The Grumpy Owl

pic nicked from here

After months of fucking about, fooling around and figuring things out, my migration to a site that’s mine –all mine– is finally complete.  This journey began when WordPress blocked me out of my own site for “objectionable content.”

It is now, hopefully over.

So now I have to give some props.

First of all, to Danielle of Final Fashion.  Without the use of her credit card, I couldn’t have bought a domain.  She also allowed me to use one of her hosting accounts for a while and never interfered with nuthin’.

Also props to Anita of I Want – I Got.  Without her technical expertise, I’d be lost.  She spent a lot of time helping me set all this up and endured my stupid questions, boneheaded blunders and irritating know-nothingness.   Anything annoying or broken on this site is my fault.   That it exists at all, is hers.

Who says fashion is full of hypocritical, backstabbing phonies? Well, I do, but not today.  Today, it’s full of helpful people.  Thank you helpful fashion people.

And props, to you, dear readers, who enjoyed my brief hiatus but, if  you are reading this, are back.  I know how short your attention spans are.  Coupled with the shallowness of your interest, it’s amazing any of you are here.

We’ll now be returning to our regular programming.

Thanks everyone.

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I’ve been experiencing some technical problems here at The Grumpy Owl.

Some of these are related to a behind the scenes overhaul (this hopefully won’t impact you) and some things have something to do with other things.

The worst problem has been fixed –I can post again– but, even so, there are still problems to be resolved and The Grumpy Owl may be a bit light and eccentric for the next week or so.

I would have mentioned this to you earlier but I couldn’t.  Any post or comment-response that I write now might just vanish by next week so I’m unwilling to put forth the effort.  I hope you understand.

Everything should be up and running again by Thursday but I have my doubts.  You know how it is with technical difficulties; one thing leads to another.

So, if you commented but it didn’t show up or anything along those lines, it wasn’t me moderating you.   Just you know, some crap happening.

Please standby – I will be with you again as quickly as I can.  And there’ll be pics of me playing ping-pong.

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Brace yourself ladies:  I’m getting married.

Holy fucking matrimony, Batman!

I dislike marriage.  Not because my heart lacks love or that I fear commitment.  Not for any notion popularized by romantic comedies.  I’ve just never believed my feelings needed the approval of the State/Church.

Boy, was I wrong.  Turns out they do.

I’m in the rather unfortunate position of loving a foreigner who is attempting to immigrate to Canada.    The government has already barred her entry into the country once and, should some bullshit like that happen again, I would like to have some sort of legal recourse.  Hence matrimony.

Though the lady and I plan to build a life together, though we love each other, I would never have gotten married.  I don’t invite the government into my house.  They’re like a vampire.  Once in, they don’t leave until they suck you dry. Unlike a vampire, they needed no invitation.  They simply broke in.

Our government lacks the manners of vampire.

So on Oct. 11, hoping to arm myself with the crucifix of marriage,  I popped the question over twitter:

And I received a prompt reply.

It’s not terribly romantic to propose over twitter but that was hardly our first conversation on the subject.  What might be less romantic was my reaction to her acceptance:

Before you judge me, you should try those tacos.  They’re incredible.  Shalome is a great cook.  As I recall, it was a bowl of gumbo that finally made up my mind.

Besides, I’ve never pretended to be a romantic and I don’t have a single friend who would judge me as a romantic.  The demands of my stomach are more important than the demands of my heart.  That I have found a woman who meets both is luck.  You understand that.  I understand that.  But will the government understand that?  I doubt it.

You, lucky Grumpy Owl reader, are now reading evidence.  I have been informed by a lawyer that Shalome and I must produce pictures of ourselves together. We’re going to be investigated by people behind desks.  I’ll get no jury of my peers.  I’ll be judged by some fellow in a shabby suit – if he’s even wearing a suit.

Our lawyer told me he was used to representing people who were squeaky clean.  I told him that I do not squeak.  He said that Shalome and I should move in together.  I asked: “Who wants to live with their wife?”  All of this will be problematic.

In a country that allows Adam and Steve to get married, my relationship might be too strange.   I don’t see how our plans or lifestyle becomes subject to government judgement but they are.  On pain of deportment.  If they don’t like us, they can fuck us up.  The man has us in a bind.

