11 may 2000 ::an explanation, an apology

i've wrestled for days with what i'm going to try to write tonight. i honestly don't know where to begin, but i'll try.

last saturday night, sunday morning if you want to be a weenie about it, i did one of the all-time-worst shows ever. i had no topic, i gave no direction, i was short, arrogant, flippant and condescending to my callers.

and now i am apologizing.

the saturday before, 28 april at around 15.30, i stood at the head of my grandmothers bed, my hand on her head and the rest of the family gathered around. she was no longer conscious though she could probably hear us. we watched her breathing go from shallow to erratic to still. we all gathered around to see our Matron... the woman who was born in March of 1913 when Apaches and Comanches still wandered the plains, leave this world for the next.

i was, and still am, filled with both pain and happiness. the pain is a by-product of my own selfishness, a quality i think is inherent to love. the happiness is that she is not only relieved of her pain from arthritis, osteoporosis and a body that had been weathered and beaten by the sands of time, but i am happy to know that she is now eternally young, free, happy and with my grandfather.

and though there are many who believe that when we leave this life, we are nothing but a piece of meat to be deposited in the ground. to this i bear witness that my grandmother had a dream two nights before her heart attack. she saw my grandfather, who died a year and a half ago. he came to her and told her he was coming to take her home... three days later, he did.

those with no spiritual center such as aetheists, cannot understand that there is more to life than the meat on our bones. that life is a process with only a biological meaning. all thought, all concepts of will, all perceptions of reality, all concepts of love, devotion, charity and compassion are nothing more than mere chemical reactions in the brain.

i cannot share such a dark, pessimistic point of view.

but i wander.

it was a long week. i took the next monday off as i looked to clear my mind and my heart. the next 4 days were business as usual, which means many details to attend to at work, many errands to run in the evening and on the weekend. and by the time i started getting ready for the show, i started to feel how deeply tired i really was. and truth be told, i wasn't prepared. no topics, no idea of direction, nothing.

and of all the shows i've ever done, i have to admit, this last one was one of the most disasterous. i didn't have the energy to do anything constructive and i allowed myself to resort to topics that were basically the lowest common denominator.

in my own defense, i admit that the viewers at large, have been less than supportive. no, i'm not talking about notes of praise or encouragement or anything like that, but this is YOUR show. if there's a topic you want discussed, you have the ablity to influence my show to that direction. thus far, i've had only two suggestions (that i can recall right now). and they were both from the same person.

doing live television is somewhat stressful, even for an "old timer" like me. i have to worry about content, lights, sound and i need to keep a nimble finger on the fone to separate the wheat from the chaff.

all in all, i feel that i'm entitled to have a bad night now and then. after all,i don't really see a whole lot of people who take the time to criticize me, with their own access shows. this allows me to categorically dismiss their criticism. but i do try to elevate myself above the blind angry ranting and raving of the likes of the delusional, manic depressive, Alex Jones.

another show is coming soon. i don't have anything definitive yet, so i'm still open to suggestion should you care to give one.

 

 

23 may 2000 ::another sticky morning

two years ago i was working at The Industry Standard. it's at the corner of Battery and Pacific, close to the financial district for those of you who are visiting San Francisco and want to see it. I was temping for Mactemps at the time and i was at the beginning of my disorientation of living in San Francisco.

this was the summer of El Nino and by late May it was still raining. the rains are supposed to stop by mid april or so. whenever it thundered, people would stop working run to the window and gasp in awe. thunder is that rare in san francisco.

lately i've been thinking a lot of San Francisco. i was not happy there until right before i started to realize i was probably going to come back to austin. the people there aren't exactly what you'd call nice, there isn't a whole lot of natural feel to the city (unless you consider concrete and glass to be natural) and the city was littered with the pretensious semi-educated multi-media wanks who had the spiritual and emotional depth of a bag of hair.

and too many of those wanks have now found their way to Austin.

perhaps it's not that i miss San Francisco, per se. i do miss the weather, the deep blue skies, the non-homogenous feel of the city and i KNOW i miss the food. though i never ate at any of the fancy-dancy places in SF, i did find that the quality of food is much better than anything here in austin. maybe it's that people demand better, maybe it's because so many vegetables are grown in California. either way, the food is much better there than here. as i may have stated previously, they (in SF) still don't have a clue of what Meskin food (ie: Tex-Mex) is all about. what they try to pass off as "Cal-Mex" is generally one step above Taco Bell and many many steps below Chuy's... and frankly, Chuy's food isn't all that great (but it is fun).

