Kosher Eucharist / יוקאריסט כשר

Anal sex is not enough.

Playing cunt-pong is no longer sufficient.

If you’re among the one to ten percent (depending on which rights group to listen to) of the world’s population consigned to an eternity in Hell’s Yankee barbecue, it’s not enough that you throw your deviant, techno-propagating lifestyle in the face of God and decent folk. It’s not enough that you march in the streets festooned with more feathers and sequins than the week before Lent in Bahia. No, if you want to be Gay with a capital G (and a lowercase “ay” in honor of all those who fell in the struggle), you have to be a radical.

Somehow, it has been accepted into Radical Canon that if you’ve had, at any time, some dude’s equipment in your ass, you’ve got more than enough room in there for the War, the Muslims, the Children and the Minorities as well. (”And if you’ll look over here, you’ll see our lovely collection of dild–” “No thanks, I’ve had African poverty lodged in there for a week and I’m full up.”) Radicals cultivate a similar attitude towards Jews, blacks, immigrants, women and anyone whose skin color wasn’t represented in the Crayola rainbow until a series of lawsuits, which is irritating for people in these groups who doesn’t feel that a placard reading “SHAVE BUSH” represents a nuanced expression of their political beliefs.

But back to them queers. Groups like OUT Against the War, and more blogs, websites and random sign-bearing protesters than I can count, carry on as if the blessed union of glans and prostate releases a massive surge of antiwarphins, flooding the brain like foam on the dance floor of a club named after some manner of power tool. And for our lesbian sisters, imagine how many radical political awakenings transpired something like so:

No fingers in: Free guns.
1 finger in: Free market.
2 fingers in: Free education.
3 fingers in: Free health care.
4 fingers in: Free abortions.
The whole damned fist in: FREE PALESTINE!!!!1!!111!

In case anyone was curious, I’ve got three fingers in. Politically.

Ironically enough, this phenomenon of claim-staking mirrors arch-conservative views of the radical community. Arch-conservatives look at a group of radicals and say, “Bunch of fags;” radicals look at a group of fags and say, “Bunch of radicals.” Nobody asks the fags, of course, who would probably tell you that radicals are a bunch of pussies and the arch-conservatives - you guessed it - a bunch of fags.

But the worst part, of course, is that small but vocal group of gay people who ascribe to radical politics and assume that their radicalism isn’t a result of being upper-class and white, but a result of being gay - as if their gay gene read CTAGAGTFUCKBUSHCTAGTA. These are the queer crusaders who insist that anyone with even an aesthetic appreciation for D’Angelo’s “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” video should be marching on Washington. This is the limp-wristed legion whose cognitive dissonance occasionally leads to the kind of breathtakingly shortsighted statements that make you think that maybe Moses had a key insight with Leviticus 18:22:

Queers for Iran should be coming soon to a rally near you.

—

This post brought to you by:
Funkadelic - Jimmy’s Got a Little Bit of Bitch in Him

A Day in the Life:

Dolly Parton - 9 to 5

8:45 A.M. - Arrive “at 8:30.” Open breakfast of weird New Zealand “Extreme” granola bar. Listen to discussion between bosses about how fucked we all are if we’re in this building “when the big earthquake hits.” Open Gmail and begin chat with The Jew.

9:10 A.M. - Assure boss that I have enough to keep me busy.

9:20 A.M. - Drag out five minutes worth of word processing to fifteen minutes so I look busy until boss goes to meeting.

9:40 A.M. - Read various blogs. Respond to rabble on own blog, many of whom use phrases like “love lump.”

10:10 A.M. - Actual work: make list of people whose licenses to attend post-mortems of food animals for safety inspection purposes have been revoked by the Ministry of Agriculture. Marvel at the unattractiveness of people whose job it is to check cow organs for disease. Wonder if the job requires homeliness, or if the job makes you homely. Resolve never to have a job that involves looking closely at animal lungs. Wonder what these people did to be revoked. Hope it was a sex scandal.

10:35 A.M. - BORED. Write blog post about average day at work.

11:05 A.M. - Return to list.

11:10 A.M. - List is good enough.

11:30 A.M. - Conversation with Jew takes a turn for the Reilly. Fear, briefly, for own soul.

12 noon - “Mickey, Mickey, you so fine, you so fine you blow my mind - Hey, Mickey!”

12:05 - “Oh, Mickey, you’re so pretty, you don’t understand…”

12:10 - Wikipedia something. Anything. “Baronet.”

12:40 - Have made it from “baronet” to “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

12:42 - Have made it from “Total Eclipse of the Heart” to “Island gigantism.” Wikipedia fucking rocks.

12:59 - Argument with Jew erupts over whether I can color in Colombia on my “Map O’ Conquests.”

1:02 - Color in Colombia despite Jew’s objections. He can get his own map. And his own moderately-amusing-in-hindsight sexual escapades.

1:05 - Color in other countries. Covet the amount of coloring I’ll get to do for Russia, Canada, or Australia. Plan which countries I need to join my conquests to each other. This involves a lot of small, new Balkan countries. Realize futility of trying to sleep with a Montenegrin.

1:15 - “You take me by the heart when you take me by the hand…”

1:25 - “Update” a “document.”

2:00 - Lunch! I have waited this long because the Indian restaurant across the street sells things cheap after two o’clock. Order some variation of “Meat in a Vivid Sauce.”

2:30 - Wander aimlessly for the rest of my lunch hour, trying not to look like a drug addict. Fail at this.

