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 |
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
When looking for roommates, I try very hard to mask my identity, using a dummy email account without my name on it, using only my first name in all correspondence and messages, etc. This is because googling me sends you directly here, and I would rather my first impression on a potential roommate not be the bilious alter ego I use to write this blog. Now you might say that forcing applicants to read the blog would be a good way to weed out the incompatible, and I might agree with you in theory, but in practice I am very lazy and I usually only have like six people look at the place and though I will generally end up with someone who would vibrate with sympathetic laughter while reading this site, the rarefied, best-foot-forward/ first-date protocol of roommate searching precludes whimsy and cynicism. It's all faux up-frontery and gushing earnestitude. Honesty is desired in higher than usual concentrations, but don't go admitting that you sometimes clip your nails on the couch while watching QVC, letting the clippings hurtle willy-nilly towards the beverage glasses of your companions.
But Hotmail went down during the search process, and I had to communicate using my work email address to one prospective tenant/roomie. I forgot that I had done this when we met, and our first conversation included this exchange: SHE: So, what do you do? UD: I work at a [blah de blah about my job]. SHE: Uh-huh. That's cool. What else? UD: What else? Well, I'm in a band with some friends [blah blah blah bandcakes]. SHE: Mm-hmm. What else? UD: Oh. Well, I publish a zine, and -- SHE: [unable to contain herself] Yeah, I think I saw that. UD: Umm? Really? SHE: [giving away the gag] I totally googled you! Which ended up not being creepy, because I do the same thing all the time. (And as it turned out she was totally cool with the site and would have been an ideal roommate except that she was planning on moving back to the West Coast in a few months, and I need someone for longer. (If you're reading this, JL, I mean it: you're the balzac and I wish you didn't have to Capistrano yourself into the sunset.)) We googled her back (fair's fair), we got a lot of hits for a professional pool player with the same name. We laughed and talked trash about her bitchy opponents. So what is it with an alter ego? I find that without one, the act of creation is much more difficult. I've had songwriting dry spells as Jeremy Broomfield, even as Tex churns out cowboy zombie tunes like a horse makes poo. Universal Donor can write for an hour straight on any topic at all, while the primum ego (?) blows spit bubbles at a blank word-processing document for an evening. What is the mechanism by which the alter ego works? If you write as someone else, are you responsible for what he says in the same way you are responsible for what you write above your own name? Our pal V. would say definitely yes, but I submit it's more complicated. Richard Bachman's work was a bit trashier than Stephen King's, and maybe not as good -- but it was still better than most other offerings from the genre at the time. So what? I dunno. All I know is that I, Universal Donor, feel comfortable calling Lance Armstrong a wife-beating niece-fondler. An alter ego is like a heavy parka that I put on to ward off the chill of writer's block -- and wearing a parka, I'll go places I'd never go in a t-shirt. Thursday, October 21, 2004
Well, the canal is complete, joining the Pacific of my jawbone to the Carib of the world. My face is numb to the nosetip, and for all the panic and worry, the procedure didn't hurt at all. There were a host of entirely new sensations involved, which is a dubious treat, like did I really need to know what it would feel like if you tossed my skull linto a rock tumbler? One of the drills seemed to have been borrowed from the Chunnel crew for all its sensitivity. It went: ahhhhHHHHH- g'jugjug jugJUGJUG- GAAGGLE-ZHUM- ZHUMZHUM-BAGGLE- FRRM-GATT- GATT-GAATTT! But despite the disconcerting vibes, no pain.
Afterwards, he gave me scripts for antibiotics (novocain pronunciation: "anabonix") and Vicodin, because, he said: "once the novocain wears off, you may feel like you've been punched in the face." I'm thinking, did he punch me in the face while I was under the gas? Damn that's fucked up. Except I didn't get the gas ($80/30min? Fuck you too!) so that seems unlikely. But it affords me the chance at another new sensation, because I've never been punched in the face. Have you been punched in the face? What's it like? How long does the pain last? Why'd you get the facefist, and did you deserve it? As you know, I'm a talky sumbitch, and I can remember at least three instances where I talked my way out of a situations that might have ended with physical violence to my pretty face. Each time it was people like Nicky Katt's aggro stoner Clint in Dazed & Confused, who just seemed bored without something to growl at. Why are boys so stoopit? Couple weeks ago I was playing three-player pinball with this hipster couple at Enid's, and I dunno, maybe I was flirty, but I think I was just good at pinball, and the guy grew more hostile as the game progressed, making snide comments and then like, almost body-checking me as he surrended the table to me after a drained ball. I'm not small, which means that this guy was potentially unbalanced. You want a piece of the UD? I'm solid as your dad's cock on Levitra. But I'm also a peaceful man, so I walked away from the winking eye of my replay. Fisticuffs are bad for your flipper fingers. Wednesday, October 20, 2004
All right! I'm watching the Yankees blow a 3-0 series lead, I'm searching for new roommates, I'm experiencing some fucked-up kind of chronic fatigue syndrome that makes me sleepy when I'm within 20 feet of another person, and starting tomorrow, I'm getting a root canal! Whoop!
