UNIVERSAL DONOR: MA VIE EN CROUTE
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Universal Donor
We can ill afford another Klendathu  feed it up!
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You are just a number to me! And that number is: PAGES UD MADE: My Books Page My Reviews Page My Reference Page My Music Page My Pictures My Store UD-RELATED PAGES: My LiveJournal My MySpace music page My Flickr page My del.icio.us page My Last.fm page My Amazon Wishlist HEAVY ROTATION TV on the Radio: Dear Science Walkmen: You & Me Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes Ratatat: LP3 Beach House: Devotion BLOGS ETC claude le monde nuncstans rock 'em stock 'em tomato nation postmodern drunkard tuckova 22 ghastly mess constintina total virility fuzzysquid drunken bee stacey nightmare elyse from ANTM stereolabrat dark side points jf_franklin 123 i love you READ NOW brotherhood 2.0 NOT BLOGS ETC qwantz (dinosaur comix) go fug yourself the burg cat and girl book of ratings married to the sea icanhascheezburger fire joe morgan fivethirtyeight.com READ NOW hospitality on parade WEIRD LOVE dead amusement pks craters! all content © 2002-2008 Jeremy Broomfield 
Hosted by: HostRocket.Com Comments by: YACCS PRAISE & REVIEWS "[UD] is a genius." --Christian Oates "[Claudia] is fucking awesome, and [UD] is a genius. And vice versa. You should all buy Fear Not." --Tricia Howey MOTTO egeo huic vigorum MY WRESTLING NAME Titan Gently MY PUNK NAME Razor Ection 
WHO LINKS TO UD? • from Technorati • from Google • from Yahoo and here's something weird: my place in Humor 3-space |
Thursday, July 31, 2003
I tend to embrace new technology with the fervor of savage tribes embracing Christianity, or smallpox, or both. For example, I want the chip in my brain that allows me to do my banking from home while hunched over a toilet, puking up Indian food ("GLARFLE transfer $500 to Dr. Klein's gastroenterology practice as down payment... BLARG!... on future reconstruction of throat lining! LARF!"). Put me at the top of the list of potential Mars colonists, where I smell a business opportunity.
(Actually I smell a movie idea, which please don't steal: it's called Mars Needs Drugs, and it's about how the first Mars colony becomes self-sufficient after ten years, and they declare their independence from Earth because they have no drugs and they are bored bored bored. The powerful drug cartels of Earth immediately launch drug-filled ships to Mars, where they hope to sell at a premium in exchange for, oh, gold or dilithium crystals or something. Earth Cops try to regain control of the colony AND stop the drug dealers from poisoning the only remaining drug-free community, and also they want control of the gold or whatever. So lots of explosions and space fights: Earth cops fighting colonists and drug dealers; competing drug companies fighting each other in the lawless expanse of space; colonists trying to keep it together while getting high for the first time ever. Umm. Maybe some aliens with intoxicating blood, who everybody wants to kill. I dunno, it's a little sketchy at this point. Mostly a title. Don't steal it.) So when the Segway Human Transporter came out after its dizzying spree of fabulist hype, I was totally psyched, if a little disappointed. Yes, it looked totally gay. Yes, it was slower and more landbound than a jetpack, which is what we really all wanted. But dude, it's got two wheels and it stands up by itself -- with gyroscopes! If you ever went on family car trips to science museums, you remember buying gyroscopes (or, if you are a girl, watching your brother buy gyroscopes, because girls can't figure that shit out) that would completely shatter into arcs of useless metal after ten tugs of their red strings, which may not have instilled much faith in gyroscopic anything, but still, the word: oh, the word: "Gyroscope." Fuck, that's a good word. If you can ignore the initial images of rotating meat and vaginal exams. Which I can, friends! All I am having a very hard time saying is: Give me my Segway now, you fucktards. I don't need one at all, and I would turn into a flabby mass of whooshing nerdlinger in about three months, possibly making Star Trek hand gestures as I wheeled gyroscopically past, but it's a chance I'm willing to take because I am sick of people explaining why Segways are stupid/dangerous/unworkable. Open your fucking eyes, people! Embrace the future! Zoom! If the price we pay for increased mobility is a few crushed pedestrian toes or mutilated homeless children, so be it! Until I get my neoprene morphine harness, this will have to do! ZOOOOM! Wednesday, July 30, 2003
I am a New Yorker, and that is a large part of why I am so annoying. Of course it is also why I am so unassailably awesome. But while showing Confusing Wizard around the city last weekend, I caught myself starting way too many sentences with "See, New Yorkers don't blah blah blah" or ending sentences with "...that's what we [New Yorkers] do." All very self-consciously tongue-in-cheek, natch, but still: there it was. Like: "New Yorkers don't mind sitting on the sidewalk, because we don't have the luxury of hectares of municipally groomed grass to cushion our fannies," or "Don't worry about traffic lights: just cross the street wherever." Except of course I didn't say "hectares," "municipally groomed," or "cushion," or "fannies."
