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 
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Tuesday, December 30, 2003
I'm back, but I took yesterday off because this is my silly season. I work like three out of every seven days, and the rest I spend in sweaty, tossy torpor in my bed which refuses to be comfortable, but is yet the most comfortable bed I've found. Insomnia has made an early New Year's Resolution not to quit bothering me. Insomnia might not be so bad if I weren't so tired, but since I'm just a pre-zombie if I undersleep, it's like WHAT ELSE CAN I DO BUT LIE HERE AND THINK THINK THINK. Oh, and the ridiculous thoughts that take on a manic importance when you can't sleep: I must start a new religion founded on truth and beauty; bitches owe me money; I need new shoes; what if that chord were major instead of minor? My extremeties bristle together in their chapped winter shells. Who will make moist my flippers?
Ah but yay: my rustling, dry-handed prayers have been answered by a moist and merciful god. Through the miracles of SCIENCE and the InTerWeb, myCetaphil.com allows me to electronically personalize my home moisturizing experience! Gah! Doesn't this bullshit piss you off? Moisturizer websites? Gabble! 2003 was bad because I saw Daredevil, which seriously is one of the ten worst movies ever, with Jennifer Garner trying to ninja the fuck out of a blind guy within five minutes of meeting him because he asks her name. 2003 was good because I got the Matrix sequels out of the way and I can start anticipating real-life things like marriage, home-ownership, parenthood, crippling back pain, and twenty-rock-per-hour crack addiction. OR WHATEVER. Also I saw Errol Morris's The Fog of War, which made my December, if not my year. Also I bought products, ate food, and killed zombies with knives. Who can ask for anything more? Sunday I accompanied the new roommate (whom we'll call Newmonia in honor of her recent welcome-to-New-York illness) to a cough sports bar so she could watch her beloved Packers on one of the ten DirecTV hookups in the stinking dive. I couldn't stand it for long, but the straw that broke my scoliotic spine was a jittery, stumbly man who stared at the Vikings game so hard I thought his eyeball might land in his highball. On the sidewalk smoker's ghetto, he explained that he'd been on a bender -- variety unspecified -- and that he was down, way down, and need to win this one badly, and the Vikes were winning but not beating the spread, so who the fuck cared, god fucking dammnit. I sympathized with a genereic "Huh," which marked me as a good listener and confidant, I guess. Juicy-eyed and earnest he looked at me, saying "I gotta quit, man. Gotta quit gambling, gotta quit smoking, gotta quit drinking, gotta quit the drugs." I waited for a line about hookers, but apparently his vices know some earthly limits. But it sounded like a good resolution to me, folks, so let's just make it the UDvsGA boilerplate. Good luck in the New Year, my friends, and may your addictions be cheap, benign, or easy to kick. Monday, December 22, 2003
I don't mean to startle you, folks, but in light of today's Vaterland Security Direktiv, I think it's time for an uncharacteristic stab at topical graphic parody. Therefore a new color-coded system for assessment and communication of the UDvsGA Threat Level has been developed and will henceforth be ignored completely:
My Unforgivable Christmas Hiatus begins tomorrow, as I'll be nestled in the dewy folds of the Delaware Water Gap, which my family has designated as the Least Likely Place To Hook The Computer Up To The Internet. I'm all for family events, and the potpourri of putative relatives from our international satellite outposts will make for a lot of interesting conversations. Like for example? Last year my German stepuncle in-law Berndt told me the following joke while we were smoking in the garage, which took like twenty minutes of fervent gesturing and mental-Deutsch/English-dictionary-searching (accompanied by lots of "Ach!"s and "Scheisse!"s) to successfully communicate (especially the concept of what sounded like "bejesse," which turned out to be "BSE," which turned out to be Bovine Spongiforme Enzephalopathie which of course is Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy in English, and is more commonly known as Mad Cow Disease and oh god I know but hold on because I think you'll agree the joke is worth the wait:
Ha! Believe me when I swear to you on Gregor's hairy balls that Berndt was quite visibly distressed that I did not find this joke to be the funniest thing on earth, and insisted on telling it three times to make sure I hadn't misunderstood it. I assure you that there was no intended play on "do you have brains" to mean "are you smart" or anything like that. That joke is totally straight-up, for sheezy. In his frustration, Berndt grabbed me by the shoulders to force my body to shudder in a gross pantominme of mirth. Sweet Jesus Christmas! So pray for me. I'll be back next week. Thursday, December 18, 2003
Lunchtime in midtown during the Christmas season is like a cold, ambulatory version of hell, a rainbow of pashmina and trenchcoats. You never feel more like lashing out in a spastic flurry of fists and kicks than that moment on the sidewalk when you need to shout "GAH FUCK WILL YOU FUCKING MOVE ALREADY!" at some ovine claque of midwesterners acting like a garland-bedecked streetlamp is a fucking wonder of the world. My boss came back from a lunchtime shopping trip looking like an Afghani refugee with all her possessions in bags and the thousand-yard stare of a frustrated consumer. Apparently other people had the shopping urge at the same time, go figure.