3:10 - Back at “3 o’clock.”

3:15 - “Oh, what you do, Mickey, do Mickey…”

3:30 - File something.

3:35 - Boot flask time!

3:40 - Talk to friend Robert on google chat. Today’s topic: cloacae.

4:05 - GETTING PAID TO BE DRUNK AND TALK ABOUT BIRD GENITALS WOO

4:07 - Apologize to boss for “Woo!” Blame it on Communists. And inadequate food safety.

4:12 - Boot flask is empty. Sad.

4:21 - “It’s guys like you, Mickey!”

4:32 - Bosses leave! Huzzah!

4:33 - Continue exactly what I was doing before they left.

5:15 - Leave at “5:30.”

And New Zealand’s food is safe for another day.

Dear Amy,

I heard you’re getting married.

I must admit, Amy, I’m a little dismayed at the news - I know this is normally the time for a chorus of “Mazal tovs” and that insufferable song frummies like to sing about the cities of Judah and streets of Jerusalem, but I have a couple of minor objections. First and most pressing, your fiancé, the similarly ironically-named Blake Fielder-Civil, looks like something a refined person might disgorge after consuming a pint, three White Russians, shrimp scampi and the spunk of someone with a CB callsign by which he insists everyone refer to him. I know what you’re thinking - “Bashert!” - but first listen to my second objection: you should be marrying me.

Hear me out, Amy. Ever since I’ve heard you rake your voice down the back of “Me and Mr. Jones’” horn chart, ever since I’ve heard a young Jewish girl namecheck Ray Charles, Donny Hathaway, Sammy Davis Jr. and Slick Rick all in the space of a few songs, I’ve been hopelessly in love. You’re like Billie with range, or Macy with timbre. You’ve got more sass than an old-fashioned root beer. You complement Ghostface better than RZA does. Your liquor cabinet is much better-stocked than mine, and your stash doubtless more potent. You should be my woman, Amy.

Sure, there are a few difficulties involved, but I’m flexible. I know you have an epic appetite for the hairier sex, and I understand you need fresh lyrical material, so I promise not to get between you and whatever you drag out from under the bar stool after last call. You don’t even have to think about me when you come. I’d prefer you didn’t, actually - mixing affection and orgasms always ends with someone crying.

In fact, our relationship could be entirely non-physical. A careful study of your lyrics has led me to the conclusion that once something has passed the event horizon of your navel, no known force in the universe can keep the singularity ‘twixt your legs from rending it asunder (”Whoa-oh, here she comes, she’s a man-spaghettifier…”). Also, given your apparent propensity for combining semi-anonymous sex with heavy drinking, you’ve probably got more clap than a Barbra farewell concert. I’m far too lethargic, and my micturition far too liquid and painless, to contend with the demands you place on cocks that fall into your orbit.

Really, Amy, all I want to do with you is get sloshed, burn spliffs, listen to Coltrane and render shrieking judgment upon the sober, non-tattooed, Gucci-toting masses whom you so viciously eviscerate. We could make a life together like that, Amy. We could be happy.

Think about it, Amy. And think about how awful “Amy Winehouse-Fielder-Civil” will look on your checks.

—

This post brought to you by:
Amy Winehouse - I Heard Love is Blind

and
Ghostface Killah & Amy Winehouse - You Know I’m No Good

So often, we hear about the health risks of man-on-man love. Social diseases, various “tearings,” and the threat of hellfire are tossed back and forth in the media like large, gloomy beach balls. Few, however, have dared break the story of the scientifically proven health benefits of being a dyed-in-the-wool, Grade A, so-gay-it-hurts five-alarm faggot - to wit:

Bitch drinks are good for you. A University in Thailand, working in conjunction with the USDA, has discovered that slathering fruit - especially antioxidant-rich “brightly colored” fruit - with booze helps preserve the nutrients in the fruit: this in addition to the health benefits of “small” amounts of alcohol as touted by the “one glass of red wine” people. Hear that? Put down your reasonably priced Jack and Coke, your “masculine enough” whiskey sour, and your classy martini. If you want to be healthy and vital long into senesence without resorting to the labor-intensive and increasingly rare blood of virgins, order one of those $20 six-kinds-of-fruit-and-four-drops-of-Malibu-rum panty-removing emasculations in a Collins glass with a “racy” name like “Taking Liberties in the Back of an Automobile.” Your friends will call you “Princess Valentina,” and you’ll go broke and diabetic trying to get drunk enough to Karaoke “Like a Prayer,” but you’ll dance at their funerals.

Secondly - what’s the thing about being gay that makes everyone uncomfortable to talk about? The thing that really puts the sausage in the “As gay as a” picnic basket?

The anal sex with other men. Ignoring the various back-and-forths various commentators have made about “just how explicitly?” various compilations of Holy Writ have condemned the practice, some good news has managed to sneak in the back door. According to “an article my friend Caitlin read a few months ago that we can’t either of us find now but seems to be faintly backed up by Wikipedia,” getting man-banged like a trash can lid can notably reduce the risk of prostate cancer. The idea seems to be - in coarse, layman’s terms - that regularly squeezing/knocking/whatevering the fluids within the prostate out is good for it, for some reason.

So anyway, the next time you’re drinking neat whiskey, scratching your ass in public, or making tender love within the sacred bonds of Holy Matrimony, think about that.