The point is: I gotta shut up already. I am trapped here, and like any prisoner, I am trying to make the best of it, trying to justify my position as a matter of personal choice. And though it's true that it's not as pathetic as a guy in Myfuckhole, Ohio saying "Man, we got ever'thing a person could want, right here in Myfuckhole!" or blubber-encased pastel church lady from Gorgor, Wisconsin describing her hamlet as a "little corner of heaven!" GOD! Listen to me! Does anybody actually say shit like that? They can't possibly. On this issue, I am trapped between my New Yorker's condescension for ANYBODY that doesn't live here and my New Yorker's reflexive questioning of all received wisdom (aside: I suck). People don't talk like that anywhere, right? Then again, people do believe in Jesus, so there ya go. I can never leave, because I need a bodega in walking distance EVERY MOMENT OF MY LIFE, in case I feel a 2am need to shout through bulletproof plexi at a guy who is trying to translate my English words and Western hand gestures into whatever means "Camel" his local Tajikistani dialect -- or maybe it's "filters" or "hard pack" that he's having trouble with. Also I need to live in a place that comprehends the concept of "walking distance." But mostly, I need to know that when I spit on the ground, there is a chance I am making it cleaner. Because I spit a lot. Tuesday, July 29, 2003
Until I can cobble together a coherent post, please make do with this image, which I hate. Focus on it for three minutes and you will understand my omnipresent frustration at the impossibility of combating the ignorance of the world. The picture is wrong for many, many reasons, but I am specifically confused by the apparent distance between his lips and brow, and the fact that he must have no legs. I knew David Spade was short, but I didn't know he was a half-dude with a ginormous head. Guh-largle.
Thursday, July 24, 2003
Sometime next week I have to visit the Department of Motor Vehicles to replace my two-months expired license. See, if I were an alcoholic, some bouncer or bartender would have noticed the bright red expiry date in June, and I could have a shot at cirrhosis, too. Damn. I'll make you a deal, New York: let me smoke in bars again and I will consider a plan to convert my disposable income into stomach-annihilating liquids.
Also, if I still bought my smokes on the street instead of the web, some store clerk might have noticed, though why I still get carded falls outside the circle marked "my comprehension" in the Venn diagram of all the ideas in the universe. I do not look remotely teenaged. Teenagers have something about their skin, especially their face skin: it's all... taut or something. How do they do that? But so the clerks who card me must be doing something other than checking my birthdate and flattering me. Are they checking to see if they can arrange for my death in a way that will allow them to harvest my organs, which I have agreed to donate to serial killers? (Movie idea: incarcerated serial killer wakes in prison hospital after suffering a comprehensive shivving in the caf. He is told that he had to have a stomach transplant (I know, but keep listening) as a result of injuries. Only donor was some twentysomething who mysteriously choked on a bar of halvah outside a Pakistani bodega on the lower East side. Over the next couple weeks, killer realizes that something is wrong... very wrong: he has Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease! Ah, the cruel tricks of fate! Thence, his real torment begins!) So they said over the phone that I could come to the "Express" License Processing Center (skeptical quotes mine) for an eye test and, if I desire, a new picture. First of all, they are lying sacks of insulting shit if, by using the word "express," they are