I am reminded of that classic Public Enemy lyric:

I got a letter from the government
The other day
I opened and read it
It said they were suckers
They wanted me for their army or whatever
Picture me given’ a damn I said never
Here is a land that never gave a damn
About a brother like me and myself
Because they never did
I wasn’t wit’ it but just that very minute…
It occurred to me
The suckers had authority

The suckers have authority.

It can safely be assumed that they will google the pair of us.  Looking for a fraud.

I wonder how they’ll react to my assertion that marriage is a fraud.  Not my love, not our plans and not our relationship.  But the signing of of papers and marching down an aisle to have some fat-faced priest deliver his sanctimonious blessing upon two humans fucking?  That is a fraud.  A complete fraud.  Fucking needs no blessing.  Love doesn’t require Jesus.  It needs no tax breaks.

Unless you’re in the unfortunate position of loving a foreigner. Then you need this shit.  And maybe if you’re buying a house or something. Does it strike anyone else as odd that you more often need the law to protect you from the law than you need it to protect you from crime?  Just sayin’:  Things could be simplified.

I wonder what conventions the validity of my marriage is to be measured against.

The so-called family has all the solvency of GM.  It’s been propped up by the government for years.  Why?  Because the family is dead.  Like GM, it’s bankrupt.

The divorce rate is at 50%, children are raised by a mixture of television and school while the parents who actually remain together are at work.  In today’s world, the so-called family only exists in freakish, isolated circumstances.  It’s an old institution.  Obsolete.  Broken.

Not all of the tax breaks, propaganda, king’s horses and kings men, can put the family back together again.

And, in light of all this, my relationship is going to measured against what?  Some platonic ideal of family life?  By who?  Fucking bureaucrats? And why?

So I can hopefully stay with the woman I love, eat her tacos and play with her dog.  So the woman I love can stay in this bullshit country and work as someone who helps the old and infirm while paying taxes and bitching about the weather.  So that her and I can have a life together but in separate homes.

I know why I do what I do.  I just don’t know how the government can judge it.

They can’t.

Fuck ‘em.

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My morning routine, which actually takes place in the afternoon, is usually rock solid. I wake up and have coffee and a smoke in front of the computer.  I look at email.

But I’m not quite ready to answer.  Mainly I’m just deleting the bullshit. (Invites, sales pitches, your last email etc.) Then I have another smoke and more coffee.

Sometimes I blog something, sometimes I don’t.  Sometimes I reply to emails, sometimes I don’t. After I’m done doing or not doing all that, I perform my toilet.

Freshly cleaned, I return upstairs to get dressed.

When I come back down I either  fuck around on the computer until I go to work or I get undressed and prepare for  my pre-chore nap.

But today all of that went crazy,  Shalome is training to be a personal support worker and needed someone to practise her chops on.  She was to bathe, shave and dress me.

This, of course, sounds great.  Who wouldn’t want to be bathed, shaved and dressed by a buxom young lass?  And all I needed to do was act old and grumpy.  Believe me, I can do that.  Particularly in the morning.  It all sounded great.  Porn mythic, even.

pic nicked from here

I was laying in bed, getting a “bed-bath” and complaining like a motherfucker, shouting “YOU’RE HURTING ME! YOU’RE HURTING ME! YOU’RE HURTING ME!”, making demented demands and practising the grab-ass that will serve me so well in my autumn years, when I realized something:  It’s not all that much fun.

While it’s quite enjoyable to be pampered, it must be quite awful to be cared for.  Shalome was good at it.  That doesn’t really matter.  I felt like a giant, skinny baby.  Although you can be assured that, when I’m old, I’ll be molesting every nurse that passes into grabbing distance, the situation was quite unsexy.

Once again, I feel like porn has lied to me.

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For starters, Shalome is not Asian.  I was told that’s important.  And she’s not even going to be a nurse.  She’s going to be a personal support worker.  Porn is full of crazy lies.  It just makes unsexy things sexy.  Like pizza delivery.  Or gang-rape.

Having thought about it, I don’t suppose the experience is meant to be sexy.  At all. Maybe that’s why Shalome called me Mr. Oakley.  That just reminds me of my mom.  And that makes me think of sexy again. Then again, so do most things.

So, you see, I’m confused.

At any rate, my behaviour set the cat to howling.

This was odd.  Not only is she quite passive and quiet, I never knew she cared.  But when she saw me flopping around on the floor, pretending to have a seizure (my own little improvisation) she must have realized her supply of tuna juice was in danger and, as a result, grew quite upset.  She made noises I don’t often hear her make.