I have a lot of free time down here, what with my limited liquor fund and my not getting laid anymore, so to spice things up a little I joined a gym - a real, honest-to-goodness grown up gymnasium, replete with spandex, grunts, and the ball-sweat of strangers. The humiliation of only being able to bench-press fourteen of something - kilograms, granted, but it’s still a very small number - and the inherent awkwardness of being confronted with other people’s sweaty flesh in an arena other than a Motel Six just over the state line make me desperate for any entertainment or distraction from the thought that other people are watching me and quietly evaluating my fitness.

They’re free to do it quietly, because it’s already been overtly done. When I first joined, I was assigned a little, fit, humorless blond thing to evaluate the attrition 22 years of cream sauces, beer, and a tendency to roll over and go to sleep instead of strive for Round Two had wrought on my body. She pinched various areas of my body with a pair of calipers (”How does that feel?” “Like my back fat is being pinched with a pair of calipers,”) added some numbers, did some shit in metric, and pronounced that my body was 16.7% FAT.

This is apparently “within normal bounds” - a disturbing phrase because of the kinship it implies with the portly, poorly read mass of humanity. I don’t care how normal it is, I am alarmed at the though that nearly one fifth of my body is composed of something you could fry chicken in. Have you been to the grocery store in the South and seen those 25-pound drums of lard? That’s about how much fat is in my body. One drum worth. Seventeen dollars of obesity. Catering size grease.

Then she made me strap something to my torso that looked like an amazingly feeble bandolier, and bade me ride a bicycle as she monitored. Apparently, my oxygen efficiency is barely across the border between the salted fields of “poor” and the rocky but manageable soil of “fair.” There are parts of my extremities that wait, expectantly, for the infrequent Oxygen Train to come to town. Young blood cells in these whistlestop capillaries have heard stories from their elders about oxygenated blood, but have never seen it themselves and are skeptical, sometimes openly scornful, of their grandparents’ pulse-expectant vigil.

Little Blond Gym Lady then wrote me out a schedule of exercises. Some of these are reasonable (get on this machine and pretend to row a boat), some of them are bizarre (get on this bicycle that doesn’t go anywhere and is much, much harder to pedal than areal bicycle), some emasculating (get this giant ball and roll around with it so that you look like you’re reenacting a hard-fought, out-of-scale conception), and some horrifying (go to the area where the large men glisten at each other and allow them to watch you struggle to lift this acorn over your head three times.) I do the ones I can stand to, and that will have to be enough for her. The only one I really enjoy is the rowing machine, because you can play a game on it. How fast you row determines the amount of air in this little fish’s swim bladder, making it float higher or lower in the water. You try to eat the smaller fish and avoid being eaten by the larger ones. It’s a cute, upper-body-toning illustration of Hobbes’ worldview - would that all philosophy had endearing animal mascots.

The Gym People are the standard gym archetypes. There are multiple thin women, in various shades of blond and brown, who run on the treadmill and are then replaced by incredibly similar thin women, who run on the treadmill. It’s reminiscent of one of those endless Escher cycles. Large men gather at one end to be large at each other and occasionally do exercises while making the most awful orgasm sounds imagineable. I don’t even really know why they sound like orgasm sounds to me, because luckily I’ve never slept with anyone who yelled “GGRRRRAAAAAH!” at the moment of truth. There’s this one teenage guy - he’s athletic in a stringy way - who exercises for a few minutes and then admires his muscles in the mirror for a few minutes. I understand doing this, at home, with the door locked and the curtains pulled. I get the urge: this whole week, every time I have gotten my keys out of my pocket I have checked my thigh to see if it’s become a Mighty Oak, rooting me to the earth like peasants of old. (It hasn’t.) But I would never let a stranger - much less a sardonic, judgemental one, although I guess he can’t know that - see me scope myself out, and a person who can do that is beyond my understanding.

There is one aspect of the gym that does scare me - it used to be a bar. It took me a while to realize this, but gradually, like a senile Perry Mason, I figured it out. (’Why is this gym wood-paneled? Why does the sign in front of the shopping center advertise a bar called “The Rose and Crown” when there’s not one here? Why is there a sign in this gym that says “The Rose and Crown?”‘) I fear retribution for this. It is not fitting that a bar should close, ever. A club, sure. Drive the rutting seventeen-year-olds into the street, and have them take the “hip” furniture with them. But a BAR, a real sit-down-and-drink BAR, should never close. It reminds me of an event during the English Reformation (surprise!) Shortly after the War of the Three Kingdoms/British Civil War a fiery Protestant preacheress, Jane Middleton, railed against the idea of holding “reformed” (reformed, heretical, poTAto, poTAHto) church services in formerly Catholic houses of worship, arguing that the land had been set aside for idolatry and it was inappropriate for the “Godly” to worship there. Someone made the counterargument that this would exclude the entire Kingdom of England, because it had been consecrated to Saint George. Middleton is reported to have responded with an outburst of terrifying indignation. But do you see my point? If no bars ever close, eventually, in the fullness of time, every building will be, or at least contain, a bar. And the fact that I exercise in an area that was once a bar and thus indirectly support the supplanting of a bar may mark me for an unspeakable, deserved vengeance.

I guess the whole point of this post was to beg Dionysus for clemency. And to use the phrase “whistlestop capillaries.”

I consider myself a rationalist.

