by on August 22, 2007 | Trackback URI | 
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Since 1998, civil war has raged in Congo, enveloping 7 other African countries and scores of tribes and militia while mostly being ignored by the Western media. Over 4 million people have died with egregious reports of cannibalism, rape, sexual slavery, incest, child prostitution, forced labor, and the use of the child armies.
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by on August 22, 2007 | Trackback URI | Email This Post | 18 Views
There were sprinkles in her eyes, but I couldn’t notice, too lost was I in candy-coated thoughts of a land where the girls danced on striped sugar poles and the kisses they blew were chocolate. Pyramids give way to skyscrapers and time moves on like a golden river where one taste is never the same as the next. Still I wish I had thought to cross her more with more wit. It wasn’t till later that I thought about how grandely I could have sprinkled myself in her. Sweet sugar drunk together, dreaming of worlds that hadn’t existed till we spoke the words silently together star gazing in a field of coffee beans and fairies. Too saccharine thoughts of love when really all I could think to say was, “my mint mocha’s grande too, babe.” She would never buy my magic beans, roasted in the heat of unfulfilled desire, ground under the weight of self-made promises broken. Feeling like the ass instead of the juan, slumped down I just moved on to the next barrista at the next java shack, with a sprinkle in her eye and minty disposition.
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Guts
by Chuck Palahniuk
Inhale.
Take in as much air as you can. This story should last about as long as you can hold your breath, and then just a little bit longer. So listen as fast as you can.
A friend of mine, when he was 13 years old he heard about “pegging.” This is when a guy gets banged up the butt with a dildo. Stimulate the prostate gland hard enough, and the rumor is you can have explosive hands-free orgasms. At that age, this friend’s a little sex maniac. He’s always jonesing for a better way to get his rocks off. He goes out to buy a carrot and some petroleum jelly. To conduct a little private research. Then he pictures how it’s going to look at the supermarket checkout counter, the lonely carrot and petroleum jelly rolling down the conveyer belt toward the grocery store cashier. All the shoppers waiting in line, watching. Everyone seeing the big evening he has planned.
So my friend, he buys milk and eggs and sugar and a carrot, all the ingredients for a carrot cake. And Vaseline.
Like he’s going home to stick a carrot cake up his butt.
At home, he whittles the carrot into a blunt tool. He slathers it with grease and grinds his ass down on it. Then, nothing. No orgasm. Nothing happens except it hurts.
Then, this kid, his mom yells it’s supper time. She says to come down, right now.
He works the carrot out and stashes the slippery, filthy thing in the dirty clothes under his bed.
After dinner, he goes to find the carrot, and it’s gone. All his dirty clothes, while he ate dinner, his mom grabbed them all to do laundry. No way could she not find the carrot, carefully shaped with a paring knife from her kitchen, still shiny with lube and stinky.
This friend of mine, he waits months under a black cloud, waiting for his folks to confront him. And they never do. Ever. Even now that he’s grown up, that invisible carrot hangs over every Christmas dinner, every birthday party. Every Easter egg hunt with his kids, his parents’ grandkids, that ghost carrot is hovering over all of them. That something too awful to name.
People in France have a phrase: “staircase wit.” In French: esprit de l’escalier. It means that moment when you find the answer, but it’s too late. Say you’re at a party and someone insults you. You have to say something. So under pressure, with everybody watching, you say something lame. But the moment you leave the party….
As you start down the stairway, then-magic. You come up with the perfect thing you should’ve said. The perfect crippling put-down.
That’s the spirit of the stairway.
The trouble is, even the French don’t have a phrase for the stupid things you actually do say under pressure. Those stupid, desperate things you actually think or do.
Some deeds are too low to even get a name. Too low to even get talked about.
Looking back, kid-psych experts, school counselors now say that most of the last peak in teen suicide was kids trying to choke while they beat off. Their folks would find them, a towel twisted around their kid’s neck, the towel tied to the rod in their bedroom closet, the kid dead. Dead sperm everywhere. Of course the folks cleaned up. They put some pants on their kid. They made it look … better. Intentional at least. The regular kind of sad teen suicide.
Another friend of mine, a kid from school, his older brother in the Navy said how guys in the Middle East jack off different than we do here. This brother was stationed in some camel country where the public market sells what could be fancy letter openers. Each fancy tool is just a thin rod of polished brass or silver, maybe as long as your hand, with a big tip at one end, either a big metal ball or the kind of fancy carved handle you’d see on a sword. This Navy brother says how Arab guys get their dick hard and then insert this metal rod inside the whole length of their boner. They jack off with the rod inside, and it makes getting off so much better. More intense.
