I've decided to do Sunday Funnies, or at least I hope to post something or other on Sundays that people will hopefully find funny. Anything you read on a post from a Sunday is most likely an invention. I made up the Candice Swanepoel and Jimmy Durante post, for example. Although I did see somewhere that Candice Swanepoel got a nose job, I have no idea whether that was idle internet conjecture or fact - I didn't bother to fact-check (I normally do). Although, as far as I know, Jimmy Durante did not have his nose enlarged, it was genius on his part, I believe, to exploit what could almost be considered a deformity, with great bravura.
If you have any ideas for future Sunday posts, please send them along.
Saturday, April 19, 2014
HAPPY EASTER
LINDSAY LOHAN
Poor thing. I have a real soft spot for Lindsay. Alanis Morissette said any form of child celebrity is child abuse (Alanis herself was a child actor in a Canadian soap opera): that when you see a child in a movie cry, they are in fact crying, they're not acting, at that moment they're a kid in pain and crying. A few people who had big acting or music careers as children have turned out alright like... well, like... oh you know, you know the one I mean.
Every time I see a photo of her (and I try not to read celebrity news, but it is impossible to avoid it all - the last thing I ever wanted to see was Justin Bieber's new hair cut [nor did I ever want to see his old one, for that matter], but see it I did, over and over) - anyway, every time I see a picture of Lindsay she looks lost, confused, as yet again she is hustled off to jail or rehab, having thrown another several months of her life down the toilet.
I certainly know what it's like to fuck up big-time; I've been in a few rehabs and once in jail - not for the same reasons, but I know how awful it is to have everyone gossiping about you, making assumptions, having news stories written about you that are so fictional it is amazing the people who write them have jobs (by the way, I want to do a meditation soon on the people who write the "news": why on God's Green Earth do we trust them; journalists in general have a very justifiable reputation for having lifestyles worse than Lindsay's - I'd very much like to do an expose on the people who bring us the "truth"). It angers me that not only did someone "leak" a list of her lovers recently to the "press", but that anyone was willing to publish it. Everyone who published it knew where it came from (rehab), and everyone who published it knew that everything that happens in rehab is supposed to be confidential. Making life painful for people via the "press" has become a national past time, and it is a despicable one, and the people who profit from others' pain have a spirit akin to that of a Bridge Troll.
The above photo is a fake, another bit of mind-bending "press" that pops up about pretty actresses like Lindsay. Why make a fake? There are plenty of real pictures of her naked - and she's much prettier than the fake.
Anyway, Lindsay kind of reminds me of myself, not only because of the trouble we've both been in, but because of our mutual beauty. I know a lot of people have been wondering what I look like with my shirt off, so I made a fake of myself. Like Lindsay, I look a lot better than this in real life, but I still feel a little uncomfortable about my body, and I thought it would be vain to post a rockin' selfie on my own page.
Anyway, and this I mean,
HAPPY EASTER EVERYONE
The Lord is Risen.
The Lord is Risen indeed. Hallelujah.
Saturday, March 22, 2014
OK, SUNDAY FUNNIES.
Introduction.
I wrote this for the Shouts and Murmurs feature of the New Yorker Magazine. They read it, and told me that Shouts and Murmurs were "humorous" fiction pieces. I've sent many many things to the New Yorker, and been rejected many times, but that was the first time they had actually been rude to me in a rejection. In fact, I think the problem was that whoever the ASSHOLE who read it and rejected it was, knew very little about mid-western, California thinking or humor. Probably some brat brought up on 57th street who had not moved more than three or four blocks in his entire life His, or her, range of humor lay within a 12 block radius. Idiots are born and reared and well educated in NYC, and even get good and influencial jobs sometimes. What they don't know about is the Redwood Mafia. Old hippies who have a serious ax to grind with non pot-smokers in NYC. They're coming for you. They know where you live, you New Yorker Columbia fuck. Enjoy your last few days on Earth.*
BRAVE NEW CITY OF THE FUTURE
By
Douglas C. Ferrin
I’ve been living in Eureka – that’s in Cali – but I always have considered myself a New Yorker. I’ve been to NYC four times; this trip will make five. That’s in fifteen years mind you. You could say I’m bi-coastal.
That’s a long flight from Arcata/Eureka to NYC – oh, about fourteen hours on a good day. Once there were rumors of a non-stop but it turned out that that was just talk. So on the jump from Eureka to San Fran, there were only two of us in the eight seat Cessna and the other guy pretended to be asleep. I know he was pretending because I saw him crack open his right eye and I saw his eyeball dart around too.