implying a speed of service greater than "evaporating water." Because: no. No and no. Five years ago, I had my only full-blown panic attack ever at the DMV because they took five hours to "express" their fundamental disinterest in DOING ANYTHING AT ALL FOR ME. So no, it is not fast. I have the option to take a new picture. I know that no matter how much primping and fussing I do before the snapshot, I will be a sweaty disheveled hunk of twitch after waiting on line for a few hours in completely unventilated hell. See for example how the current picture, which has balefully stared at the world for half a decade, shows a broken, hollow man whose image has been horizontally stretched a bit, making my neck look jockily wide. Ugh. Anything would be an improvement, right? If those cops from Fox's America's Most Citizen-Harrassing State Troopers wanna pull me over, they better steel themselves for a ten-year pictorial roadside assault of eyebags, scabs, oils, and asymmetry. Click click boom, and all that. A driver's license picture is worth a thousand turds. Tuesday, July 22, 2003
Some girls seem willing to do anything for Mardi Gras beads. Somewhere in this transaction lies the secret to understanding an entire generation. First of all, these girls have not "gone wild." They are in fact very, very tame, like trick ponies or labratory dogs ("Show us your--" ding! "Woo!!"). Any stonewalling or stalling tactics ("Ahm not gon' shew y'all mah bewbs! Wah should ah? Oh wayt -- y'all got bayds?") are just stylistic embellishments to the inevitable flash ("Woo!!"). Everybody flashes. It's as sure as the tides.
Second of all, this bargain may not be as lopsided as it initially appears, because although it feels like the girl is the clear loser in the tits/beads transaction, this is only true if you think that the girl has lost something of greater value. Has she? If the bead-dude has a video camera and makes a million by selling her image to drooling late-night mouth-breathers with poor impulse control and a phone within arm's reach, then: maybe. But if there's no camera, the girl has turned a profit. She may have sold herself short, since there are many men who would pay much more money (like, more than the three cents per string it costs to get a flatbed full of bead necklaces at the city limits of Panama City, FL) to see naked boobs in a different context, but unless you're a time-traveling dormitory matron from the 50's who thinks that a girl loses some of her... honor (I guess?) by "letting a lad survey the grounds without a legitimate interest in the property" (or whatever regional den-mother metaphor is in vogue in your college in the 50's), then you'll have to admit that she's in the black here. Shit, it occurs to me that my conclusion is going to be obvious. Anyfuck: the mam-flashing sororotart is actually the triumphant winner of each and every such transaction, regardless of video evidence. Because they're only tits, for fuck's sake, and nobody cares anymore. The girl gets to act like the stripper that every girl secretly wants to be -- without sliding down some greasy pole or receiving any sticky money for it. Every non-wild girl screams: I'm not a hooker! I'm not a stripper! I'm just proud of my body! And if you are so freaking thrilled at the sight of my boobs -- which I see so often they actually bore me into a coma -- well, great. I needed to fill out my costume jewelry collection anyway. Except they're not saying it. I'm saying they're saying it. They don't even know they're saying it; they can't even spell it. Hell, they can't even spell "it." They don't say it, though they should. All they say is: "Woo!!" "Show us your--" ding! "Woo!!" Wednesday, July 16, 2003
You didn't watch the MLB All-Star Game last night, and neither did I. Look: the world keeps on turning.
