Ulysses

Happy New Year from Psychedelic Kimchi. See you in 2009.

(Unless I see you first.)

And a Horse Named Trigger

Kmart -- depending on how you know him, he's either Kennan Highly or "that weird dude who hangs around my junior high entrance gates in a trench coat" -- recommends me stuff from time to time, be it music, movies, murder weapons (icicles!), or video games. In that way, he's both my Svengali and my life coach. As reciprocation, I let him "pet" my dog and drink my tap water. Clearly, this give-and-take friendship is lopsided, Kmart my sugar daddy of entertainment, I a frigid, uncaring and often ambivalent vampire/cat.

Admittedly, I am a stubborn ass when it comes to recommendations outside of my comfort zone. I hear steak, coffee, and anal sex are hugely popular with millions of people, but none of them are my thing. Ditto for RPG games; and so when Kmart came to me in 2008 and asked if I could

(smuggle Rita Hayworth into the prison for him)

give Chrono Trigger a try, I said it would be no problem at all. Because I already knew what my opinion would be.

That opinion, like a lot of the opinions I harbor -- women shouldn't be allowed to vote, crocodiles are just retarded alligators -- turned out to be dead wrong. Chrono Trigger is possibly the most fun gaming experience I've had on the Nintendo DS, and I'm more than a little regretful I was too busy "watching" Baywatch and earning experience points as a delinquent to have played it when it was originally released 14 years ago.

But now I've finally been converted. God bless Kmart, for he is truly doing the Lord's work.

PS - I'm making a shirt: Crono&Lucca&Marle&Frog&Robo&Ayla

PPS -

Wanted -- "Review"

That Wanted currently has a 73% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 7.0 score on the IMDB infuriates me. Ditto for Roger Ebert and CHUD's Devin Faraci giving it positive reviews. They should be smarter than that. Everyone should be smarter than that, especially intelligent people. Much in the same way the film's protagonist, Wesley, is seduced by a skeleton disguised as Angelina Jolie, I can sort of understand: it's nice to look at pretty stuff; but Jolie looks positively ghoulish, and the film's "slick" style is a veneer of sugary icing on a cake of steaming dog turd. I've watched plenty of so-called "turn your brain off" movies that are quite entertaining -- fucking Star Wars -- but Wanted is the first "turn your brain off and get bitch-slapped for it" movie I've had the displeasure of viewing.

I've hated a lot of movies -- fucking The Brave One; which, I believe, Ebert gave 4 stars(!) -- but always because the execution betrays the premise. Hell, even when the execution ass rapes the premise, I might still be on board (see: Neon Maniacs). But when a film openly mocks me? This means war.

As corny as Wanted is -- and it's cornier than Iowa on growth hormones -- what makes me despise it as though it were a McDonald's employee who kicked me in the balls after I bought a Big Mac is that it actually goes out of its way to offend you. No, seriously.

Dialog from the film's third act:

"Six weeks ago, I was ordinary and pathetic, just like you."

I've never yelled at a movie before. In fact, if you yell at a movie, you maybe should be institutionalized. But how in fuck's name does Wanted have the nerve to tell me I'm pathetic? You know what's pathetic? Wanted!

What the fuck have you done lately?

That's the movie's final line. What the fuck have I done? Wasted an hour and a half watching the cinematic equivalent of being vomited on out of spite, that's what.

(Though I will say, there's no better way to offend a person. Wanted is an offense from which you can't retaliate. Still, I tried.)

0/4 *_*

The Morning (after the Day)

The Day in Question

Merry Christmas, all you aging rascals.

Balls Out

As much as I should grow up, I just can't; things that were difficult years ago are just as difficult today (if not more so) and I'd be lying if I said that I could get beyond whatever miniscule victories I once claimed as my own. (Bigger and better things, she muttered, with a diamond on her tongue.) That said, you're a real man if you can bust Darm up on the 'fast' speed setting.

BPOTY (Blog Post of the Year)

I'm still unsure whether this is the greatest thing Roger Ebert has ever written or whether it's the greatest thing anyone has.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/11/the_pot_and_how_to_use_it.html

Marinate. (Simmer?)