God plays a limited role in my affairs, except when we hold our occasional powwows, which tend commence at around hour 40 of wakefulness. I wear a hamsa, but less to ward off the evil eye and more to bestow ethnic pride on my chest hair like an airbrushed Virgin Mary on a hydraulic ‘64 Impala. I knock other people, not wood. I find spitting distasteful under any circumstance, and combing it with the nonsense syllable “tfu” probably carries the death penalty in those small, economically overachieving Asian nations where failure to keep one’s anus tightly clenched results in an immediate visit from a surprisingly diffident unit of brownshirts.

But despite all that, I remain firmly convinced that it’s only a matter of time before the flesh-eating dead descend upon our cities and chew up thousands of years of human civilization until it bursts from their grossly distended abdomens. I use garlic as a seasoning, not a deterrent, and even if I had a gun, it would be empty of silver bullets - but I have prepared multiple contingency plans of action for the inevitable moment the ghouls’ moans reach my window (remember: if your home lacks any implements which can swiftly destroy a brain, you may as well begin to accustom yourself to the taste of human flesh now).

Optimism may be a luxury in the face of undead hordes, but I allow myself enough to hope that when the zombies arise - and they will arise - they remain slow of both motion and wit à la Dawn of the Dead, not athletic like 28 Days Later, not shambling proof of extremely fucking punctuated equilibrium à la the execrable Land of the Dead, and not possessed of an insatiable taste for poofy-haired, heavily-armed cheerleaders as in Night of the Comet.

But the ever-growing library of zombie movies and agreed-upon meeting points with similarly farsighted compatriots in the event of an outbreak of the living dead has begun to have a profound effect on the workings of my subconscious. I dream intensely and incessantly, and zombies have begun to converge on my somnolent mind as if it were the attractive but loose blond who receives a bloody comeuppance for baring her tits about an hour into every traditional zombie flick. My dreams not only feature zombies, they feature cinematic structure - they increasingly start out by introducing characters and building suspense before the first rotting hand grips the first unfortunate ankle.

I can only assume this means that locked somewhere deep in my psyche is the definitive zombie movie, a Citizen Kane where Orson Welles rips out Dorothy Comingore’s vocal cords instead of inflicting them upon an opera house, a Seven Samurai where seven ronin protect a village from the undead hordes, a Godfather where cannoli is eschewed for cannibalism. I reckon the movie - I’ll call it The Shawshank Reanimation for now - will continue to be revealed in prophetic bits and pieces snatched from dreams until I finally wake up one morning and devote my life, with epic singularity of purpose, to the creation of the cinematic pinnacle of the genre, a movie that makes Night of the Living Dead look like Saturday Night Live.

I just hope I do it before the dead arise.

And they will arise.

—–

This post brought to you by:
Fela Kuti and Afrika 70 - Zombie

This thought has been kicking around my head for a few days:

How far are we all, really, from “the edge?”

I had a day last week of awful conversations. Ordinarily, I like to speak to three people in the day: my boss, my bartender Ingrid, and the pretty girl at the Indian restaurant. But on this bright, sunny Thursday, two more people shoehorned themselves in: Hare Krishna Girl, and Inhalant Abuser.

Hare Krishna Girl waylaid me on my lunch break by saying “Where are you from!” in my face so abruptly, and with such seeming intent, that I thought she needed help. I thought she might be lost, or just need to spend five minutes talking to someone who really, honestly, did not care about rugby. No, she just saw someone young, with floppy hair and a beard, and decided to try to convert him to a for-profit non-religion. She brought out some books and showed me pictures and stuff in them - “See? This crawfish has a soul too, according to the illustration” - and tried to make me go to some yoga thing. I bought a pamphlet about astroprojecting, or something, from her for two dollars, because I pitied her and hoped she’d use it to buy fries. She honestly didn’t see the humor in saying that her “yogi” had “renounced everything to travel the world,” and she had chin fuzz. All in all, an awful five minutes.

Then, later that night, a man asked me for directions to a store. I told him. He gave me a pair of goggles, “so that if I got pepper-sprayed I wouldn’t get glaucoma.” He then followed me around for a while, making barely coherent conversation, and I let him because he was so obviously nuts I thought people were probably never civil to him. He gave me the torn-off cover of a notebook and a book about royal weddings as we went down the street, then proceeded to take out a CD he had shoplifted from the store he’d found me in, throw the case and CD away, and start reading the liner notes. Then he started inhaling some substance or other - it looked like turkey sausage but probably wasn’t, and he had gotten in out of his fanny pack - and being even less coherent. I left when he began to berate me for not remembering what rank I’d reached when I did Tae Kwon Do as a child. He tried to chase me down, but since I’m a reasonably healthy 22-year-old, and he was a heavy drug user in his fifties, the race was short.

But here’s my question. Don’t you think, after maybe two weeks of really shitty days in a row, you might wind up in a situation like that? Can’t you imagine a series of circumstances that would lead to your standing under a cypress tree in the park, holding a bag of rotten corn in one hand and a Cabbage Patch doll named Lady Beatrice in the other, mumbling the Psalms to yourself?

This post wasn’t very good. I’m working on one about gays that should be better.

You may remember that Kosher Eucharist is not only a weblog - it is also a comic. Due to a variety of circumstances, including but not limited to my laziness and the fact that making comics is kind of labor-intensive, it’s been several months since we last encountered our heroes (we’ll call them “Michael” and “Chris”). In the previous installment of Tales from the Eucharist, The Manischewitz Wager - Part 1, which you should really read again as a refresher, Michael and Chris had made a wager over who would first defile a daughter of Israel, with the winner receiving one bottle of Manischewitz wine, his choice of flavor. We rejoin our heroes a few months after the wager had been struck:

(if the image is compressed in your browser, the link to the image itself is here)

story: chris & michael
pencils, inks, coloring: michael
scanmaster: ben

Coming up next in Tales from the Eucharist: see the gripping denouement in the final chapter of the Manischewitz Wager series!