I did, however, catch the national anthem, as performed by that cheeky highway pianist, Vanessa Carlton. I've seen better singers -- you know, actual singers -- falter in the face of so much reverb, so many different copies of themselves echoing back like ill-wishing sonic boomerangs. But VC was great. Beautiful. Really -- perfectly on pitch, perfectly. There was a cellist next to her, and the sound was really remarkable. Brava, brava. Of course it was also fake-ass fake. Staged, stupid, funky bunk. I've recorded enough music and listened to enough pop to be able to detect an Auto-Tuned vocal line in ten seconds. The camera spent a lot of time on blimps and flags and players' bowed heads, but whenever it deigned to show VC, she blocked our view of her mouth by handjobbing the mic. It was a CD, and she mis-synched some breaths and her mouth didn't open wide enough on the belted notes. Bogus. (To judge for yourself, go here and click on "the National Anthem" video link.) But I repeat: it was beautiful. I love the sound of singing computers. Makes me think of the future, the sparkly, cybernetic future, when "pain" will be a boogeyman in a bedtime story I tell my children from the comfort of my neoprene morphine harness. I got complicated chills that originated in my extremities and converged on my sacrum. Because yeah: nobody cares about fake anymore. Less than 15 years ago Milli Vanilli were shamed out of everything they had, but authenticity isn't what it used to be. Hell, even the illusion of authenticity isn't what it used to be! The mildly talented Carlton, slutting her arms around and pulling her hair back from her face like a nervous teenager (she's 22) didn't try hard enough to fool me (and who am I, dammnit, but your average hyperobservant armchair genius?), but she didn't have to fool me -- she just had to pretend to fool me. Sort of. She seemed kinda giggly about the whole affair. Like: "dude, I'm totally not singing this right now!" Yeah! You go, girl! Or grrl! Or whatever you are! Today, it's a non-story. "Hi, AP? Reuters? CBS News? New York Fucking Post Page Six?!? I have the scoop of the century! Anthem Faked! 'Synch it Ain't So, Ho!' Um... " (click) You don't have to be real. You don't have to have talent, and you only pay your dues to the union. All you need is money behind you, shoving you into vans and studios, onto stages and planes. Nobody wants the truth -- they want chills. Give me my chills, and the dessicated bodies of pop stars gone bye-bye! I need chills! And brains! BRAAAINNNS!
Both to back up what UD was saying, and in absolute seriousness and neccessity, does anybody know of a good internist and/or pyschiatrist in New York City?
I would appreciate answers as rapidly as possible. Tuesday, July 15, 2003
Seems like everybody I know who writes on the web is writing about how crappy they feel. This is discouraging mostly because it is as sure a symptom of creative laziness as writing about the weather (see my post from July 7) or capri pants. But it is distinctly encouraging because it means that it's not just me that feels like hot steaming shit. Or, for that matter, you. I feel so bad that I just want to be horizontal, but I can't get comfortable once I am. Last night I swear I almost abraded a six-foot-long hole in my sheet by twirling around and around like a dervish praying to a distant and uninterested god of comfort and peace. "Encouraged" must be the wrong word for how I feel, containing as it does that bizarre premodern string "courage," which can't apply to me. Courage? That's a quality of suicidal knights who march into battle against retardedly lopsided odds, and that only happens in stories, right? Courage is bullshit, just another tool of the king (or whatever) to keep the masses docile, like "humility," "work ethic," "heaven," and "not rising up to kill the very small amount of people in charge of keeping you miserable."
Huh? No, I am not advocating revolution as a solution to all-over body aches. But I would advocate just about anything if I thought it had a chance of improving the human (read: my) condition. There are things you can do -- things even I could do -- to make yourself feel physically better: quit smoking, exercise, eat right BARF BARF BARF. But if you take away all the immediate, tangible causes of misery, you are left with nothing to justify the overwhelming horror that remains. I've seen it happen, so have you. Stay focused, set goals. Keep it together. There is no promise, there is no cure. There are only Band-Aids, and everyone knows that Band-Aids don't heal you, they just keep the wound out of sight and clear of dirt. In the meantime, make sure your bed is comfortable, and your living space climate-controlled. Read good books and don't watch too much TV. Then, one day, have some children, which will divert your focus for 18 solid years, robbing you of the luxury of feeling sorry for yourself (ha!). But glaargle! I already have the eyebags of a one-year-old's dad! I already have the fatigue! JUST BRING ME THE DIRTY DIAPERS AND THE ENDLESS EXPENSES! Yes, the solution: I have thunderously failed to take care of myself. Put me in charge of somebody else. Wednesday, July 09, 2003
You can't invite bad luck by talking about your good luck, so don't tell me to knock on wood. In spite of your feel-good superstitions, my flaily impersonations of retards, while tasteless, will not cause my children to "come out retarded." Misfortune is not like Beetlejuice or the Candyman -- though they are particularly charming embodiments of the concept -- and can't be summoned like a golden retriever on the porch.