It’s this big brother who travels around the world, sending back French phrases. Russian phrases. Helpful jack-off tips.
After this, the little brother, one day he doesn’t show up at school. That night, he calls to ask if I’ll pick up his homework for the next couple weeks. Because he’s in the hospital.
He’s got to share a room with old people getting their guts worked on. He says how they all have to share the same television. All he’s got for privacy is a curtain. His folks don’t come and visit. On the phone, he says how right now his folks could just kill his big brother in the Navy.
On the phone, the kid says how-the day before-he was just a little stoned. At home in his bedroom, he was flopped on the bed. He was lighting a candle and flipping through some old porno magazines, getting ready to beat off. This is after he’s heard from his Navy brother. That helpful hint about how Arabs beat off. The kid looks around for something that might do the job. A ballpoint pen’s too big. A pencil’s too big and rough. But dripped down the side of the candle, there’s a thin, smooth ridge of wax that just might work. With just the tip of one finger, this kid snaps the long ridge of wax off the candle. He rolls it smooth between the palms of his hands. Long and smooth and thin.
Stoned and horny, he slips it down inside, deeper and deeper into the piss slit of his boner. With a good hank of the wax still poking out the top, he gets to work.
Even now, he says those Arab guys are pretty damn smart. They’ve totally reinvented jacking off. Flat on his back in bed, things are getting so good, this kid can’t keep track of the wax. He’s one good squeeze from shooting his wad when the wax isn’t sticking out anymore.
The thin wax rod, it’s slipped inside. All the way inside. So deep inside he can’t even feel the lump of it inside his piss tube.
From downstairs, his mom shouts it’s supper time. She says to come down, right now. This wax kid and the carrot kid are different people, but we all live pretty much the same life.
It’s after dinner when the kid’s guts start to hurt. It’s wax, so he figured it would just melt inside him and he’d pee it out. Now his back hurts. His kidneys. He can’t stand straight.
This kid talking on the phone from his hospital bed, in the background you can hear bells ding, people screaming. Game shows.
The X-rays show the truth, something long and thin, bent double inside his bladder. This long, thin V inside him, it’s collecting all the minerals in his piss. It’s getting bigger and rougher, coated with crystals of calcium, it’s bumping around, ripping up the soft lining of his bladder, blocking his piss from getting out. His kidneys are backed up. What little that leaks out his dick is red with blood.
This kid and his folks, his whole family, them looking at the black X-ray with the doctor and the nurses standing there, the big V of wax glowing white for everybody to see, he has to tell the truth. The way Arabs get off. What his big brother wrote him from the Navy.
On the phone, right now, he starts to cry.
They paid for the bladder operation with his college fund. One stupid mistake, and now he’ll never be a lawyer.
Sticking stuff inside yourself. Sticking yourself inside stuff. A candle in your dick or your head in a noose, we knew it was going to be big trouble.
What got me in trouble, I called it Pearl Diving. This meant whacking off underwater, sitting on the bottom at the deep end of my parents’ swimming pool. With one deep breath, I’d kick my way to the bottom and slip off my swim trucks. I’d sit down there for two, three, four minutes.
Just from jacking oft’ I had huge lung capacity. If I had the house to myself, I’d do this all afternoon. After I’d finally pump out my stuff, my sperm, it would hang there in big, fat, milky gobs.
After that was more diving, to catch it all. To collect it and wipe each handful in a towel. That’s why it was called Pearl Diving. Even with chlorine, there was my sister to worry about. Or, Christ almighty, my mom.
That used to be my worst fear in the world: my teenage virgin sister, thinking she’s just getting fat, then giving birth to a two-headed, retard baby. Both heads looking just like me. Me, the father and the uncle. In the end, it’s never what you worry about that gets you.
The best part of Pearl Diving was the inlet port for the swimming pool filter and the circulation pump. The best part was getting naked and sitting on it.
As the French would say, Who doesn’t like getting their butt sucked? Still, one minute you’re just a kid getting off, and the next minute you’ll never be a lawyer.
One minute I’m settling on the pool bottom and the sky is wavy, light blue through eight feet of water above my head. The world is silent except for the heartbeat in my ears. My yellowstriped swim trunks are looped around my neck for safe keeping, just in case a friend, a neighbor, anybody shows up to ask why I skipped football practice. The steady suck of the pool inlet hole is lapping at me and I’m grinding my skinny white ass around on that feeling.