(And yes, this all really happened.)

Sometimes I wonder if the increasingly debilitating pain of having to venture out in public during the daytime might be somewhat alleviated if I could amuse myself with telepathy. What’s going on under the gel-encrusted quills of an ars? Do the Yazam cops realize that the more heat they pack, the more it looks like they’re compensating for spending all day riding on a Kawasaki Ninja built for two? Is there anything at all going on in the Breslovers’ heads beyond the persistent zzt-zzt of two remaining synapses trying desperately, and failing utterly, to connect? And, most intriguing of all, do all those seminary girls know their goddamned skirts are dragging on the ground?

Imagine if you could spend one fine Jerusalem afternoon in the area of the Ben Yehuda midrachov finding out:

The more inexplicable ruffles my skirt has, the more Hashem loves me.

Speaking of my skirt, I know it’s dragging on the ground, but my willingness to ruin my clothing just shows the boys that my daddy has money.

Ohmig-d, is that RIVKAH EISENBERG?! I haven’t seen her in at least two days! I must express my pleasure upon unexpectedly seeing her in public by shrieking her name at the top of my considerable lungs!

Are her elbows uncovered? Slut.

I mean, sure, I’ve been fooling around with Moshe from Neveh…well, and Josh from Neveh…well, okay, the entire 12:30 Gemara shiur from Neveh…but they kept their kippas on during, and I wore the skirt with extra ruffles, so it doesn’t count. I’m still a virgin.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter, what happens in Yerushalayim stays in Yerushalayim.

Ha! Like Las Vegas! I am sooo funny. Wait until I tell Aliza that one.

I wonder why I haven’t got my period yet…

Ohmig-d, is he looking at me? Ohmig-d, he’s cuuuuuuute! And look how long his tzitzis are! His middos must be even more ridiculously outsized!

G-d, my feet are sweating in these Uggs.

That reminds me, I need to go pick up my engraved heart pendant from Hadaya. The fact that I spent several hundred dollars to get my name crudely etched in a misshapen silver heart shows the boys that I have abundant self-esteem, and also that my daddy has money.

Oh, we’re at Fro-Yo. Bleh. I don’t feel like ice cream. Ever since I started throwing up in the mornings last week, I haven’t really been too hungry. I should probably go to the doctor. But for now, maybe cutting back on the ice cream and losing a little weight will be good for me. I swear, my belly is starting to pop out of my ruffles. Fat fat fat.

But at least I’m not like Adina. That denim skirt doesn’t do much to hide her tush. That’s not even ghetto booty. That’s Warsaw booty.

Ha!

I can’t wait until Zolly’s tonight. I am going to drink, like, eight drinks, and I am going to yell out “WHOOOOOOO!” after every one. I’ll show all the boys my middos. And my boobs.

Ha! Just kidding! I am sooooooo funny.

Speaking of my boobs, have they gotten bigger? Sweet!

I hope I don’t pass out at Zolly’s like last time, though…

I don’t even know whose apartment that was. Good thing I got back in time for morning shiur.

Ohmig-d, cute Israeli soldiers! I should go up to them and say “I love the army!” in Hebrew. The security guard at the sem taught me how. How did it go? Ani mufkeret?

Oh, cell phone’s ringing! Ugh. I need to get a new phone. If I keep this crappy Nokia, how will the boys know my daddy has money?

Hours upon hours of thrills.

—

This post brought to you by:
Raekwon - Ice Cream

“Cunt.”

Imagine a country in the South Pacific. Let’s call it… Zew Nealand. It’s larger, more populous, and more developed that other South Pacific nations, and it has a reasonably stable government. This government has the free time to create a number of useful agencies, including, say, a Food Safety Authority.

Now let’s imagine that someone from a blog - let’s call it Halal Shahadah - works there, and gets to read emails from people who write in:

“hi my name is _____ if someone is 25 weeks pregnant and there fridge has defrosted and the chicken has defrosted and become infected there is a smell and flies from the fridge will this affect the baby?”

Think about the fact that this woman will make a New Zew Nealander in less than four months’ time.

“hello how are sheeps slaughtered thanks”

Food Safety Authority, honey. Not butcherfaq.com. Why do you need to know this?

I had a request for all the deer slaughterhouses in the country (from “Team Meat”), and one man from India wanted to know the name of every place - every single one - that sold dairy products. A doctor in Hong Kong reported “oily diarrhea” in people who had eaten something called “oilfish,” and wanted to know the rules for labelling it. A man angry about genetically modified corn - which is not sold in Zew Nealand, to my knowledge - asked if “you are a Human being or an alien who doesnt care about health and your communitys.” Someone found rat shit in his cereal, ate some, vomited, and told us. A woman sought permission to import a “calming paste” for dogs and horses, to treat “anxiety, nervousness, distraction and stress.” The active ingredients are B-vitamins, tryptophan, and chamomile. A woman and her husband had eaten some fish and left some out for the cat. The next morning, they found the cat had disdained it and that it emitted a bright green glow. The woman asked if this meant it had mercury in it. (The terrifying answer is that there are some species of fish that glow when they decay.)