I guess that watching Shalome carry me to the bathroom, while I knocked my pyjama pants down about my ankles and shouted about the woman in the next room (my beleaguered roommate) was more than my sweet little kitty could handle.

That cat is really upset with me right now.

And the whole incident has done nothing to help the already troubled relationship between Shalome and my cat.  Jealousy is so ugly.

In the bathroom, Shalome shaved me, then returned me to the couch and proceeded to dress me.  A three piece bespoke suit may not be the best thing for this sort of practise.  It is not, after all, what most people wear.   But that’s what I planned on wearing today so there it was.  Besides, when I get old, that’s what I want to wear.  It will make my advances on the nurses seem charming instead of what they truly are:  The depraved actions of a desperate and morphine-addled lecher.

It must be quite awful to have other people dress you.  I did not like it.  For starters it took quite a long time.  This time could be better spent trying on different ties and socks.  When I get old, I’ll certainly need to have outfits preplanned right down to the last detail.  Otherwise my poor personal care worker will be spending all her time tying things around my neck.  And I can guess where that will lead.

pic nicked from here

I guess we all learned something today.  I learned that being old is going to be awful and Shalome learned what happens when you give me an inch.  Next thing you know, I’m faking a seizure with my pants around my ankles while my cat is howling.

Valuable lessons.

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Being a teenage romantic and believing in hell, he’d always thought that five minutes after his death he’d wake up with a fresh lease on life.  But at age fourteen, only ten minutes into his first bottle of cheap scotch, he got on the phone, called everyone he knew and told them he was now sure that was not the case.  There was no decent hell or sin.  Having looked at the devil, he found him wanting.  The devil felt the same about him.  Both have been in mourning ever since.

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Most of what you need to know about anything you can learn from baseball.

In real life, when asked for advice or insight or just feeling a need to offer it,  I’m prone to telling a short story about baseball players.  Having trouble adapting to something?  Well, let me tell you about Travis Snider and his problems at the plate. He’s an object lesson in things that work yesterday not working today.   Approaches must change.

Surrounded by problems and unsure what to do?  Did you know that I once saw Roy Halladay put two men on base with no outs then strike out the next three batters?  From this we can learn the importance of focusing on what’s in front of you and in your control.

Need a lesson in aggression? Let us look to Ty Cobb.

You would think that this constant comparison of life’s little problems, like your divorce or the death of a loved one, to the serious drama that occurs on the baseball diamond, would add perspective  Instead it often annoys people.  It’s probably because Toronto is more of a hockey town.  Besides which, most of the art-fags I know can appreciate pig vomit on a canvass but are blind to the beauty is a perfectly turned double play.  They can derive wisdom from menstrual smears on a wall but fail to see the lesson in a sacrifice bunt.

I don’t get it.

But I do get baseball and I tuned into the world series game two between the Phillies and the Yankees.

This was a great game but a gruesome sight.  For starters, the Yankees won and I hate the Yankees.  Everything that’s wrong with the world, society and whomever you happen to hate, is symbolized by the Yankees.  And these bad guys usually win.  That makes it worse.  But what made this game especially hurtful to watch was seeing a pitcher like Pedro Martinez being out-duelled by a pitcher like A.J. Burnett.  I love Pedro.  I can’t stand A.J.

A.J. beating Pedro is a travesty.

A.J. played with Toronto for a few years.  To say that he had a ton of talent would be putting it lightly.  This was never in doubt. But, mentally, he was unavailable.   He only put effort into his last season here and only then because he was becoming a free agent.  In that last season, we finally got to glimpse the A.J. Burnett that could have been.

It drove me crazy.  He was gifted but unable to rise to the level of his gifts.  And all because of a lack of trying.  And trying is the one thing you can control.  A.J. Burnett just doesn’t try.

Pedro Martinez, on the other hand, is everything I like about pitching.  He started off as a power pitcher.  He could just wind-up and throw that fastball right past the best hitters in the majors  But, he got older and lost his speed.  These days, the worst hitters in the majors could smash his fastball out of the park.   Pedro adapted.  He reinvented himself.  No longer able to overpower batters, he started fooling them.  He outsmarted them by changing speed and location.  Having lost the thing that his whole game depended on, he changed up and became a new pitcher.

Did anyone else see him quickstep Jeter?  That, my friends, was a thing of beauty.