but anyways, i've been thinking of SF as of late. i am filled with guilt and shame that i wallowed in depression and isolation for most of the time i was there. by the time i emerged from my "funk", my best friend had long since betrayed and abandoned me. i had no friends at the time. as the days wore on, i started meeting some people and i started enjoying what the area had to offer. not just geography-wise, but cultural wise as well.

well, that culture that made SF famous in the first place. not the pretensious, arrogant snot-nosed multimedia masturbator culture that has infested SF as of late.

but anyways... i've gone over this before but lately i've come back to where i was a year or so ago. sometimes it's hard for me to remember that i'm back in austin. sometimes i think, "hey, i can just go to Market, catch a streetcar to the Castro, get something to eat, then grab the L (Taraval) and go to the beach for a bit."

oh well... it's not as though i can go back to SF. not until the next serious earthquake scares the little marketing weasels and anti-cultural pixel monkeys out of the area. hell, with my luck, they'll all move their pretentious, soulless asses to austin.

 

 

24 may 2000 ::by the way...

so how did it come to be that the last show we talked about swingers? if memory serves me right (and it does), it seems that the time i did a show about polyamory, only one polyamorist called (and i couldn't even HEAR her!), but the lines were filled with angry white males crying about the immorality of polyamory even though it was apparent that none of them knew what it was about.

so i'm amazed and flabbergasted at the reality that while polyamory as a subject was a total and complete waste of my time, the topic of swinging and swingers really brings out a response. go figure.

to complete the picture, note that all of those who called and said they were swingers were guys. wait, i think there was a woman in there somewhere, but it's so damned contradictary (sp?) that with polyamory, i get a plethora of angry white males who don't even know what polyamory is, but berate me nonetheless, but when the topic turns to swinging, i get guys calling who sing it's praises. perhaps the underlying lesson here is that guys watching my show feel it's okay to fuck any hole they can as long as it's only for the sake of getting their rocks off whereas the act of loving and caring for more than one person (and by definition, having more than one person loving them), is somehow threatening. maybe it gets back to how so many guys have the mentality of "it's okay if my girlfriend fucks someone else as long as she doesn't enjoy it more than when she's with me."

i might be wrong.

i might not be wrong.

as for me, i have this outlook that is simultaneously fascinated and disguisted with swinging. on the one hand, humans are not monogomous by their nature. if that were the case, we would not be able to mate while we had a spouse. that's what monogomy is in the natural world. on the other hand, monogomy is something that people can "force" upon themselves. that is, monogomy can become a lifestyle. usually this is done out of some sense of "morality" or atthe least, social expectation.

swingers see monogomy for what it is: a decision. they tend to be people who are lacking jealousy, people who are capable of having sex with someone other than their spouse, but still remain devoted to their spouse.

i know that sounds blasphemous to many, but the reality is that sex and devotion do not have a direct correlation to one another. it is entirely possible to love someone without having sex with them and it's equally as logical to have sex with someone you do not love.

but every swinger i've met thus far have this very frail center. all too often, swingers are looking for sex with multiple partners to fufill some emptiness in their life... an attempt to gratify their addiction. sex with others becomes a mechanical process equivalent to masturbating, only using someone elses body instead of their own. they tend to be insecure, they are generally spiritually void and are hedonists without a moral compass.

on the other hand, the "moral monogomous" who bemoan the "evils" of swinging and polyamory are morally corrupt. generally speaking their mindset is much more volitile than swingers and given that these folk generally believe that their words and actions are sanctioned by a diety of some sort, they become much much more dangerous.

in my personal life, i could not be a swinger. sex is not the "end all be all that should only be shared with only one other person" that the moralists would try to force upon me. on the other hand, i could never live in a world where sex is a cheap meaningless process that exists only for the sake of getting my own rocks off.