I just had a relatively painless experience at the bookstore, which was mercifully, if depressingly, empty. People don't like books as much as they like gilt-coated plastic elf dildos, or bobble-head reindeer. Or chocolate-covered machetes! Nog stockings! MOVE IT, GRANNY WISCONSON! I bought my books and felt very smug about my literacy until I saw a copy of FHM, at which point I coated the front of my parka with vomit. FHM has a way of convincing semi-reputable actor-types to wear the most retarded garments made of shredded ribbon or whatever, and also of making that Buffy girl look like a zombie horse. I hate men's magazines almost as much as I hate men. But I like Christmas because I like buying things. Spending money is not something I was indoctrinated to do -- I've always been very good at it. Chanukah is okay, but even the semi-clever eight day scheme can't make up for the essential shabbiness of the holiday in comparison to Christmas. I walked past a gound-floor retail space that's been empty for months, and they had begun to set up some kind of event-space called "Chanukah House," with giant menorahs and some flatscreen displays (wha?) and a truly awful series of rotating dioramas depicting... who knows? Nobody knows what Chanukah is a commemoration of. A war maybe? A visitation by aliens? God's decision to make one side of my family much better at Monopoly than the other? There are no coniferous trees in the holy land. How sad is that? Monday, December 15, 2003
Regardless of how you feel about the capture and nurse's-office-lice-checking of Saddam Hussein, I think we can all agree that Rupert Murdoch is a fat fucking retarded fuckbag. Why do I say that? Well I don't even need to look at the New York Post to know that the cover story's lead is something like "Saddam Found in Ittle-Bitty Hidey-Hole Wearing Apron and Tending Plot of Daisies." I understand that there is a huge market for "news" stories that insult the principals, but this type of reportage assumes a mean and nasty segment of the population that doesn't know any better. You can show a man a good article, or you can give him a subscription to the fish. Paper. Whatever. Objective reporting is dry, dull, and honest -- BO-RING! -- but it preassumes that the intelligence of its reader surpasses that of a spatula. I assume no such thing about you, reader. I'm'a flip my flapjax wit' yo ass. Unh!