So listen: I have never been mugged. I've never been punched. I have never been sexually assaulted. I have never been in a car accident. I have never been arrested. Dude: I've never even been stung by a bee. Those of you cringing in anticipation of the immediate correction of these oversights of fate can untense your stupid trapezii. I'm still here, unmugged, unstung, unraped. I've had close calls: that spinout on snowed-over Route 80; that drunken party fucktard who was staring at my mouth like it was a fisty bull's-eye; the time I was almost hit by a train. Ooh! Once I was sitting in my laundromat, waiting for my wash to finish, and I was reading the last ten pages of a Joseph Heller's Something Happened (which is key because for almost 600 pages nothing happens at all and then, at the very end, something does, and it is very very very bad), and I was so totally engrossed that it wasn't 'til I finished that I noticed the cashier at the back sort of quivering and crying. The place had just been robbed at gunpoint, with such quiet efficiency that the robber had rustled past me, gun in hand, like a dryer sheet in the wind. Hooray for literature! I've always said New York is really safe, sometimes by comparing it to criminal hellholes like San Francisco or D.C., but usually just on the strength of my personal experience. Well, that's stupid; anecdotal evidence is no basis for, well, anything. So I admit, now, that as a six-foot-one male with long supple arms and a frighteningly huge jaw, I have less to fear than ittle bittle puny girly you. I am free to live my life without fear, until the day I'm forced by circumstance to perceive the dangers that grandparents have always seen in hitchhikers, alleys, and bodies of water. Until then, however, I will continue to stride carelessly through throngs of Hell's Angels on my way to the roof to practice my fencing moves in a thunderstorm. Monday, July 07, 2003
Whiners want you to believe their lives are worse, much worse, a huggamajillion times worse than yours. You are meant to listen (without eye-rolling), listen more, moan appreciatively, and once you concede defeat, to pay your fee in pity. But we don't give up so easy. Don't we gamely trot out our petty miseries, lean and piebald as they seem beside the snorting, muscular stallions of the truly fucked? The contest is lost, but I will not be denied my day at the boo-hoo races.
So it goes that I always greet poverty-based sob stories with mine about how "Dude, when I was unemployed, I ate Lucky Charms for breakfast, lunch, and dinner." Yeah, it's not much, but it's mine. Unfortunately, I now realize that it was not poverty that drove the diet -- it was the FUCKING HEAT. FUCK IT. (I will limit myself to one weather-related post per week, my panting dogs, but humor me.) I cannot stand food in this weather. I will lose five pounds by the end of July, and by the end of August, you will wonder where I've gone. This weekend on Fire Island was like summer camp, but with less structure and no tetherball. I went swimming every day and I saw plants. I slept on uncomfortable slabs of foam. I got all greasy with the SPF 15 that people assured me was the minimum required to avoid instant screaming face cancer. I didn't worry about anything and I didn't use a phone or computer. It was heaven, and one more day of it would have driven me insane. (Whining ahead.) Now I am animated by a frantic, pulsing feeling that I have neglected some unnamed but tremendous responsibility, that there is no time, NO TIME AT ALL! What the fuck? Why must I be punished for having a relaxing weekend? Why was I bequeathed this demonic work ethic that has NOTHING TO DO WITH ACTUAL WORK? Tonight I sleep, naked and fanblown, only with the aid of Ambien. Let me sleep. I'm tired! Thursday, July 03, 2003
Another symptom is my rosy nostalgification of summer camp. This is a retarded syndrome, because I've detailed on this site the humiliations that characterize almost ALL of my camp memories, and I pretty much blame all my back problems on the antiergonomic backpacks (seriously, they were body-hostile) with which I was forced to carry half my weight in dried food simply because I was tall. Aargh! Right, camp sucked.