One minute I’ve got enough air and my dick’s in my hand. My folks are gone at their work and my sister’s got ballet. Nobody’s supposed to be home for hours.
My hand brings me right to getting off, and I stop. I swim up to catch another big breath. I dive down and settle on the bottom.
I do this again and again.
This must be why girls want to sit on your face. The suction is like taking a dump that never ends. My dick hard and getting my butt eaten out, I do not need air. My heartbeat in my ears, I stay under until bright stars of light start worming around in my eyes. My legs straight out, the back of each knee rubbed raw against the concrete bottom. My toes are turning blue, my toes and fingers wrinkled from being so long in the water.
And then I let it happen. The big white gobs start spouting. The pearls. It’s then I need some air. But when I go to kick off against the bottom, I can’t. I can’t get my feet under me. My ass is stuck.
Emergency paramedics will tell you that every year about 150 people get stuck this way, sucked by a circulation pump. Get your long hair caught, or your ass, and you’re going to drown. Every year, tons of people do. Most of them in Florida.
People just don’t talk about it. Not even French people talk about everything. Getting one knee up, getting one foot tucked under me, I get to half standing when I feel the tug against my butt. Getting my other foot under me, I kick off against the bottom. I’m kicking free, not touching the concrete, but not getting to the air, either.
Still kicking water, thrashing with both arms, I’m maybe halfway to the surface but not going higher. The heartbeat inside my head getting loud and fast.
The bright sparks of light crossing and crisscrossing my eyes, I turn and look back … but it doesn’t make sense. This thick rope, some kind of snake, blue white and braided with veins, has come up out of the pool drain and it’s holding on to my butt. Some of the veins are leaking blood, red blood that looks black underwater and drifts away from little rips in the pale skin of the snake. The blood trails away, disappearing in the water, and inside the snake’s thin, blue white skin you can see lumps of some half-digested meal.
That’s the only way this makes sense. Some horrible sea monster, a sea serpent, something that’s never seen the light of day, it’s been hiding in the dark bottom of the pool drain, waiting to eat me.
So …I kick at it, at the slippery, rubbery knotted skin and veins of it, and more of it seems to pull out of the pool drain. It’s maybe as long as my leg now, but still holding tight around my butthole. With another kick, I’m an inch closer to getting another breath. Still feeling the snake tug at my ass, I’m an inch closer to my escape.
Knotted inside the snake, you can see corn and peanuts. You can see a long bright-orange ball. It’s the kind of horsepill vitamin my dad makes me take, to help put on weight. To get a football scholarship. With extra iron and omegathree fatty acids.
It’s seeing that vitamin pill that saves my life.
It’s not a snake. It’s my large intestine, my colon pulled out of me. What doctors call prolapsed. It’s my guts sucked into the drain.
Paramedics will tell you a swimming pool pump pulls 80 gallons of water every minute. That’s about 400 pounds of pressure. The big problem is we’re all connected together inside. Your ass is just the far end of your mouth. If I let go, the pump keeps working-unraveling my insides-until it’s got my tongue. Imagine taking a 400-pound shit and you can see how this might turn you inside out.
What I can tell you is your guts don’t feel much pain. Not the way your skin feels pain. The stuff you’re digesting, doctors call it fecal matter. Higher up is chyme, pockets of a thin, runny mess studded with corn and peanuts and round green peas.
That’s all this soup of blood and corn, shit and sperm and peanuts floating around me. Even with my guts unraveling out my ass, me holding on to what’s left, even then my first want is to somehow get my swimsuit back on.
God forbid my folks see my dick.
My one hand holding a fist around my ass, my other hand snags my yellowstriped swim trunks and pulls them from around my neck. Still, getting into them is impossible.
You want to feel your intestines, go buy a pack of those lambskin condoms. Take one out and unroll it. Pack it with peanut butter. Smear it with petroleum jelly and hold it under water. Then try to tear it. Try to pull it in half. It’s too tough and rubbery. It’s so slimy you can’t hold on.
A lambskin condom, that’s just plain old intestine.
You can see what I’m up against.
You let go for a second and you’re gutted.
You swim for the surface, for a breath, and you’re gutted.
You don’t swim and you drown.
It’s a choice between being dead right now or a minute from right now.
What my folks will find after work is a big naked fetus, curled in on itself. Floating in the cloudy water of their backyard pool. Tethered to the bottom by a thick rope of veins and twisted guts. The opposite of a kid hanging himself to death while he jacks off. This is the baby they brought home from the hospital 13 years ago. Here’s the kid they hoped would snag a football scholarship and get an MBA. Who’d care for them in their old age. Here’s all their hopes and dreams. Floating here, naked and dead. All around him, big milky pearls of wasted sperm.