Oddity

1. I'm neither a Mormon, nor a Latter Day Saint, but I am Perplexed.

2. I can appreciate a good slice of mendacious pie. Lies make the world go round, after all.

3. There are 139,357 published comments. (See numbers one and two, above.)

4. Oh, so that's the origin of people born with darker skin? Golly.

5. Joseph Smith is, apparently, a key player in the Holy Trinity.

6. Where did they find those clowns from the live-action segment and, furthermore, would it be possible for the guys to actually believe what they're saying?

7. Strange. That's the best response I can possibly muster.

Maniac Dawn -- The Deformed Infant (Mother)

Nicole, it turned out after Jack asked if he could sit at her booth, had been raped multiple times by, she claimed, four men. She said this to Jack as matter-of-factly as a person remarking about the weather forecast or the price of a head of cabbage. (Forty percent chance of rain today; the cabbage at Wegmans is a dollar twenty a head.) Dumbfounded, Jack only stared at her. He fished a bent Camel from the breast pocket of his leather jacket and lit it with the sole match from a book sitting in an ashtray on the table, the restaurant's name and slogan printed on the front (THE SEA SHANTY! COME ASHORE!).

Presently, a waitress approached and asked to take Jack's order. But before she could, Claudia stood up and said, "He's not eating. He just came to pick me up. Go outside and bring the car around, Paul. This one's on me."

And that was fine by Jack. He had no money, anyway.

Apparently neither did Nicole, because fewer than ten seconds after Jack stepped down from the restaurant's unvarnished wooden steps and into the biting New England winter wind, she came bounding out of the restaurant, her purse flailing wildly. "Find the car!" she yelled.

"What car?"

"Any car!"

Like a relay runner waiting to be passed a baton -- striding slowly at first, then into a fast jog -- Jack started in the direction Nicole was running toward, looking back again and again with every breath to see how fast she was catching up. Faster than the restaurant's staff, it appeared. Ironic given his poverty, Jack thanked God for the minimum wage. The chef and management were a good 40 yards behind them, the wait staff and line cooks double that. As Jack and his newfound accomplice pulled farther ahead, he laughed out loud, imagining the busboys ankle high in the Atlantic surf.

As instinctively as migratory birds, their pace slackened as the sound of their pursuers faded. But when Jack heard a car engine in the distance behind them, he grabbed Nicole's wrist and pulled her into the uprising wood. There they sat in the dark and cold for an interminable amount of time.

Then Nicole said, "I don't think a few mussels and a Budweiser are worth all this for them, do you? Let's go."

Jack stood up and wiped the muddy knees of his jeans. He wanted a cigarette.

"I know a place not too far from here, actually. No one's there, and we can hang out until at least tomorrow. I'll let you fuck me if you follow."

"But haven't you been fucked enough tonight?"

"Metaphorically, maybe."

Maniac Dawn -- The Deformed Infant (Father)

When Jack Stillwater was eleven he lost a testicle due to torsion, and when he was twelve his father shot himself with a 12-gauge rifle. On Jack's birthday. When Jack was thirteen his mother ran away with some rube she met at the truck stop at which she waited tables. After spending a hellish year in the care of foster parents more in tune with nature than nurture, a too-kind euphemism to say that they raped their ward more times than they fed him, the San Francisco Department of Child Support Services placed him in the care of his ailing aunt Claudia, a heroin junkie with a crime record longer than a roll of unspooled industrial-sized toilet paper. Surprise, surprise; a heroin overdose killed her two weeks later. Her corpse wasn't discovered until she was twelve months dead, however; the police chancing upon the burnt shipping container she and Jack lived in, previously hidden amongst a forest of redwoods, only after a wildfire had erased the landscape.

Jack was fifteen by then and hard as a criminal twice his age. He stole to survive, and he treated the world with the contempt it had continually, unmercifully, given him. He slept by the roadside and scavenged like a vulture. He slept in wayside restrooms and saloon bathrooms, always hiding his eyes from light like a blinded mutant fish dragged from the deep. Always hating, yet always hoping. And why? Because it can always get better. That's what dreams are for, aren't they?

But dreams are only dreams until they come true. And then they do, and your dreams get bigger, more grandiose, and then sometimes Icarus's wax wings melt. But the dreams never cease. Not ever.

He met Nicole Westbrook on the day of his sixteenth birthday. The restaurant's yellowing calendar said so. She two years his junior, Jack liked Nicole instantly, because she looked like his opposite in female form. The girl was drenched like a sewer rat, huddled at a booth and shaking, her sneakered feet up on the vinyl seating.

She was shivering.