So watching A.J. Burnett beat him was disgusting.  A.J. Burnett does not deserve to beat Pedro Martinez.

Yet, in baseball, as in life, deserve rarely has anything to do with who wins.  They both pitched remarkable games and, in the end, the lesser man won.  Because on that day, he pitched better.

There was a moment, however, when I thought the real A.J. Burnett was going to emerge.  Jimmy Rollins had reached base and, being a notorious thief, started playing with A.J.  He faked steals, got into A.J.’s brain and forced pickoff throw after pickoff throw until A.J. was incapable of coming to the plate.  And that’s when real A.J. showed up.

He got wild and couldn’t find the strike zone.

That’s normal.  Someone like Rollins on the basepaths in a high pressure game will do that to a pitcher.  It’s what they do.  But what’s abnormal, what makes me loathe A.J., is how he handled the situation.

After extravagantly missing the strike zone, he started walking off the mound and looking at his hand.  He chewed his finger.  He pretended that he had a blister.  The commentators seemed to fall for it.  They started talking about how throwing a breaking ball can cause blisters on a pitcher’s fingers.  Bullshit, I thought.  A.J. was in trouble, he had lost his focus and he was pretending to be hurt to explain it.  That, right there, is A.J.-Fucking-Burnett.

The pitching coach visited the mound and said something that soothed A.J.’s fragile emotions.  All of a sudden, his finger problem was cured. He bounced back and continued to pitch well.  And I can’t hold that against him.  After all, lacking that sort of bounce, is what I hate about him.

But those of us who watched him in Toronto know the real A.J. when we see him.  It’s not the talented pitcher who held the Phillies to one run over seven innings.  It’s the guy who has a mental problem, falls apart and then plays sick to explain it.  He’s Pussy Finger.  And somehow, in October, Pussy Finger beat Pedro.

The World Series, like the world, can be one fucked up place.

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I’ll try anything once (especially things I don’t like)  so last week I tried advertising on this blog.  It wasn’t for me.

Some people can happily advertise away and get something out of it.  Money, I suppose.  Maybe even a fair bit.   Not me.  I got squat.  Apparently my roughly 700 unique visitors a day aren’t buying whatever google is selling.  I knew you people were clever (you’re reading me , after all) but I had no idea you were also cheap.

I can’t blame you:  I never click through those things either.

I could have kept up with the idea, changed my strategy and tried to discover new ways of making money off this thing.  And it’d be nice to make some money.  (Since these days, I’m fucking paying to have a blog.)  But time is money and investing all that time to make that little  money is a losing proposition.  I’m not sending the kid down the well to rescue the goat.  The old lady who ate the fly will have to be satisfied with that.

And looking at those ads made me feel a little sick.  They just don’t belong here.

It’s not that I’m anti-whoring.  Pay me the right amount and I’ll whore like crack addicted runaway.  It’s just that I have no reason to whore for small amounts of cash.  At the very least, I need a new pair of cufflinks out of the deal.  At the very least. And they have to be nice cufflinks.

Even given all of that, I remained on the fence with the whole thing until I was perusing the wonderful collection of smut on Penetrating Insights and saw this:

An owl with a message?

Owls are always sending me secret messages and I try my best to listen.  So I’m not ignoring this one.

It’s not even an issue of credibility.  I don’t really care about that.  I’m more interested in the incredible than the credible.  It’s an issue of genuine orders from the owl kingdom.  I have to follow and relay those.  It’s in my contract.

But even without such clear instruction,  I like writing here and I do it for free.  I’m not wild on having to pay the costs of upkeep and all that shit but, when it comes right down it, being read by you people is a privilege.   (Often a dubious one.)  If it costs me pocket change to enjoy it, so be it.

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pic nicked from here

I miss the old logo.  But this would be a decent new one.

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Not that it’s any of your business but I’m heading into the country for a few days.  Hopefully, I’ll get to go swimming.  I went all summer without swimming and I hope that I won’t go all fall without swimming too.  If you’re all that interested in my business, twitter is your best bet.  My infernal device allows me to update that account.

The pics I take on my blackberry will appear in the sidebar.

If you leave a comment on anything, I’ll get to it when I come home.

Ta.

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Click To Play

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[blip.tv ?posts_id=2639591&dest=43876]

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pic nicked from here

Until last night, I’d never watched a complete football game.  It always looked boring and confusing.  Every time I tried to watch a game (usually because the Simpsons was delayed by one) it always seemed like they spent more time talking than doing anything.  It could take half an hour for half a minute to go by on the clock.