 

 

29 may 2000 ::oh joy.

it's no secret. the City of Austin treats the ACTV facilities like the ugly child that's to be kept in the basement. the place is run down, the paint looks like absolute shit, the carpet is stained with spilt drinks, the air vents are decorated with black lines of mold radiating from the vents. many people have complained about a degredation of the quality of life while being in the facilities, yet the mildew level remains dangerously high.

and the bathrooms... goodlordamightdamn. ammonia farm.

so imagine my lack of surprise when i found that the fones in the mini studio were broken.

hmmm... let's see... it's a studio where many people do live call-in shows, and that means that generally speaking, people have to call using the... telephone. okay. fix it, right? well, hell if i know how things like this are handled, but apparently it's not a priority for someone. if i had a user at work whose computer was broken and i decided i didn't want to fix it, i'd be in the day labor pool REAL quick.

but apparently public facilities are treated with a DIFFERENT work ethic.

okay. i rigged something up with the facilities line with a trick that we used to use in the "good old days" when we had to tape a microphone to the speaker of the fone. it actually worked. even Ross was impressed.

because i wasn't able to set up the studio in a way that i would have preferred, i decided to keep things "light". so let's talk about movies and games. pretty superficial, right? well i think there were a few calls about the afore mentioned topic. it seems that most of the calls were about any and everything. i killed one call from an angry white male who wanted to talk about... abortion. and i had yet another clever angry white male (AWM) who used the word "fags".

oh yea, buddy. Africa is brimming over with war while one third of that continent's population is rife with AIDS, China wants to conquer Taiwan and imprisoning people who BREATHE the "wrong" way (ie: Falun Gong), the Mexican goverment is doing their best to irradicate the Chiapas, the tobacco industry is working as hard as ever to hook every teenager into a new addiction and somehow... somehow YOU have the moral latitude to declare the "evils" of someone loving someone else who just happens to be the same sex as they are.

i do NOT even have to spend a moment explaning how pathetic you are.

then i get this other wanker who decides he's going to try and make me his bitch for the night. he calls and laughs and tells me how he and his friends think i'm pathetic and stupid i tells me what a loser i am for doing a show on a saturday night. i asked him "how many shows have YOU done?" he wouldn't answer. i asked again. and again. and again. lather. rinse. repeat. finally i explained to him that if he didn't get with the program and answer the question, i was going to kill the call.

he has done exactly Zero shows.

i let him go off on me. i can't remember his comments except they were clever little insights such as "you're so fucking stupid" and the such. hmmm... well, it's pretty hard to argue with logic like that, isn't it? he apparently didn't like the fact that when i had a heckler call in to prank me, i'd say something like, "Son, it looks as though your daddy's energy would have been better spent if he'da pulled out and jizzed in a dirty gray gym sock." i mean, hecklers call to hear me piss on them. it's access and that's just part of the territory. cope. i do.

he went on, explaning the point of "how fucking stupid i am" and took the time to clarify for him that he had an opinion, NOT a criticism. in order to have a criticism, he'd have to have a clue as to what he was talking about.

i think the finer points of that were lost on him. i didn't find that much of a surprise.

but in my explaining things to him, i did make an error. i told him that in order to for him to have any valid criticism of me or my show, he'd have to have experience in doing what i do. has he ever fielded a call from a stranger looking for help as she explains she can't have sex with the man she loves because she's started to remember her father molesting her? i have. has he ever listened to a stranger cry because they feel so lonely? i have. has he ever tried to reason with someone who is having unprotected sex with other men on the side and refusing to tell his girlfriend of two and a half years that's he's also having sex with? i have. my error was in my criteria for allowing people to criticize me. you do not have to do a show in order for me to listen to you. i simply need to be respected. that means, thoughts and comments need to be made in a constructive and positive manner. it is NOT acceptable for someone to just make a critism without offering an alternative.

then... then i explained to him that while it may be pathetic to do a show on a saturday night, it wasn't nearly as pathetic as calling into one. trust me, he did not get into my show with only one call. he had to beat that little redial button until his fingertip was black and blue.

so why did i let him go off on me like that? obviously he had nothing to contribute. he was just some angry little wank looking to tear someone down for his own edification. but i let him have his time. why? well all too often live show hosts sit in ivory towers. that is, they put themselves beyond reproach and that's too bad because yaknow... sometimes... sometimes people actually have a good observation to share. obviously this was not the case with this angry wank, but it's good to have someone put the fire to me now and then. not only did i prove him wrong on each and every pathetic point he was trying to make, i ended up rallying support from those who have seen my show before and know what it's about and know what *i'm* about.

and a few minutes after i throughly slapped around this anti-intellectual bitch around, he calls back and utters something almost Swiftian in it's cleverness. "Fuck you, asshole." or something equally witty.

I love pissing away my saturday nights on pathetic invertebrates like this...