I watched the preview for Errol Morris's upcoming documentary about Robert McNamara, The Fog of War, and then I wasted about half an hour at Sony's home page for the movie. McNamara talks about how the key to ending the Cuban Missle Crisis was a sudden attack of empathy experienced by JFK. Like it took a little girl walking up to the white house with a lollipop, or a puppy, or a lollipop shaped like a puppy, to make THE LEADERS OF THE WORLD think for a moment about what other human beings might be feeling. The intelligence community can tell us what people are thinking, sure. We clearly need an emotional CIA. I don't know, but shouldn't empathy be a required skill taught in school? Like, for everybody? What good is school anyway? People envy those who have more than them and are disgusted by those who have less. You shouldn't envy fame, wealth, or power, because look what you become: Rupert Murdoch. Or Colin Farrell, or Fred Durst, or Andie MacDowell. Can people really envy these hapless fucktards? Please imagine the hell of daily Farrelldom. And for Jesus's sake, how can you hate poor people? Just stop a second and ask yourself that question. Fuck! I'm going to build a schadenfreudist detector. It'll be a lapel button with a fucking laser in it, yeah? If I'm walking down the street and the button sees you laugh at somebody who trips on a sidewalk crack -- you know, that barking little lip-fart laugh that in kindergarten would have been accompanied by a raised arm and pointed finger -- the button will take your balls or ovaries away, because you are not allowed to reproduce. If you've already reproduced, the button will take your children, too. Then I will make a delicious ovaritesticle tart, smothered in hot baby brains. Brains! BRAAINNNSSS!! Thursday, December 11, 2003
On the way to the train after work yesterday, I saw a girl drop her unlit cigarette on the ground, pick it up, and put it right back in her mouth. So naturally, I hustled up to give her a light and see what kind of tall, clean girl with a nice beige wool coat would put a slushy smoke in her piehole without a second thought. I lit her smoke and she said "Thanks! What's your name?" and I was like oh shit. Because I recognized her: she works at the Scientology bookstore on 43rd Street. She's always standing outside handing out leaflets with pictures of L. Ron in a pith helmet, inviting people to a "photography exhibit" that's clearly a front for a giant mass-hypnosis indoctrination ceremony where they fuck you in the ass with ice dildos until your wallet falls out of your pocket. Yowp.
But I was already talking to her, and this poor cornfed sweetheart has been a 'Tologist since birth. That's deep conditioning -- the same as how I was programmed in my crib (and I don't mean my "house," goddamnit) to be a cynical atheist liberal weakling genius -- and so she tried to convert me within ten seconds of asking my name. I'm not gonna badmouth Scientology, because that'd be like having sex with your slutty cousin: easy, but you could get in legal trouble. Religion is weird, because, for example, Saint Barbara is the patron saint of field artillery. Do whatever you want with that. Once I knew this Catholic chick from outerborough Noo Yawk, and this is how she talked to customer service people on the phone: "Yes um hello? Is this the custamah service airier? Yes hello. I'm coowahling in regarts to a problem on my account? Yes... that's correck. Uh huh. That is correck. Well upon ruhceipt a my last bill? I buhcame aware that it did not refleck the updatit charges? This was asposed to be taken care of, but apparently it has'n as of yet. Uh-huh. Well I'm not in... uh... I don't have that numbuh for the Accounts. You could gimme it?" See? Religion makes people talk funny. Maybe if Jesus loved me instead of my devout upstair-tarded neighbors, I would get more sleep, and I could write coherently, or funnily, again. Plus also goddamn nuncstans fucked up my mojo when she posted yet another of her best posts ever on the internet ever (see the Dec 4. entry). From now until Gregor comes out of whatever cave he done hid in, just assume that I'm saving my best material for when it will make him look bad in comparison. Though it's hard to look better than a man drenched in hobo semen. Monday, December 08, 2003
On SNL this weekend, I was happy to see Paris Hilton appear for real during Update to play double entendre tennis with Jimmy Fallon around the fact there is a hotel called the Paris Hilton, Jimmy saying "I'm very famous and I may have to come in the back door of the Paris Hilton" and after asking if the hotel has ballrooms, "I'd love to have my balls held by the Paris Hilton." Stupid jokes, but they're so charming, the two of them (and so young!), and though the gist was that she was saying no way could he ever "get into" the Paris Hilton, the delightful frisson of the bit came from the fact that you knew that HELL YES Jimmy Fallon could fuck Paris Hilton, and probably did, right there under the desk when they went to commercial.