We can start with the teeth. I've been a really good brusher forever and a fair-to-middling flosser for the last four years or so. My parents have bad teeth that flashed metallic at me from above my crib, and my sister has been getting cavities steadily since high school. I've been fairly lucky, but this summer's decision to quit smoking had some repercussions -- specifically the replacement of the cigarette with the Tic Tac. Look, it worked, okay? It may have been a drastically flawed plan, but I'm a non-smoker, an ex-smoker, and last night I had five chain-smokers in my apartment, chain-smoking, and I didn't feel any desire for a drag at all. NONE, MOTHERFUCKER. Mostly because my teeth are aching. Apparently coating your teeth with sugar every half hour for four months can lead to dental disaster. We! Make! Holes in teeth! Thursday afternoon I found out that I had three cavities, one of which had metastasized so quickly from my last visit in February (when there was no decay at all!) that it requires the dreaded canal. Well, actually, the dentist told me I had three, and I was like "what about this down here?" And he was like, what, where? And I was all, down here on the left, brah, remember when you shot a jet of water there and I just about leapt from your chair? And he's all, "well let me take a poke with my pokey-thing... ah, well what do you know! You're right! You should be a dentist!" And I was all "Ha ha maybe YOU should be a Dentist!" but I only said that in my internal blogging voice. So four cavities, my friends. So which stressor is the main source of this roiling unease in my stomach? Who cares, it's impossible to tell until the responsible stressor is removed. Which could be tonight if it's baseball, but if it's teeth it's gonna be around for a while now. And apparently everybody responding to my craigslist ad is "quiet, responsible, respectful, and clean." Bullshit. Thursday, October 14, 2004
Damn it's been a busy week! And it's just getting busier, people. I had to put together and emcee a trivia night all by m'lonesome because my irrepressible "co-host" decided to jet off to Las Vegas and then commune with scorpions in the Utah desert for a couple of days, maybe try out his yankee pickup lines on some BYU coeds down at the milk bar, I dunno. And after all my nervous sweat and solo planning and stomach cramping, it's the most poorly attended quiz evah, thanks to the televisual competition of the debate (wham!) and two baseball playoff games (bam!), so I'm standing on a chair, reading questions unmic'd to five teams instead of the usual 25. A perfectly good quiz, 50 questions, wasted on the dregs who dragged in. Ah, but no weeping is allowed; it's called trivia for a reason.
I ask you, though, is this fair: I have to find a new roommate, again. Craigslist makes this a little less painful than it used to be, but still, it is an abhorrent process. I have to make the place look nice and keep it that way for two weeks, pretty much by myself because the roomies are, like, absent and uninterested. I have to deal with the dishonesty of deleting all male responses to my ad despite the fact that I didn't specify "no dudes" in the ad -- though I further think you'll agree that an ad that said "chicks only" would be a little ooky, right? You know my reasons, so it's all jake with y'all, but to your average female apartment hunter, it's a don't-even-think-about-it offense. RIGHT? But boys are so messy. All right here quick and subliminal advertisement if you know of any clean responsible genius yet unboring women in the New York area who you think might be compatible with UD in a living sitch please forward their info most ricketytick. No phone, no pool, no pets; I ain't got no cigarettes. I have to watch baseball until the Yankees lose, which it looks like I'm gonna have to wait a while for that. I like baseball, but being a Yankee fan means that it's hard to care until the World Series, and I really wish that some other team would beat Boston for a change so I didn't have to feel so guilty. The games until the series, about which I care slightly less, will still somehow appear in my line of sight, no matter what else is going on. For example, last year, game 7 of the ALCS vs Boston coincided with the night after a friend broke up with her fiancé of five years and needed some serious love and attention. There were three comforters to the one bereaved at the outdoor cafe that night, but I still looked like a fucking heel as my head turned repeatedly towards the TV in the window of the bar. I can only hope she was comforted by the absurdity of the entire city seeming to celebrate her sad breakup with roaring cheers. Also making me busy: other stuff I'm too busy to explain. Friday, October 08, 2004
On the way home yesterday I was overcome by the need to buy a lotto ticket. I mean totally overcome, in the "oh my god I just had a flash of my crushed-metal and fire-bally future and I'm not getting on that plane for nothing" kind of mode.
