PS: Did you know the Middle English wif means both wife and a band for faggots? Fill in the musical punchline of your choice.

PPS: Did you know that post scripts are considered bad style and are only used by the least serious and most disorganized writers?

All “what do I care” references on a discussion board are redundant.

Nobody cares.

son of parnas, Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Jesus, I haven’t had beer for breakfast in 10 years. What kind of life is that!?!

Those lovely eyelashes are what originally drew me in.

If the face rings a bell…

Mr…?

Baba. Ponda Baba.

Am I the only one who found the ratings page for X-Men: Last Stand a little odd?

All the rest of you: be honest with yourselves; it’s time for you to admit defeat.

I got a break-barrel air rifle instead of a repeater, or something easier to load, for the intersection of two particular reasons.

1. It only fires one shot at a time, then you have to crack it open with serious effort, carefully feed a pellet, close it, and snap a very noisy safety to off.
2. Blood lust isn’t some alien disease impossible for mankind to understand, it’s in-built and once it’s on, even reasonable, professional people start doing fucking stupid shit like firing wildly when they have no aim or idea what’s 50 yards behind the target; here’s just one example.

Responsibility starts before you’re in the middle of a thing. For the younger readers who might have enough uncorrupted gray matter to accept this as axiomatic—if you live this, you will live long and large, your way.

A lesser pantheon fan I’d linked posted on his site some pictures of dead song birds he’d shot. I removed all links on Sedition·com to him within 5 minutes. Why?

Shooting songbirds is illegal, I believe in all the US. They are protected. But beyond that, there is not one good reason to shoot one unless, and this is debatably reasonable, you’re a taxidermist or a natural history curator. You can’t eat them. A blue bird could in no manner be considered a pest or vermin. He shot them, presumably, just to show off his aim. Oh, and because someone called him a pussy. Killing a couple of totally innocuous 3 ounce animals out of peer pressure doesn’t make you a man. It makes you the kind of perdedor who will end up in real trouble someday because you can’t stand up for yourself.

You know why I miss Neil so much sometimes? Because when I called him a pussy the first time he didn’t go start a fight with his girlfriend, steal from his roommate, or shoot a bird. He lunged for me. I hook-kicked him in the face. He rolled me right the fuck over anyway.

This fellow, indeed a male, got on the bird feeder one time too many today.

But, but Ashley… but you just said… but I thought you loved animals. How could you?!

I do love animals. I love them more than you could guess because I haven’t published the story this is from yet–

I’ve cried over birds, snakes, dogs, cats, the works. Even a pet tarantula who took a spill from a height.

So, how could I? That rat, and his family, ate the electrical wiring in my wife’s car; not once, because I let that slide, not twice because even that didn’t garner a killing, but three times. Then they ate the fuel line on my car. Then they ate the baby birds in a nest of house finches I’d been watching in the ivy on our chimney. Left the bones. Chewed the flesh off the chicks. At least two (one, two) of the rats have died in the walls of the house and stunk everything up while producing clouds of flies inside. One thousand dollars of car repairs and a stack of dead song birds bought that little guy a .177 caliber wake-up call.

Bad as that picture might look, it was all over in 5 seconds for him and he never knew what was going on. The impersonal stuff is far worse. Traps—takes days to die, usually of starvation/dehydration. Agony. Poison—it’s an anti-coagulant that makes you bleed to death from the inside, plus the squirrels or other animals I’ve got no beef with might get into it.

Why post the picture, now you cry? There are more reasons than you might expect.

Nature is bloody, vicious, painful, and awful. Awful in the original sense really. I don’t know how valuable it might be for humans to escape the animal but most of you seem to have forgot that you have any at all. That’s a dangerous illusion. You believe yourself so eager to love and protect nature, yet you’re so utterly disconnected from it and ignorant of what it means.

You think you’re not a killer. You are. Walking down the street, you kill animals. Taking a shower, you kill animals. Rub your eyes. You just killed animals. Even the painfully empathetic who lean all the way to vegan are mass killers. A bag of produce which wasn’t sprayed with pesticide is loaded, loaded, with bugs. Harvesting the produce and grains kills by the million. Harvesting it at all causes mass starvation of the survivors. It’s not a zero sum game but you might not have time to make your own chair before the music stops.

You should use what you kill. It’s a nice photo. It’s a jumping off place. A note on that point—that rat didn’t die to give me something to write about. He died so we could afford to own a car. This piece and photo are reuse.

That’s a Chinese animal with no business in this environment. I advocate shooting, where it’s legal, domestic cats too. For the crybabies who think Exxon is the Devil, your tabbies and seal-points do more damage every three weeks than the Valdez did.

Heart shot, you’ll notice. No scope. The break-barrel only affording one chance at it. The rat only allowing two seconds to try.

Thousands of GIs cope with brain damage

The war in Iraq is not over, but one legacy is already here in this city and others across America: an epidemic of brain-damaged soldiers. The Associated Press, Marilynn Marchione

Also, since it’s Christmas time–

Do you like honey? I do. Do you know what honey is? I do.

It’s insect vomit.

Do you like bee barf? I do.

The number varies a bit depending on the timing and headlines but 54% of Americans would like to see Vice President Dick Cheney impeached.

This morning, against my better judgement, I picked up a Time magazine while waiting at the methadone clinic to discover that only 68% of Americans even know that the Vice President of the United States is Dick Cheney.

So… assuming the Venn is properly aligned and those positively answering question A belong to the set of those bright students in the know regarding question B–

80% of Americans want Dick Cheney impeached.

Dick, Dick, Dick… you’ve got one chance left, my negro. There is one, and only one, political avenue open that leads to Redemption Gdn for someone in your position. It has turned some of the worst, least popular Presidents into heroes. And just think of the great company you’ll have when you’re greeted by Abe and Johnny ’neath the Italian signage.