So when I got on the plane from San Fran to Houston, I was sure ready for some good chat with my neighbor. He had the window and I had an aisle seat. And boy what a grump he was. He was mumbling when he said it, but I’m pretty sure he told Jesus Christ Himself to shut the bleep up. Talk about trying to get blood from a turnip.
The food was crummy but I didn’t care because I was going to be in New York in a few hours.
Well it was night by the time I landed and I got a cab to my Soho hotel; I closed my eyes for the whole drive because I wanted to see the city at first in broad day light. It had been nine years since my last stay and I wanted to see this “Brave New City of the Future”, as everyone kept calling it, in its boldest brightest colors. Once in my room, I closed the curtains, ordered in Chinese and watched the tube until I fell asleep. In the morning I went down to the coffee shop in my hotel and had the continental breakfast with eggs and bacon. I sat at the bar so as not to look out the windows. Then finally it was time.
I was almost shaking in anticipation. I opened the café door, fully opened my eyes – and a good thing because the guy with the jackhammer was three feet from the door and I would have lost a toe maybe a foot if I hadn’t been looking where I was going. Now I really was shaking but mostly from the gripping fear that often follows the relief – that: “thank God I still have my toe, or my life or whatever” feeling – of still being in one piece. So I scooted out of the way of the door and of the three guys working. One of them was working anyway, the guy with the jackhammer. The other two drank coffee. I stood next to the building at the inside edge of the sidewalk. I looked up. I looked around. I know it made me look like a tourist but I did it anyway. My mouth fell open. Soho hadn’t changed at all. Where, I asked myself, was the big geodesic dome covering the city? I’d seen it on the cover of a Scientific America at the dentist office just a few weeks ago. And the monorails? When the guy with the jackhammer stopped jackhammering and lifted his goggles to hoot at a girl, I said, “Hey. Where’s the dome?”
“The what?” he said, wiping the back of his wrist across his forehead, but still looking at the girl. “Hey Baby, don’t be that way,” he called.
“You know,” I said, “Isn’t there supposed to be a big dome covering the city and all the monorails?”
Still distracted by the girl, the guy said, “Huh?”
I repeated my question. The girl had gone into a shop. The workman frowned thoughtfully, looked up, shook his head and said, “Yeah I dunno. Maybe.”
“Hey, maybe you’re digging a hole for it now!” I exclaimed, the idea just having occurred to me.
“Yeah, I dunno what it’s for. I’m union,” he said. “I don’t think so though,” he continued after a pause. Nodding toward the coffee drinkers he said, “Think these guys are with Water.”
“Well,” I said. The jackhammer guy put his goggles over his eyes again, said, “Sorry man,” then once again shattered the relentless noise of the city.
I felt lost. I mean I knew where I was. Like I said, I consider myself a New Yorker, but maybe I had been expecting too much; after all I hadn’t actuallyread the science magazine – I’d been called into Dr. Soman’s office just as I was picking it up - but it had looked so real. I’d read other things too: about the friendly new face of the city; how people were more relaxed because there was less crime; how businesses were trying to have a kinder “interface” with the public, as one article had put it.
Well, being in Soho already, I hopped over to Mary Boone Gallery. The same gaunt, effete looking fellow in the expensive suit who I had first seen maybe thirty years ago sat at the same little table outside the door to the gallery. After thirty years, he still wouldn’t look at me, even after my big west coast, “Hi, howya doin?” I went into the gallery but the walls were empty. A guy who looked like an action painter from the sixties was up on a cherry picker moving lights around. “Hey there,” I said. He didn’t answer, but he did glance down at me. “Any good shows in town?” I asked.
“Futhiscrp,” he mumbled. “CRAP!,” he said, having burned himself on a hot bulb. He sucked the side of his hand, then saw me still standing there. “Go to Chelsea,” he said.
“Chelsea?”
“Everybody moved to Chelsea after 9/11. Check it out.”
He didn’t have a gallery guide so I went to the subway to see how to get to Chelsea. The subway to Chelsea appeared to be one of those proximity things, like the Vatican subway stop in Rome that lets you off when St. Peter’s is still somewhere beyond the curve of the earth. “Bleep it,” I said and took a cab.