During Alias last night (which is as addictive as crack but better for your heart because you don't have to go to deserted streets in bad neighborhoods late at night to watch it with gun-wielding drug dealer scum), I saw a ridiculous advertisement from our friends at Eli Lilly. A woman, supposedly afflicted with ADD, sits at a conference table, having trouble concentrating as her mind slips from thought to thought. The ad is intended to scare the pants off you, and it's shot like the trailer for The Ring, with bursts of static and flickery ghost imagery, rapid fire shots of kids, birds, stores, and a guy in a bunny suit. What the fuck? Should I be worried about having ADD, or that I'm totally fucking psychotic? Bunny suit? Like where in real life do you actually see a bunny suit? There was a bunny mask in that preview for Cabin Fever, which is another thing this ad looks like, and there was a campy bunny mascot for Crunch gyms for a while, before they switched to their misspelled (or at best nonstandard) "No Judgements" campaign. I have ADD (or as they're calling it now "Adult ADD," which sounds a whole lot sexier!), and I rarely picture guys in bunny suits during meetings. I picture death by paper cuts, stuff like that, but no bunnies. I'm not even the thousandth person to point out the retardation of advertising prescription drugs directly to consumers, but there's something really ballsy and evil about this ad, and it will usher in even more egregious affronts to decency. Like "if you haven't asked your doctor about Flammerval, YOUR CHILDREN MAY BE EATEN BY ZOMBIES. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of their lives. Beware the bunnies who want to keep you from your Flammerval. Common side-effects include testicle dessication and explosive diarrhea." And the weird part is, Lilly doesn't make Ritalin or Adderall, the two drugs used most often to treat ADD and ADHD. They make this new shit called -- I shit you not -- Strattera. Apparently it's not a stimulant. Where's the fun in that? It's just a boring old selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor. Yawn. I don't know about you, but without the orange firecracker warning sticker, I don't really believe a pill will help me. Thursday, December 04, 2003
The upstairs neighbors earned the nickname The Pirates for their noisy pegleg hornpipe antics, but yesterday they took peace disturbance to a new level of misdemeanorhood.
When I got home around 10pm, I didn't really mind the sound of the repetitive bass line blooping through the building, becuase 10pm is okay for music appreciation at any volume. Never mind that it was that terrible salsa bass line that -- forgive me for sounding like your parents when you started listening to rap -- makes every fucking salsa song sound the same. It was (and always is) like: Boooomm Tick BaBoom Tick Boo... (down whole step) ...Doom Tick BooDoom Tick (down a fourth) AD INFINUCKINGFITUM. The disc was clearly on repeat, and I began to think the Pirates had been killed by a sauce-loving psychopath who had made himself at home and passed out in blood puddles. Well, at 2am I thought maybe it was time to make Mr Buttsauce turn it down, right? But I was already nakies in my bed, employing the kind of wishful thinking that Ambien makes so simple. But my nudity and comforter did not seem to quiet the Boooomm Tick BaDoom of the Psychopathic Salsa Pirate. I yelled to good old Heroic [Second] Roommate for assistance. UD: Hey! Hey HST! HST: (from living room) Yeah? PSP: Boooomm Tick BaDoom Tick... UD: Make it stop. HST: Yeah. PSP: Boooomm Tick BaDoom Tick... UD: Tell Jesus to make the salsa man shut up. HST: Will that work? PSP: Boooomm Tick BaDoom Tick... UD: Doesn't Jesus hate salsa music? I'm pretty sure he does. Because he loves me, and I hate it. HST: I'll tell him. UD: And tell him to eat a bowl of dick. HST: Who, Jesus? UD: ...No. Tell Jesus to tell the other guy. But Jesus must have been too busy doing god stuff, like raping goats or something, so I had to take matters into my sleepy-time hands. I put on some laundry clothes and some sneakers and went on a recon mission to make sure it was the apartment directly upstairs. I was gonna disguise myself with my pillowcase, but it had gone completely transparent from head- and face-grease, so I risked identification. And yes, it was the fucktards upstairs. Boring story short: they turned it down after liberal application of the thwack'em stick (a