i guess he can handle that on his own?...so, yeah, if someone's not specifically trying to kill him, this might suggest that yep, arnold's a waste of space. on the flipside, however, why would melted-metal terminator not just go a little further back in time?

what i gleaned from this, then, after much thought, is as follows: the revolutionaries, in the future, will clearly have a better grasp of time travel. not so much perhaps, of cyborgenics (or whatever), but SHIT, if you can time travel, and do so more accurately than a robot that's trying to kill you...you MUST have a leg up. somehow.

i haven't seen t3; frankly, i am hesitant because i know t2 can't be topped, and i don't want to ruin this solid run for myself. i first saw the original terminator when i was 4, and i'm pretty sure that's the reason why i'm an insomniac to this day. i am disclaiming because i really am curious if and how time travel is addressed in post-t2 sequels/fanfic/etc. anyway, time travel inconsistencies aside, holy SHIT i am glad this movie exists. it definitley cuts me to the core.

CHRONIC NIGHTMARES THE ZINE

people who know me will argue that i loved the 90's more than most. a few weeks ago, roomie dan managed to dredge up a vhs that features a greatest live performances episode of my old staple, mtv's 120 minutes. while there was a lot of pointing and laughing at the tv set -- i mean, everyone looked soooo bad in like 1994 or whatever -- the tables eventually turned when other roomie stacie called me out on being 'frozen in time' and totally dressing like one of the girls in luscious jackson. ok, fair enough. true. although i could largely give a shit, one aesthetic i never, ever wanted to hit was the classic, old navy swathed, baggy-panted, mousy-haired, sort-of-looking-like-a-hippie-but-not-really TURD. i remember kara warning me about this a few years ago, and the warning stemmed from her admonishing me for dressing all 90's. i have to accept the facts. i look like an extra from 'airheads'. at BEST.

getting back to the roots that i apparently can't leave behind, i decided to resurrect a hobby that was semi-entrenched in 90's culture. i am launching a zine. when i was a freshman in high school, my older sister created one herself that was called the singlet. it proliferated throughout the lehigh valley and our town in jersey, and it was awesome. my own contributions were usually dumb drawings of crying punks or anything with lots of blood and for some reason i made a dumb fake russian comic strip for a while. not sure what that was all about in retrospect, but at any rate, i really liked doing that shit!

anyway, i just finished laying out and photocopying the first issue of CHRONIC NIGHTMARES today. each issue, i've decided, will be a single short story, fiction or nonfiction, whatever. the first issue is titled 'the hair' and, um, let's just say that it might hold the interest of anyone who has a zit-popping fetish. anyone else who reads it might puke, but hey, it's free! i'll probably be distributing it at a few bars, venues, etc....ideally, places where semi-literary degenerates hang out. i will also be posting the content on this blog so anyone who is NOT a degenerate can have access to the fruits of my imagination, as well. obviously, feedback will be very welcome, even if your 'feedback' consists of shaking me like a baby and yelling 'GET A GRIP, IT'S 2007.' that's cool, i guess.

the creep

looking at old photos today and found this one, taken last summer when italy won the world cup. i was in pompeii working at the time, and for a small town that place when totally apeshit. it was awesome. the picture above really si pretty indicative of the general vibe, which is to say it's like the gates of hell themselves opened up, but, like, FUN hell, not bad hell. there was a town-sanctioned rave complete with giant speakers blasting some techno remix of 'we are the champions'; there were fires and motorcycles and feral dogs everywhere. one of my coworkers, in a drunken celebratory frenzy, hopped on the back of a fruit truck that had been re-assigned to the role of PARTY TRUCK and had to find his way back to pomeii from some other town. there was a guy giving away free hotdogs; there was a girl passing around a bottle of sardinian fire water, which kind of made me want to die but, you know, WHEN IN ROME. or something. anyway, there were actually two kinda of bad-hell things that happened that night, but neither had permanent repercussions. the first, shockingly, involved fireworks. anyone who's been to southern italy knows of the local penchant for explosives; this night was like a motherfucking showcase. upon leaving the bar where we watched the game that night, my pal aims and i walked right into an in-session firework party, which consisted of a senile man lighting shit and throwing them backwards over his shoulder. i took one to the back, whicvh was more starling than anything, although it did toast my shirt a bit. whatever. aims, however, took one to the FACE, and it could habe been gnarly but it totally wasn't! after she recovered we all made sure she got an extra hit of that sardinian firewater and then we partook in aforementioned rave, where i then got pinned down by a group of four 16-year-old italian lads, two of whom licked my face. normally, i'd be all about this sort of young-man-ness, but these kids were pretty rough. anyway, i wriggled out of their slimy hands, and when i got home i found that one of them had unzipped my pants! i mean, i was pretty wasted, so i guess the possibility remains that i just forgot to zip after pissing in an alley, but i gotta save face, ya know?