Either that or my folks will find me wrapped in a bloody towel, collapsed halfway from the pool to the kitchen telephone, the ragged, torn scrap of my guts still hanging out the leg of my yellowstriped swim trunks.
What even the French won’t talk about.
That big brother in the Navy, he taught us one other good phrase. A Russian phrase. The way we say, “I need that like I need a hole in my head…,” Russian people say, “I need that like I need teeth in my asshole……
Mne eto nado kak zuby v zadnitse.
Those stories about how animals caught in a trap will chew off their leg, well, any coyote would tell you a couple bites beats the hell out of being dead.
Hell … even if you’re Russian, someday you just might want those teeth.
Otherwise, what you have to do isyou have to twist around. You hook one elbow behind your knee and pull that leg up into your face. You bite and snap at your own ass. You run out of air and you will chew through anything to get that next breath.
It’s not something you want to tell a girl on the first date. Not if you expect a kiss good night. If I told you how it tasted, you would never, ever again eat calamari.
It’s hard to say what my parents were more disgusted by: how I’d got in trouble or how I’d saved myself. After the hospital, my mom said, “You didn’t know what you were doing, honey. You were in shock.” And she learned how to cook poached eggs.
All those people grossed out or feeling sorry for me….
I need that like I need teeth in my asshole.
Nowadays, people always tell me I look too skinny. People at dinner parties get all quiet and pissed off when I don’t eat the pot roast they cooked. Pot roast kills me. Baked ham. Anything that hangs around inside my guts for longer than a couple of hours, it comes out still food. Home-cooked lima beans or chunk light tuna fish, I’ll stand up and find it still sitting there in the toilet.
After you have a radical bowel resectioning, you don’t digest meat so great. Most people, you have five feet of large intestine. I’m lucky to have my six inches. So I never got a football scholarship. Never got an MBA. Both my friends, the wax kid and the carrot kid, they grew up, got big, but I’ve never weighed a pound more than I did that day when I was 13.
Another big problem was my folks paid a lot of good money for that swimming pool. In the end my dad just told the pool guy it was a dog. The family dog fell in and drowned. The dead body got pulled into the pump. Even when the pool guy cracked open the filter casing and fished out a rubbery tube, a watery hank of intestine with a big orange vitamin pill still inside, even then my dad just said, “That dog was fucking nuts.”
Even from my upstairs bedroom window, you could hear my dad say, “We couldn’t trust that dog alone for a second….”
Then my sister missed her period.
Even after they changed the pool water, after they sold the house and we moved to another state, after my sister’s abortion, even then my folks never mentioned it again.
Ever.
That is our invisible carrot.
You. Now you can take a good, deep breath.
I still have not.
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i apologize for the lack of updates and articles. its been a long, trying summer for me, and im off in a couple of weeks to graduate school in London. anyway, in the process of moving out of my apartment, i found some writings from around the third year of college — approximately 4 years ago when i would have been 20 years old. this particular passage felt particularly timely given the big leap ahead:
I feel like I am mandated to rebel against this existence. Yet my detachment from my own outward life weighs me down. Here I am, in limbo, unable to get over myself or the little obstacles that only hinder growth. Can I and the rest of the world stop feeling sorry for ourselves for one minute and rise above our egos?
May we are afraid that if we address the big picture, we will truly reach something. Satisfaction is a forbidden fruit in these parts.
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by on August 17, 2007 | Trackback URI | Email This Post | 7 Views
Given Mel Gibson’s pinache for anti-Semitism (perceived or blatant, including his “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” quote to an Los Angeles police officer), an interesting thing happens when you search for a DVD on Israel at Amazon (the choices below it are a tad nefarious too):
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“A math question: if it took 3,000 Israeli troops and police to evict two families of Jewish settlers from the West Bank city of Hebron, how many would it take to clear out the 275,000 Jewish settlers living inside the Palestinian territories? Two possible answers: a) it would require nearly every single policeman and soldier on duty in Israel today; b) zero, because it simply won’t happen.”
Tim McGirk in The West Bank: Mission Critical in Time Magazine
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The Article: Xtreme Religion by Ian Murphy in Buffalo Beast.
The Text: Since the dawn of man, deep, resonating questions have plagued his mind: What is the meaning of life? Is there a higher power? What is man’s place in the universe? Is there an afterlife? Who let the dogs out? Who? Who? Who?