I couldn’t believe there could be art in the concrete chunks that passed for buildings in Chelsea. And yet, when I went into one of them, there must have been a hundred galleries. In that building alone mind you. I’m serious. I started on the ninth floor and went to every gallery on the top three floors. By the sixth floor I was parched and feeling faint. I soldiered on for another floor but then I had to sit in the only chair in a white room the size of a college field house with one painting on each wall. I put my head in my hands but it didn’t do any good because every time I rubbed my eyes or even closed them I could see sun-spot-like images that had burned themselves onto my retinas of twig horses and busted old radios and kitchen stuff on shiny wood floors and brutalized mannequins. I staggered back out to the street and asked a man in a suit if there were any coffee shops around.
“Go to the Village,” he said. “It’s better there.”
Suffering from severe Museum Fatigue, as I call it, tired, hungry, thirsty and sad, I walked east for a mile until I finally saw a cab. I think he saw me too but I’ll never know. After an indeterminate time one stopped for me. “Where to?” asked the cabby as I got in. “I wanna go home,” I said, closing the door.
“Yeah? Where’s that?”
“Arcata, Eureka… you know.”
“Wellll….” he said. “Uh… what street’s that on?”
“I don’t care,” I said. “Just head uptown. Up the middle of town, please.”
“Yeaaaaa, OK. Fifth Avenue OK?” he said. He was looking at me in the mirror; I nodded and off we went. I had him let me out somewhere in the 40s outside of one of those old Chock full ‘o Nuts diners, except it wasn’t Chock full ‘o Nuts anymore, but it looked the same. It was already late afternoon. I had the place to myself so I took a table near the window. “Whattl it be?” the sixtyish waitress with craggy skin asked.
“A new lease on life,” I said. “A functional childhood and a new look at the future.”
“I hear ya’,” she said and laughed but I wasn’t trying to be funny.
“I’ll have coffee and three Coney Islands,” I said. “And a big water.”
“You got it.”
And actually the peace and aloneness and the coffee and hot dogs were almost as good as a new lease on life (I knew I’d never get the functional childhood). I sat in the warmth and silence of the diner looking at the noise outside – people in suits and skirts and with strollers, all but power-walking, the cars reflecting the orange late afternoon sun off chrome and mirrors so I had to squint sometimes. Tired but somewhat refreshed, I almost started to feel at home. I walked up to 57th St., and went in to some book shops. The air was getting chilly and the sun was going down as I entered a building with galleries. There weren’t as many as there used to be because everyone had gone to Chelsea and some of my favorites had gone bankrupt, I was told by pretty girls behind big wood desks, and some of the owners had died, but I saw a couple of good shows anyway.
I walked up to Central Park and saw the trendy shops for children and people who like Apple gadgets and crossed to where the carriages give rides. Someone on a bike advised me to “Watch where the bleep [I] was bleeping going,” which actually made me smile. I had saved the apple slices from the airplane lunch I had bought the day before – they were in plastic wrap and still in my pocket and they had that old-lunch pail kind of smell. I asked a driver if I could give them to his horse and he said OK. The horse gulped them down, almost taking off my hand and slobbering it with its huge lips. It breathed out, warm appley horsey air right in my face, then it rubbed its nose on my shoulder and I patted its warm, steaming, acrid smelling neck.
I headed uptown: I wanted to see that big Rembrandt painting where he thought he looked like a Chinese Emperor at the Frick Museum. Someone somewhere that day had told me that further uptown Harlem was jumping. I didn’t really care, but it was interesting. Across from the Frick, I breathed deeply and looked down at the darkening park and the crowd and rumble and all the movement and the middle-aged lady reading down below the balustrade on a bench, deeply absorbed in her book. I hadn’t been to Times Square yet, which someone somewhere that day had told me was now a Disney park. Nevertheless I decided things hadn’t changed much at all. Not really. That made me happy.
THE END
* I am making perhaps the very wrong assumption that most people reading this have some sense of West Coast humor and don't need the specifics mapped out for them. For example, when our protagonist claims there were rumors once of a non-stop flight from Arcata to NYC, he clearly places an excessive degree of importance in his tiny home town and its little airport. Let me know if you need more help, or if for some reason some joke escapes you, like they certainly did for the New Yorker Columbia Fuck who rejected it from the magazine: the man or woman who will be dead by next WASP Wednesday, a Redwood spike with a banana slug strapped to it's blunt tip, driven through his or her spleen..
©2013 Douglas C. Ferrin
Sunday, March 2, 2014
IS GETTING A NOSE JOB RIGHT FOR YOU?