anyway: being in winning world cup country when world cup is won: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. yep.

when i turned rotten

talkin' bout shaving...a little while ago during a semi-serious beer-drinking session, the conversation turned to middle school awkwardness and typical female rites of passage, such as shaving one's legs for the first time. i remember this particular event very clearly because it was minorly traumatic. it was the summer before fifth grade, and i secured a manual razor and hit the showers. pretty much the first thing i did was slice the shit out of my knees -- both knees. shaving wounds being so superficial that you often don't even feel them still bleed a lot, though, and when i was ten, this accident was the first i'd had involving water and blood. of course i thought my injuries were, like, infinitely worse than they actually were; the water helped turn the shower into a scene out of carrie and the fact that i felt no pain was really distressing, since i could only assume that i must have inflicted such intense nerve damage upon myself that i had lost all below-the-knee sensitivity. after my mom assured me that, no, an entire vein had NOT fallen out of my leg, i began to chill the fuck out. something had changed, though. maybe i can chalk that moment up to the very instance that i became my own biggest problem, the most unintentionally destructive thing in my life; maybe there's something to be said for shedding a little blood being a metaphor for loss of innocence. whatever the case, after that moment, not only did i think i was tough for some reason -- i also thought i was a total badass who knew that the world was a bloody, godless, scary place. yeeaaaahhhh.

anyway, summer carried on and my knee wounds began to heal. i also got better at shaving. on one memorable evening, as i was still rocking some crucial scabs, my older sister and i accompanied our mom to a bible school recital in which our younger sister was performing. because of my preadoloescent crisis of faith very shortly before this event, church was probably not the greatest place for me to be. the older sis and i parted from the herd and made our way to the choir loft, where we were gloriously the only spectators. we had a great view of the church, for sure; down on the altar, we could see the twenty or so kids in the first-grade vbs class, with our baby sis front and center, the tallest kid in her age bracket by a foot. i can't emphasize enough how freakishly large she was compared to the other kids; she was easily a focal point, and this fact we exploited. when she was little, she would do anything we encouraged; in this case, she chose to imitate various obscene gestures we directed her way from the balcony, where we remained invisible to the audience. somewhere in the video archives of suburban new jersey home movies, i like to think that some parent has a tape of a tall, gangly kid breaking the choreography of her scheduled bible school performance to flip off some unseen hecklers and snarl and gesture through the entire performance.

the closest i've ever come to an abusive relationship.

about a month ago, my roommate dan turned me on to some life-altering tv: RAMSAY'S KITCHEN NIGHTMARES. i've never really cared for shows of the culinary ilk because i hate to cook. however, i will make an exception for this guy. he's captivating and utterly unnatural -- dan and i always chuckle over the gratuitous 'gordon-changing-into-chef-costume' scene, in which the viewer is treated to a quick peep at the wildman's furious torso, and it really serves to show that although his craggy face may look 50, his body can still KICK YOUR ASS. weirdly, though, i recently found out that gordo's only like 38. 38! all of those crags, at 38! that's what plugging lines of coke cut with pure testosterone will do to your face, i guess.