But as my ten-year-old half-sister starts her first prolonged separation from the parents at a place called Belvoir Terrace, I can't help but think about the nice things about camp, though I swear they are purely theoretical: free time, nice weather, swimming every day, that perverse camraderie born of sudden and utter proximity to a new group of people, bug juice. I suppose camp represents everything that adulthood denies me. Sure, you had to get up at the fuck of dawn, but you got to do arts and crafts! Arts and fucking crafts! What could be better? Of course, at my camp, there were no arts and crafts to speak of. Instead we had canoes. It was all canoes. If I had gone there for one more summer, I think I would have fucked a canoe. To this day, when I see some idiot on Survivor: The Wherever holding their paddle incorrectly, I get a twitch under my eye. I have been ruined. Damn, dude. Compare that fancy place they sent my sister to the hellish Darwinian nightmare of my Camp Pathfinder. Jesus fuck! Nobody at my camp had ever even heard of a "terrace." This post sucks, but it's all you'll get 'til Monday. Happy Fourth, everyone.
I wrote this yesterday but it didn't post properly:
I'm feeling a little tender right now, probably as a result of shocking my system last night with more vodka than I've had in six months. My sleep was fitful and my dreams filled with lyrics to songs I don't even know. My eyebags are puffed up like bruise-colored kasha and I have the emotional stability of the pre-menstrual. One symptom of post-drunk sentimentality is the way my eyes well up with salty tears if I think about The Flaming Lips song "The Spark That Bled," as if it's the most beautiful song evah, which it surely is not (see "100,000 Fireflies"). Though in my head, right now, that chord change right before Wayne Coyne says "What was this," I thought, "that struck me?just about makes me shiver into helpless sobs. Alcohol is stupid. Tuesday, July 01, 2003
The internet makes certain kinds of ignorance much more indefensible. As recently as six years ago, you could sit around with your friends and have a highly amusing debate about the shape of Cap'n Crunch cereal, generating a never-ending list of amusing possibilities (or as I like to call them, "possibili-titties"). You were probably high on some kind of weed, or drunk on stupid booze with a handle. But anyfucking way, you can no longer speculate about facts, because the moment you say "I'm pretty sure the faces of a regular dodecahedron are pentagonal," I'm just gonna go on the internet and check it out. I'm not gonna argue anymore, and anyway, you were right about the pentagons. Nor can you make bold guesses; say "Dave Attell is totally gay," and somebody will show you a sparse list of google results (for +"Dave Attell" +gay) that seems to disprove your theory, because, they suppose, if Attell were gay, more people would have written about it. "But Dave Attell is totally gay," you'll insist, "just watch the show, I mean come on!" Look dude, I agree. But what's the biggie?
Here's the biggie: over 40% of the U.S. population believes that the "Bush Administration" "misled" the public about the presence of WMDs in Iraq. Substitute the more honest "President Bush" and "lied to" within the quotes, and then ask yourself how the same citizens that failed to impeach the previous President for lying about his sex life can, as they shortly will, overlook this President's history of prevarication and economic rumphumpery and blah blah blah manipulation cakes. Who cares? I'm just feeling grumpy because the heat is high, the air quality is low, my expenses are large, and my penis is not vagina-shatteringly [huh?] large enough to satisfy cum-guzzling virgins [huh what?] in heat (that last bit according to my junk mail). And if, as my doctor says, only exercise will make my body feel better, why does my body shed 80% of its water after one block of what can only be called brisk strolling? My only solace is that my bones will never, ever break, because I have eaten five times my weight in Tums over the last ten years, and also that zombies hate the taste of calcium. So it's your brains first, asswads. |
OTHER REVIEWS: John from Cincinnati Menomena LATEST BOOK REVIEWS: The Game Moneyball One-Upsmanship Siddhartha You need the Fear Not Guide to Life. Buy it already. ($4) Now available! The Broomfield Variations CD ($10) or go to The UD Store 
MY IMAGINARY GIRLFRIENDS Chan Marshall Rotem of the IDF Eleanor Friedberger Amy Goodman Bernardine Dohrn ('69) Maya Rudolph Joanna Newsom Imogen Heap Caroline Dhavernas Shana Rae Ray DISALLOWED FOREVER "I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you!" - "from whence" - "...the exception that proves the rule" - any use of the question "spit or swallow?" - the phrase "drop trou" - fake-o reviewer verbs: "penned" for wrote "helmed" for directed "lensed" for whatever - "expat" - the euphemism "passed away" - pronouncing merci beaucoup as "mercy buckets!" (see also: "grassy-ass!") PET PEEVES "confinscated" - trying children "as adults" - "drownded" |