decomissioned mop handle) to the ceiling, which was good because Ambien and I were ready to go up and get Louima on their Dominican asses for real. But so my sleep was curtailed, my little lambs, and you can't get blood from a stone. I don't really believe in calling the cops for shit like this, because the neighborhood, which frowns on crime, practically grimaces at the police. A couple years ago, this drug dealer got shot on the corner and hustled his bleeding ass into the building. A detective came knocking and asked if I had seen anything, and the weary look on his face told me that the building was collectively blind. Even though everybody on the block sticks their head out the window at the sound of a loud argument. Fuck it. If the pirates love music so much, maybe I could tape a subwoofer to the ceiling and share some of mine. Any suggestions? I'm thinking Langley Schools Music Project's version of Wings' "Venus And Mars/Rock Show" on infinite repeat, bitch. Boo-yaa! Tuesday, December 02, 2003
Unfortunately my office has kept me as busy as Pussy Willow at a hobo convention, what with all these numbers that need to have mathematical operations performed upon them, so I'm sorry I haven't had time to give you a rundown on the reunion situation. But see the reunion itself did not turn out to be the rich font of comedic inspiration I had hoped. It was, in fact, rather blandly great. At least half of my class of 750 grads showed up, and after an initial panicky run at the undertended bar, most of them calmed down enough to act human. Which is more than I can say for how we acted ten years ago, but blah blah blah sour grapes blah blah blah 90210 blah blah maturitycakes.
People were puffier, baldinger, or marrieder, or just the same. I was overdressed in my navy blue and pinstriped polyester suit, which put me at a distinct advantage over most of the people with aggressively casual attire ("look at me I'm mellow I'm young I'M CALM GODDAMN IT AND CHILLED OUT OH GOD AAAARRRGGHH!). The suit was slightly offset by my name tag, which identified me as JEREMY FUCKING BROOMFIELD. Something I've noticed recently is that women, in general, seem to think it's okay to wear jeans anywhere. This epidemic seems most prevalent among cute and/or hip women, but it's seriously everywhere. Now obviously men don't get away with it as easily because we look "sloppy" in jeans instead of "cashz," like we didn't read the invitation properly or whatever. Meanwhile but so I lost my train of thought. The food was barely mediocre, and the dancing was just as spastic as our actual HS dances would've been if our school had been the kind to have dances instead of Math Olympiads. Which maybe there were some dances, but I was never invited SHUT UP WHATEVER. But there were a lot of people I was glad to see, and who were glad to see me. I liked watching the people who looked as if they were gonna hook up later, and I liked the giant moose heads that hung over the proceedings like bighorned chaperones. In the end, I don't know why I was so worried about the whole thing, but at the same time I don't know that it was worth the $80. Happily, I didn't have to pay it, because the Government asked me to pour a vial of colorless liquid into the punch bowl for a "social experiment" they were conducting, and they paid my way. They told me to leave if the teeth-grinding sounds became deafening or if people's spasms became limb-threateningly violent -- whichever came first. Oh but I'm tired, doctor, and I'm getting too crotchety for large social occasions. Viz: an old friend told me at the reunion that his mother had "passed on." I knew his mother, and it was sad news. And though I was sincerely sympathetic and expressed my condolences, in my head I was like "Passed on? PASSED ON? What the fuck does that even mean? If you're trying to say 'my mom died' then just say it! Don't phrase it like she opted out of living. Gahd." All while making totally genuine sad-eyes. See, Doctor? Regulate me. There's something wrong with the part of my brain that releases antisociopathic neurotransmitters, and one day when somebody tells me that their relative "passed on" -- which I seriously think is just this side of saying they were "taken to Jesus" -- I'm gonna speed-dial J.Ro and have her hustle a whole bunch of people to Jesus's house with her bare hands. |
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" |
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