Sigh. The things I put up with to keep food safe here in Zew Nealand…

Hypothetically.

“I seldom know at any given moment whether the Lord is giving me a punishment or a reward.”

-Flannery O’Connor, from a letter written to a friend shortly before her death

I don’t usually set much store by dream analysis. I find that most of the conclusions reached by dream analysis can be broken into the two classic categories: obvious (Your dream about your father’s death indicates a fear of your father’s eventual mortality and, by extension, your own) and crap (the presence of the badger represents lust.) That said, I had the following dream last night:

My birthday was coming up, and as it came nearer I noticed my friends looking at me and smirking. They began to make cryptic “wait till you see your gift!” comments that grew more and more ominous. Suddenly, with the peculiar, immediate logic in use in dreams, I began to suspect that they were going to give me the severed head of Flannery O’Connor, preserved in a jar, and that the head occasionally made oracular pronouncements. Gradually I became certain that this was my intended gift, and I was afraid. I knew that if I saw the head it would ruin her work for me forever, possibly damn my soul through a mechanism that wasn’t clear, and make me very, very uncomfortable. In order to circumvent this, I went back in time to try to convince Miss O’Connor to make arrangements to prevent her head’s being preserved as an oracle after her death. She didn’t seem concerned about it at all, and when I woke up dream-me was thinking I’d have to stay in the past as the only sure way of outsmarting my friends.

I’d love to set the Freudians on this. “My friends conspired to damn me with the gift of the prophetic corpse of my literary hero. And then I fucked my mother.”

This post includes a soundtrack. Press play and read on:

Sometimes I worry about my esteemed co-blogger and travesty fiancé. In attacking entire groups of people - an admirable pursuit I in no way intend to disparage - he sometimes overreaches. When he should be focusing his considerable energies towards hating the player, he sometimes slips over into hating the game.

Take his latest post. Hippies deserve to be verbally destroyed, yea, unto the tenth generation, but I detect a note of animosity directed not merely at their inexplicable affection for hand instruments louder, cheaper and more African than a Ladysmith Black Mambazo bootleg or life on the streets of Kinshasa, but at their drug of choice. I feel this is unfair. Weed didn’t make hippies, Vietnam made hippies, and the statute of limitations for revenge has not yet expired - I recommend burying Hanoi with an airdrop of those Vietnamese-origin disposable chopsticks with absolutely inscrutable English instructions on the sleeve. (”What’s that, Mr. Nguyen? You’re stuck under a collapsed statue of Ho Chi Minh? Save yourself! Taking chopstick and hold to as you were a pencil! Now you can pick-up any thing!”) Every society has its Lotophagi - and of course, the real reason we hate hippies is that they’re lazy even about being lazy, whereas we have whittled malingering into a fine art - and if hippies didn’t have weed and Phish tours, they’d have Miller and Smokey and the Bandit.

But the Goy and I have always had a certain difference of opinion regarding the hierarchy of drugs. We are of course both devotees of the sauce, but while Chris ranks it as his third-favorite rush (right under getting a blowjob from someone you don’t respect and the violent death of Communists), alcohol for me occupies a place somewhat below uppers and far, far above any drug whose effects include falling into something that can apparently be termed only “the K-hole.” This led to a difference of priorities in recreational activities. Occasionally we would “share” a drug experience, such as the time we did coke in the company of our friendly dormitory cocaine dealer and that ubiquitous cocaine-session archetype, the nameless blond chick who leaves no impression on you beyond her surprisingly deep well of knowledge concerning blow - but generally, if the day’s program called for smoking, snorting, or ebullient declarations of love for people that didn’t truly deserve it (weddings notwithstanding), we parted ways.

Thus, while young Cortés was off repeatedly invading his nationalist Mexican paramour’s Tenochtitlan in an elevator maintenance shack on the roof of the engineering building, and collecting hickeys which made Montezuma’s revenge look downright Christian, I was usually to be found engaged in my traditional pastime of putting anything I could find with the suffix “-drine” up my nose and really effusively describing the merits of Charles Mingus albums. He would spend an evening in the drinking martinis in a Garden District hotel bar in the company of a buxom young Jewess, I would spend an evening smoking ganja that reportedly “tasted like blueberry” (it didn’t) in a shed behind some dude’s house in the company of a semi-catatonic Azeri and a backwards hatted Atlantan Jew who kept trying to convince me Neil Peart was God (he didn’t).

I don’t regret it.

But that brings me, in a roundabout way, to my main point. I love weed. Not in a hippie way; I don’t love weed because I love Jerry, blacklights, African liberation colors, incense sticks or Day-Glo tapestries, I love weed because it gets me fucked up. I feel this is somehow purer - drugs should be taken because drugs are fun to take, not because the man with dreadlocks told you to.

But honestly. I loved it the first time I hacked and wheezed through a lungful of smoke, which had been delivered unto me by a small glass pipe named, as I recall, Frodo Baggins - any committed ganja smoker will confirm that stoners have an eerily universal tendency to name their smoking implements after Lord of the Rings characters, which I assume is because there exists a certain class of stoner who, bedecked in afro, erratic chin fuzz, khaki shorts and (more often than not) a Star of David on a twisted hemp rope, looks more Hobbity than Frodo-under-Merry-under-Pippin-under-Sam’s-just-a-little-too-loving-gaze in Return of the King. This also may be why you’ll meet a million pipes named after Hobbits but never one named after Elves - stoners have many qualities, but ethereal beauty is rarely among them. But that first encounter was downright magical. I had been warned that “nobody ever gets stoned the first time they smoke,” and about ten minutes after I had smoked I was complaining that nothing had happened and weed was vastly overrated, which was precisely the moment when my field of vision suddenly tilted 45 degrees to the right and the giggles set in. That started a series of cannabinoidal misadventures over the years which have included both the closest I’ve ever come to a profound religious experience (lying in bed awestruck by the depth of Lee Perry’s production on Heart of the Congos) and at least three times when I’ve smoked so much I woke up the next morning high, which always strikes me as a victory of cosmic import (probably because I’m high).