You probably know that I justifiably abhor the lottery for the predatory regressive tax that it is, and you probably would have guessed that I single out "educated" people who play the lotto for especially loud, vituperative, spittle-flecked public derision, because I believe that the only way to train people away from the lottery is to humiliate them in front of friends and strangers. To convince people not to play the lottery, my goal is to come up with the shouted equivalent of the following sequence of more traditional, jock-on-nerd physical humiliation: 1) walk up to victim, pull down his pants, exposing penis that has been shriveled by a recent swim in a cold pond; 2) when he covers his shame, bash his nose so that blood jets down the front of his face and shirt -- blood is humiliating, right?; 3) have someone ejaculate on his bloody face, making him look like a Serrano; 4)push him backwards so that he stumbles over the other dude who has assumed the strategic kneeling position immediately behind the victim; 5) take his wallet, pee on his shoes, and put a big knife in his ass, then webcast a video of the whole thing to his parents, his ex-girlfriends, his favorite rock stars, his boss, and everyone in Europe. See, if I could do that, no one would ever play the lottery again. But I'm still working on the wording. Quality, policy-altering invective takes time to craft. It's particularly hard to get through to lottery players because they've got years of built-up denial to penetrate, a crusty calculus of deliberate stupidity and unbridled cupidity. While it is true that it is impossible to win the lottery without buying a ticket, it is also [essentially] impossible to win with a ticket, too, but lottery players don't distinguish between 1 in 45 million and the flip of a coin. WHATEVER. So I'm feeling weird because even though I feel rather strongly about practicing what I preach -- especially in regards to the laws of probability -- I bought a fucking ticket. I didn't have a choice, either; as I sat on the train, I came to understand, like a divine revelation (in Greek, BTW, revelation = apokalypse), that I had to buy two dollars' worth of NY lottery tickets. I went into the first store I saw, stiff as a man with a mugger's gun jammed into his spine as he punches his PIN into the ATM, and did the quick-pick option so I didn't have to have SAT flashbacks. I've got four chances at $12 Million. All day, this flat paper turd has been sitting in my wallet, mocking me for weakness. But also, quietly, murkily, thanking me for averting some terrible fate. I sold half of it to my coworker. Drawing's tomorrow. Tuesday, October 05, 2004
If you grew up without zits, you were blessed, and I say "fuck you" to you with my arm outstretched and my middle finger extended as if you were driving an H2 down my sleepy street. Some people don't pop their zits, and their restraint freaks me out -- not to mention the fact that every cell of my being wants to do it for them, and I quake like a junkie on line at the methadone clinic if I see a juicy, unpopped whitehead. Oh god! I know it is revolting, disgusting, but how can you ignore that ripe, quivering package, begging for release? Other people's blackheads I approach with a more philosophical eye. Like Dude, hey, I know you see that thing, and I can help. Would you care to step over here, into the light but away from the prying eyes of the other people? Allow me. Sit still. Hush. Stop fidgeting already! Just one second! Ok, this may sting for a sec. 1, 2, 3, oh shush! Don't be a baby!
Has science yet reached the conclusion that some people are just doomed to be zitty and others spotless? I love how if they have, the zit cream industry has done everything possible to hide, obfuscate, or contradict that fact. I personally don't believe that washing my face makes any difference at all. Ditto my hair. Ditto my clothes. Ditto everything! Soap just makes my hands dry, and though I still want my food preparers and surgeons to scrub up, I'm not gonna be so picky about everyone else. Just chill out. If you can live in your own funk, go on with your bad self. [insert New York cab driver joke here] Except don't smell like poo -- I'm sensitive to poo smell. What conclusions can you draw about people based on whether or not they pop their zits? What personality types are indicated? Because now that I think about it, I hate hippies. This is back to not washing, I'm kinda abandoning the zits deal, because I remember my strong distaste for the unwashed. I hate washing, but I certainly don't wear perfume to cover up my stink if I've managed to brew some up. Stink, that is. I hate hippies so much, and I bet there are still some out there! I didn't really see any in San Francisco on the last visit, but I bet I was gently steered away from their hippie haunts by my hosts, who know the score. Hippies and me is like Sodium and water! Kapowza! Fizz pop! I'm sure you recall from chemistry class that this is a very volatile combination. You have to store your chunks of unadulterated Sodium in kerosene to keep them from 'sploding. Which, come to think of it, would be a dandy solution for the hippies. Store them in kerosene for a while. It's up to you whether you cover their heads. |
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" |