anyway, anything this guy does now, i'm there. a new, not-so-secret fantasy of mine is that maybe one day he can be my life coach and, you know...'scare me straight', or something. getting screamed at by an insane bristish dude is not something i ever thought i'd really want out of life, but man, how i would love for him to pop my eardrums with some well-directed cussing and get little flecks of hot spit on my face and maybe even bust a tiny vein in his eyeball, only to calm down and take me on a walk through some sort of courtyard and apologize more convincingly than ike turner. i'll be the first to admit that i feel kind of weird when i think about how much i love gordon ramsay, especially when he represents so many things i should despise, but i think i might have what it takes to be his personal assistant. i kind of think that he's too tough to actually have one, but i ever hear he's in the market for that sort of thing, i plan to preemptively go on anti-anxiety meds and try my damndest to get him to pick me!

vitamin water is for douchebags.

i'm currently pounding a giant jog of 'power-c'-flavored vitamin water and i took a moment to read the quirky text on the side of the label. it's sort of like the advertising, printed media equivalent of, say, people who constantly -- and often awkwardly, to me - proclaim their own awesomeness 'just because they're awesome.' there's a song for people like that ('this is why i'm hot', which, aside from that association, is pop genius), and that makes sense, but a soft drink, too? jesus. anyway, the write-up on the label contains a michael jackson refernce for some reason, and it's not really thoughful or creative so much as off-putting. sometimes i see something on the news, something horrible or violent or tragic, that makes me think 'what the fuck kinda world do we live in?' this has a similar effect, for some reason.

soft tissue

I didn't bother to fix the semi-shitty image above, but it's a detail of a wall piece I have up at a show at Project 4 now until April 21. It's a conglomerate of things that are supposed to be like demoid cysts, which are mutated ovary cells, or something -- I've heard that the outer layer of an egg cell is the area responsible for the development of skin, teeth, hair, and nails, so when that shit mutates and goes haywire -- when it tries to turn into a spermless baby -- the dermoid cyst is the result. When I was in high school, one of my teachers took some time off to get a tumor removed, and when she came back to school it somehow got out that it was one of these, and really large. Chock full of hair and teeth, this thing grew inside of this really sweet lady for, what, like years probably. The human body's weird enough without anything going 'wrong', but stuff like this blows my mind. I know places like the Mutter Museum in Philly have a preservative bent, and historically we've been capable of maintaining soft tissue samples for thousands of years, but let's get honest -- I can never get close enough, what with the 'glass vitrines' and 'museum rules' standing in my way. Although it might make me puke, I want to handle this stuff, pick it up, maybe even cut it up. At least when I make this shit out of clay I can pretend it's real for a minute.

On the living-vicariously tip, though, there's a great special on Discovery Health now that is about a young boy from Pakistan (I think) who was born with a fully-enclosed parasitic twin. Unlike the cases where, say, a baby is born with an extra set of legs jutting out of its torso, this kid went undiagnosed for years because he just looked like a pregnant baby. That's fucked-up imagery I guess, but anyway, he underwent surgery and this monster was pulled out of his thoracic cavity. The best part of the show, by FAR, was when they brought in a pathologist and set up a sterile lab for her and she did a step-by-step autopsy of the parasitic twin. She fully cut it in half and everything. I think it's safe to say that I have the extreme desire to jump inside the TV on a daily basis. Sad but true, sad but true...however, this moment was probably the most intensely I have ever felt this totally first-world emotion. What a moment.

Fungus on a tree.

CSI:NY sucking yet again

Last season, Law and Order: Criminal Intent boasted a fine, fine supporting cast for a really twisted episode involving some maladjusted cousins who shared a penchant for rape and torture. The cousins were played by childhood-star-cum-junkie Brad Renfroe, and Ethan Embry, who was so delightfully fat he wasn't even recognizable (no, really, he carries it well). This was a brutal, brutal episode, and once again I need to applaud the Law and Order franchise for really indoctrinating a rather common practice in television character acting today -- utilizing 'washed up' stars of yesteryear in one final sweet, desperate act of NON typecasting. Even one who is not a Law and Order superfan might recall the use of, say, Christine Elise (aka Emily Valentine from NINER and Harper Tracey from ER) or Big Pete from the Adventures of Pete and Pete or, well, whoever from whatever. Point is, Dick Wolf and Co. have been doing this for years, and, like nearly every practice the franchise pioneers, they do it well. Seriously, mad props to the casting directors.