But I admit that weed can lead to serious problems. Not of the anti-drug PSA variety, because frankly those are about as effective and about as likely as Gallic valor, but of marijuana-induced idiocy. I’d like to think I avoid this treacherous pitfall, but its effects can be devastating. Observe this quotation, gleaned from the Wikipedia entry on Half Baked, which I was reading for a perfectly legitimate reason:

There is a humorous feature on the “Fully Baked Edition” DVD called “Five Minutes With The Guy On The Couch”. This feature allows you to literally smoke with the guy on the couch. The five minute clip depicts a stationary camera filming him as he sleeps on the couch, and as clouds of smoke waft in and out of the scene, the guy turns over several times, farts, scratches his head, removes his socks, and at the end of the scene, he rolls over and falls off of the couch. This feature is reminiscent of the old videos in which a stationary camera films a burning log in a fireplace, which is intended for people who do not have a fireplace, to put on their television sets, giving the impression that there is a fireplace in the room. The effect of this bonus feature is that as you smoke with your friends, you can look over and see the guy on the couch, as if he were really at your house.

And how many rips from your little friend Samwise Gamgee did it take you to arrive at such a lofty plateau of overexplanation, nameless Wikipedia stoner? The idea that somewhere out there exists a group of people who actually sat down and smoked weed with a televised representation of a minor and unresponsive fictional character from an unassuming stoner movie - the idea that there exists a group of people who would want the Guy on the Couch “really at their house” - terrifies me almost enough to make me cast my Rizzlas and my Trojan Ganja Reggae Box Set to the curb.

But I stay strong. And I stay high.

And if Goyeleh isn’t willing to accept that about me, then I just don’t see how this sham marriage is going to work.

Two months into my sojourn in New Zealand (Nova Zeelanda in Latin!) and I still live in a hostel. Partially, this is because the housing market in Wellington is swamped at the moment; partly this is because I don’t have the money to outfit a swinging bachelor pad (or, as the case may be, even a pitiable hovel); and mostly this is because the twin devils of sloth and misanthropy make me incredibly reluctant to flat-hunt. I don’t want to spend a day off looking through the paper, running around town, and pretending to be “chill.” My days off are full of eating, reading, aimless walks, and the Mass in Latin, and this is how I want them to remain. So it’s the hostel.

I. Hate. Hostel people.

They’re exponentially more aggravating than ordinary people, of whom I’m no ardent fan. Most of them are German, and the reasons Germans are exasperating could fill a whole ‘nother post; nay, a whole ‘nother blog; nay, a whole ‘nother internet. They speak to each other in German, which is a horrible language to have to hear. It is harsh, yet has that weird bouncy lilt that makes everything sound insincere. Also, it reminds me of the Holocaust, for some reason. This one German girl - let’s call her Some Vapid Krautess - was stridently bitching about United States foreign policy. Say what you will about Iraq, or Vietnam, or [third world country where things did not go as we had hoped], the linchpin of American foreign policy has never been “I don’t care if it’s winter, if we shoot enough peasants they’ll have to surrender, and if that doesn’t work we’ll fight a three-front war! That’ll show these countries we’ve needlessly provoked into the most terrible war ever fought who’s boss! Hey, let’s waste able-bodied men running camps to kill various groups of people! And bomb Coventry!” Fucking Germans. One of them tried to befriend me, but his efforts consisted entirely of trying to explain cricket, and daily inviting me to play poker. This is not the way to my heart, as it does not pass through “Martini Pass” or at any point go down “Oral Sex Lane.”

Germans aside, there are the Damnhippies, an ethnicity unto themselves. I have a deep, abiding hatred of hippies, as previously discussed, and it’s so deep-seated and so visceral that even peripheral hippie-things fill me with a desire to vote for Charlton Heston and have a nice rare steak that I bought with money I made working, just to spite them. I walked into the hostel kitchen one night and a girl was sauteeing bok choy and I was so stricken I had to sit down. Can you think of a more hippie food than sauteed bok choy? It satisfies the three gullets of the Hippie-Food Cerberus: it gives no one pleasure to eat, inconveniences no animal (save the bok choy mites, whose rights are ignored!), and is utterly insufficient nutrition. No one grew up to run Vermont’s third-largest marijuana plantation, sorry, “bud hook-up,” on sauteed bok fucking choy.

Hippies are one of the primary sources of the greatest bane of hostel life: Constant Fucking Noise. No one - not one person, ever since Adam took Eve aside and asked if she, too, had noticed that everyone else was acting like a chimpanzee - has ever been pleased to know that someone nearby was an amateur bongocero. Bongos have their place, and that is in the recording studio, on the stage, and in the 1950s. Bongos should not be allowed out of these few places, because Certain People will play them.

For hours.

Starting at eleven P.M.