I just read that Candice Swanepoel, the famous Victoria's Secret model, recently had a nose job. It's hard to imagine that a girl who was so beautiful to begin with, would ever consider such a thing, but I suppose that when your body is your livelihood, you probably obsess about how you look more than most American women obsess about their looks. Which is considerable, judging by the continued and enormous sales of fashion magazines - actual paper publications.
But let's not forget other famous nose jobs: Marilyn Monroe's career skyrocketed after she got hers. And, perhaps the most famous, or infamous of all, Jimmy Durante's. Yes, few people know that the Old Schnozzle wasn't a gift of heredity, nor was it free. However, it was an understandable adjustment for the actor, having perceived himself - pre-operation - as stuck, doomed to be a middle of the road character actor for the rest of his life. Jimmy's nose job proved to be genius as, post-op, he leaped to stardom with his legendary Schnozzle, becoming one of the supreme comedic leading men in film history.
One of my favorite Jimmy Durante bits - an advertisement for VW.
3-9-14
Monday, March 17, 2014
I'm afraid I'm a bit behind on work, and so on my blog. I'm afraid Fiction Monday will have to wait until tomorrow. Don't worry though: our hero Bon is in for some new hair-raising adventures.
Today will have to be Sunday Funnies. Remember that this is from a man's point of view: women get something like 80% more messages than men on most personal sites. When I bothered to dabble in that world, it was my experience that men had to try much, much harder to get responses. If you weren't GQ good-looking like me, it's possible you might never get a reply, no matter how interesting you are.
Today will have to be Sunday Funnies. Remember that this is from a man's point of view: women get something like 80% more messages than men on most personal sites. When I bothered to dabble in that world, it was my experience that men had to try much, much harder to get responses. If you weren't GQ good-looking like me, it's possible you might never get a reply, no matter how interesting you are.
ONLINE PERSONAL ADS. ALWAYS A GOOD LAUGH.
Hm. Slow evening. I don’t do the internet dating thing anymore, but I think I’ll have a look, just for laughs.
“Not looking for anything serious, so if you just want to hang out, go dancing, I love fine restauraunts, sent me an email.”
I’m pretty sure that means an expensive evening with no second date in view.
OK, next ad.
“I LOVE life!! Easygoing, happy. Make me laugh! Laughter a must!
Personal Motto: Carpe Diem!”
Next. Click.
I like the outdoors, the beach, sports (you bet! I’ll watch football with you
Sundays). Like to party, go to the beach, anything outdoors. I love to
Laugh! Love the beach!
Click.
Easygoing, honesty is very important to me. I love to laugh. Laughter is a
Must! Like to ski, snowboard, travel, going out, fine dining.
Blah blah blah. Who wrote these things? Maybe there’s a little book you can get with ubiquitous personal ads in them.
Who’s paying for all the above activities? And what’s up with the honesty thing anyway? Everyone thinks they’re honest, or at least if they've lied they at least believe they had a good reason for it, or else they’re a sociopath. No body’s going to look at an ad that demands the prospective date be honest and think, “Well! That sure cuts me out of the picture. Good thing she mentioned she was looking for someone honest. God only knows what would have happened when she found out what a fucking liar I am!”
And laughter. Jesus H. ….. We all like to laugh, right? If someone is funny to us, they just are; if they’re not, they’re not. We all hope someone finds us funny and that we find them funny, but you never know. Once again, who would think, “She’s gonna hate me, I’m such a bore and all.” If this man exists, his ad might read, “Dour, humorless man seeks same. Dislike job and people in general, but mostly only women, so don’t be shy.” I don’t think so.
So, we’re really weeding out the phonies here, aren't we girls? Actually, if someone has been chronically attracted to dishonest and unfunny people in the past, they will probably continue to be so. Telling a date he must be honest is like…. Nothing I can think of. It’s just stupid. Honesty and humor are experiential; they are not products. Telling someone they have to make you laugh is like telling someone they’d better make you cum four times the first time you have sex – it might give him a touch of performance anxiety. It just might.
I’d say, if someone wanted to scare off the honest men and make potentially funny ones hyper-self-conscious, keep writing those adds that insist on “honesty” and that someone “make you laugh”.
Next time I’ll talk about people who say they want someone with “No baggage.”
3-30-2014
3-30-2014
SUNDAY FUNNIES
Shows you what kind of mood I'm in.
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