This week it came to my attention that Edward Furlong (formerly Eddie Furlong of T2 fame) was a guest star on a recent episode of CSI:NY. I didn't see the episode in question -- I mean, I despise the show and everything it represents, barring entertainment value -- but it didf make me shake my head in dissappointment, as usual. Whgen will Bruckheimer get it? 'Anything you can do, Dick Wolf, I can do better,' he taunts, but really, nothing he produces within the CSI franchise will ever hold a candle to the Wolf empire, and this has little to do with forgettable leads. Oh, wait...well, anyway, Eddie Furlong: That dude was fucking HUGE back in the day. Like, EPIC. Maybe he needs work nowadays, that's cool, but Law and Order is not distracting in its character actors precisely because they never opt for those whose careers REALLY took a tumble. Or a dive. Once again, Bruckheimer's that dude who shows up to a party with all this coke when all you wanna do is drink a beer and watch Survivorman.

And yeah, I do watch TV at parties.

nuggets

Last week, I had a really awesome dream that involved this necklace that I own. In, um, 'real life', this thing is a big plastic orange drop with creamy-looking swirls. It looks sort of like an oblong lollipop, and people often comment on this. I got it at a flea market, and its candy-like qualities are further evidenced by the presence of teethmarks (not mine) on the back side. Anyway, last week I had a dream that I found a pile of these at a thrift store, and the salesperson informed me that they were vintage candy necklaces, except if you ate them, you'd get fucked up because they were hallucinogenic. Anyway, as far as dreams go it was a pretty good one, lots of staying power there.

late to the game, but whatever, maaaannnn...

If you're not familiar with the vagus nerve, maybe you should think about getting acquainted. This wonder regulates how one's body physically expresses stress and anxiety, so whenever you have a weird reaction to an uncomfortable situation, this is the nerve to thank. I'm not going to go into any more detail about this shit, I mean, like all of my information is coming from Discovery Health channel -- which I watch purely for entertainment, I'm not on my way to med school or anything -- so I don't want to perpetuate any more possibly-incorrect info. Look it up yourself if it sounds so fascinating. My point is, though, I'm very aware of my own dealings with the vagus nerve, and this goes back...wayyyyyyy back. Check out this picture: It's my dad's workshop in the basement of the house in NJ where I grew up. Yeah, this is just a detail, but let me fill in the blanks. What you're looking at is an acid-green wall of tools that have been outlined in Sharpie so everything has its place. Not the most OCD system in the world, and further images of the basement would confirm that this is one of the rare instances of semi-order. Anyway, if one was to glance at this wall, and some tools were, you know...out of place, you'd be able to tell right away.

When I was a kid, I totally believed in ghosts, and killers who would slash up families in the middle of the night, and skulls that could talk. Yeah, there was nothing scarier -- or more possible -- than a talking skull, in my world. These are total suburban fears, the result of a somewhat stagnant environment I guess, but anyway, if there was any place where I was going to get murdered in my own house it would probably be in the sketchy-ass basement. I HATED going down there, but chores and toys and what ultimatley turned out to be the love of fear lured me down those steps on a daily basis. The thing I never understood, though, until I found out about the vagus nerve, was that every time I went down into that crazy green room, I would have to take a shit, like immediately. Only one other location had such a strong and intense effect on me at that point, and that was the bathroom of the Phillipsburg Free Public Library. At least that was logistically convenient. Turns out, this is pure science, this nerve that regulated stress is also in control of, say, sweating, blushing -- these things make sense -- and then, pooping. Anyway, cut to me, age 7, running into the basement to get some food product for my mom or a beer for my dad...I get to the fridge, confront that wall, notice the outline of tools that are NOT in their proper place. There's a hatchet on that wall, no joke, and whenever that was gone, I would quietly accept the fact that I was about to have a cold steel blade launched into my collarbone as the opening act of the Tibbott Family Massacre. Five minutes later, I would not be dead so much as dropping a deuce and flipping through a National Georgraphic. That's kind of why I'm interested in so many things.