Fortunately, occasionally the bongos are drowned out by even louder, ever more horrifying sounds. There is a hierarchy of Obnoxious Hostel sounds, much like poker hands:

Snoring trumps the rustle of furtive masturbation.

Spoken French trumps snoring.

Spanish loudly stage-whispered by your bed trumps spoken French.

Welsh loudly spoken by your bed trumps stage-whispered Spanish.

Guy With Guitar sawing his way through something he seems to think is “White Wedding” trumps Welsh.

Bongos trump, with difficulty, Guy With Guitar.

Loud conversation between two not-particularly-interesting people who are using their mutual, barely-overlapping broken English or German to talk about going to very, very popular tourist places like Queenstown trumps, after a pitched battle, bongos.

Horny, very drunk, Maori transvestite screaming blasphemy trumps everything and is the nuclear option of hostel noise.

Let’s go back to my arch-nemesis, Guy With Guitar. He just doesn’t get it! Owning a guitar and knowing three chords doesn’t make you a musician - I pretended to be interested in a conversation today, but I don’t call myself an actor. Another fine point often missed by GWG is the seemingly basic idea that most songs are composed of two things: a “tune,” and “some words.” These must both be carried throughout the song and not abandoned in the middle for deeper harbors. Just because you know how to play -sort of - the fist “ba-DUH-DUH, ba-DUH-DUH, ba-duh-duh-duh-duh-DUH-DUH” does not mean you can play “La Grange.” It does not count as singing “La Grange” if you just say “Shake your money-maker” five times in a row at a random point in the middle of the “song” you seem bound and determined to pass off as “La Grange.” Guy With Guitar almost definitely doesn’t know that that song is about a cathouse, the same one discussed in “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” and that La Grange is a town on the road between Austin and Houston, and he surely has never been there. In August. Guy With Guitar has no ZZ TOP cred. (I do, because my mother used to live with someone who married someone who toured with them THE DRUMMER FOR ZZ TOP [I called Mom today and asked. She said he’s afraid of ghosts but pretty cool.] Admittedly this is very marginal ZZ TOP cred, but I reiterate that I HAVE BEEN TO LA GRANGE SEVERAL TIMES.)

The final, and most pervasive, annoyance of hostel life - the thorn in the crown - is the complete absence of solitude. There’s always someone there. They may be asleep, they may speak only Serbo-Croat, they may even be on the other side of a thin wall - but they’re there. Talking. Breathing. Existing. I’m considering going into one of the viewing booths at the sex shop - not to masturbate, just to be by myself for the length of time it takes Billy the New Office Boy to realize that the way to the top is by going down.

For what it’s worth, the Hostel People think I’m an absolute freak and probably have started locking up their valuables. The way they look at me when they find me reading quietly, writing a letter or story, drinking a glass of port, or frying something for dinner is the same nervous, bewildered glance they’d probably give one of their own if he put down his bongos, slowly disrobed, and began, silently, to weep.

I haven’t put much about my personal life on this blog, partly out of decorum and tact, but mostly because I want to save some salacious stuff for Sweeps Week in case we get nominated for a blog award. (NB, I wrote this post about a week before we actually did, so brace yourself for some tawdry shit. We must live up to our Mature Content - Not Family Oriented caveat, especially since we were the only nominees so honored.) However, I did something incredibly stupid recently, and I want to appeal you, dear readers (all ten!) for help.

I went out with someone despite the presence of a DealBreaker.

You know what I mean. We all have DealBreakers - the attributes someone must not possess if we are to pursue them. They’re different for everyone, but everyone knows, or comes to know, the telltale warning signs of a Bad Idea. Just as Nature paints poisonous animals red, she makes undesirable romantic partners carry The Da Vinci Code. With this in mind, I am going to list my DealBreakers here, and if you see me making excuses for going after one of The Tainted, wrestle me to the ground and talk sense into me. If I have to be killed, so be it. Better dead than the alternatives:

Chris’s DealBreakers:

A love of:
- Evanescence, Linkin Park, or any other band “that’s so honest!”
- The primly self-condemning poetry of Arthur Rimbaud*
- “The common people”

Possession of:
- Any Che Guevara paraphernalia whatsoever
- A marijuana-themed T-shirt, especially one featuring a stoned grinning mushroom, cannabis leaf, or Jamaican
- A small vestigial tail

They Must Never Say:
- “Meat/fur/leather is murder!”
- “…noble struggle of Palestine…”
- “I don’t drink.”
- “I’m a ‘recovering Catholic.’”
- “Make love to me.”
- “I don’t particularly care for Boney M.”

They Must Not Believe In:
- Communism
- Harry Potter
- Predestination

*This is the one I ignored, but in my defense he had a Getz/Gilberto album.

There are more, but imagining an Evanescence-loving Che-embracing “muggle” touching me has left me too nauseated to continue. I’m going to go eat my sardines and fantasize about Mikeleh’s and my upcoming wedding. Now that Disneyland apparently allows The Gays to use their “Fantsy Wedding” facilites, we may be going to Florida. The thought of a somewhat-sham wedding to my best friend conducted by Ursula the octopus-drag queen and ushered by Disney workers who have just been through “diversity sensitivity” training is too fascinating a horror to be written off just yet. Imagine Mickey Mouse leading a toast about how wonderful and beautiful inter-religious gay marriages are.

Now imagine Mikeleh and me shouting foul, drunken abuse at him.

It’s a match made in heaven, if galvanized in the gutter.