Modern man, for all his Tony Robbins Personal PowerTM seminars, books, tapes and various twelve step programs, appears no closer to understanding these cosmic riddles than an Egyptian goatherd, circa 2000 BC, who believed the sky was a cow goddess, eating the sun every dusk, and giving birth to it every dawn. The point being: far too many people still believe in equally crazy shit.
Some will tell you religion (rough etymology – re linking) no longer links us back to anything; no unmoved mover, no creator, no creamy nougat center. It does however, link us to our own biological past, our primitive hardwiring, our kill-or-be-killed instincts, our clan versus clan animus. A good portion of the world population and this country are running on out-of-date mythological software. Linux, Windows 1400XP, Wahabbism, Santa Claus: ideas too are comprised of atoms. And so are bombs. Both are dangerous, especially when split.
It has always been about resources: fertile land, water, salt, gold, cotton, petroleum, stuffed crust pizza. “We deserve it and they don’t.” Aircraft carriers have replaced frigates, and entire civilizations localized clans, yet people shy away from saying “clash of civilizations.” Seems too dire, a position for zealots even, but true nonetheless. Mind you I’m not strictly speaking East v. West, but also rational v. irrational. Fanatical rationalists en garde!
The ideas of chosen people and jealous gods have justified atrocities and plundering from the ancient Aztecs straight through to the similarly antiquated mindset of the American religious right. The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, Slavery, the Holocaust—all the classics. Religion has been there every bloody step of the way, linking us back to the murderous savages we are. We only think we are more civilized because we partake in ritualized, rather than actual, cannibalism. Ask a devout Catholic about the tasteless wafer they consume weekly (made in a poorly lit Mexican factory) and they will tell you they are eating god. Same dance, different tune. Deep-seated, biologically rooted memes are a hard habit to break. Ape crack.
Folk on the moderate left like to remind us from time to time—like when fundamentalists wig out, commit arson and act like all around genocidal assholes—that these perpetrators are extremists, perverts of an otherwise moderate dogma. “These people are wackos, they don’t represent our faith,” apologists apologize. Bullshit.
The true believers are the ones willing to smash planes into buildings, hack people to pieces and bomb OBGYNs based on morality gleaned from sacred texts. God’s children, doin’ the best they know how.
These are real religious people, the ones who will get all the virgins and ride shotgun in Jesus’ sweet rapture mobile. What could be better than an eternity of tight pussy or snaggin’ a ride in the Son of Man’s tricked-out, flying Prius?
The truly faithful, the freaks, the believers are in it for the payout. All the others are Christian, Muslim and Jew in name only, they are the perversion; they are the ones who don’t understand their own faith. Probably people like your aunt, who calls herself a Christian, but gets squeamish over killing fags. You should either follow the bible to the letter or not. No more of this poetic license crap: burn down an embassy, or get off the pot. Take it or leave it. That’s why I liked the Taliban so. Religion is fucking crazy and those dudes were the craziest cats around.
The divinely guided, who will kill you, or at least wish you dead, because you belong to a different book club – this is what religion is.
People became hysterical over the James Frey deceit: Can you imagine what would happen if Oprah took on the Bible or the Koran? Surely the apocalypse (rough etymology – enlightenment) would be nigh. But don’t let your preacher or mullah know that little tidbit, because it smacks of book learnin’ – and not the good book either. Eating from the tree of knowledge has its consequence: Expulsion from ignorance.
What we need now are anti-preachers, anti-faith based initiatives, anti-Mohammeds and antichrists. We can no longer stand idly by, watching the retarded children pummel each other with stones and missiles. It is time for an apocalypse. Religion is a vile meme, its protracted end being dominion over the “other”: man over woman, tribe over tribe, “our god can beat up your god.” It will be hard to quash in the face of baseless afterlife promises and punishments, that some hold so dear. Maybe we could give the believers raisins, cookies and a universal healthcare system as substitute. Or maybe, just maybe – we should give them all a free one-way ticket to the heaven of their choice. Hey – it’s an idea!
It’s time to turn “Godless” from an epithet to a compliment. Every day, decent, reasonable secular folk withstand a barrage of damnation from less intelligent people. But for some reason, we are expected to humor them and their simpering expectations of deference. Fuck that. Religion is a mental disorder, obscuring reality and clouding thought, and we are the cure. Now is no time to back down.
This issue of The BEAST—especially this issue—is not for the religious, unless they’re ready to admit they’re taking part in an enormous charade, or at least ready to laugh about it.
The Analysis: 
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