What sort of fucking sport is this? I wondered.  They spend more time talking and planning than playing.

Seeing how my problem with football is that it’s boring, it’s strange that, for my first game, I attended Canadian Football.  That would just have to make it more boring.  For no matter what Canadians might tell themselves during the day, we all know, in the lonely dead of night, that this is one huge fucking borefest of a country. Just about the most exciting thing to do here is to go into the woods, try to catch a fish and look at some trees change colour.

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And we’re safety obsessed.

So I didn’t just think the football game was going to be boring, I thought it was going to be Canadian Boring.  That’s a whole other level of boring.  It’s like Scandinavian clean, German efficient or Japanese crazy.  Canadian boring is like vanilla ice-cream without the vanilla, made from low-fat cream and with a huge warning sticker on it.

I didn’t even know what team I wanted to support.

Toronto was playing Hamilton.  I was aware of some sort of rivalry between these teams and I know that the good people of Hamilton, like the good people of everywhere else in Canada, hate Toronto.  And the good people of Toronto think about the good people of Hamilton about as much as they think about the good people everywhere else in Canada: That is, not at all.

Hamilton is a steel town and Toronto is for bankers.  In short, when people from Hamilton lose their jobs (and they’re always losing their jobs) we’re the ones who foreclose on them.  On top of that, we’re viewed as a bunch of fancy ladies.  Even Especially the men.  A bunch of latte sipping, nancy boys who own little dogs and are always on the news thinking we’re so cool while they’re at the bar, punching each other in the face.

If you made a movie about these two teams, Hamilton would be, without a doubt, the heroes while Toronto would be the evil city-slickers who try to buy victory and get their sweet comeuppance.

So my heart laid with Hamilton.

Or I thought it did.  Then the game began.

When The Hamilton TiCats took the field, and all their fans started cheering, I just felt territorial.  All these people coming into Toronto and cheering for Toronto’s defeat?   Sitting in our stadium and driving on our roads and mooching off our taxes?   Fuck that.  I might hate this city but I live here.  I’m allowed to hate this city.  These people don’t even know why they hate it.  They’ve got no right, I tell ya.  I don’t go to Hamilton and hate them.

I  don’t go to Hamilton at all.

pic nicked from here

Who does?

So I switched sides (again) and decided that I was a Toronto Argonauts fan. A tepid one who knows nothing about the players or the game but a fan all the same. The lovely Shalome, whose American interest in football is the reason I attended the game, took the opposite opinion.  Seeing the rowdy Hamilton fans, she immediately decided that those were her people and the TiCats, her team.  I can’t blame her.  Had I been objective, I would have felt the same.

Not least because we had the good fortune of sitting directly in front of Pigskin Pete.

This fellow is the leader of the Hamilton fans and takes to his job with the dedication and energy of vintage Mussolini.  He rallies them to chant, harasses the Argo’s mascot and really gets the whole crowd going.  I quite like Pigskin Pete.

The Argo’s cheerleaders, I’m not so sure about.  While the Hamilton TiCat cheerleaders seem like some nasty, nasty, dirty girls, the Argo’s cheerleaders just seemed stuck-up.  The Hamilton ladies shook their asses until you wanted to give them money but the Toronto ones stood around in some sort of sixties-theme-night, go-go boot outfit, thinking they were better than everyone then wandering through the stands to try to sell their calendar.

I almost switched sides again just because Toronto’s girls seemed like, well, Toronto’s girls.

(No offence, ladies.  You know who I’m talking about.)

The game went on for quite a while and I spent most of my time watching the cheerleaders and getting in trouble from Shalome while learning how seriously Americans take football rivalries.  From the moment we chose different teams, we became enemies.  I took a passive approach, asking her to explain the rules to me.  For example:  If you’re supposed to move the ball forward, why do the TiCats keep going backwards and dropping the ball? She threatened to stab me and burn all my clothes.  In other words, it was a pretty typical evening out for us.

She also said that, in quality, Canadian football is something like you would find between high school and state college level in America.  I believe it.  She knows football.  I don’t. So I defer to her opinion on this.

In overtime, The Argos managed to win the game, thus imperiling my sex life.

It has recovered and is once again in good shape.  Unlike Hamilton.

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Click to play

So this is my first podcast.  You can also find it over here.  Pretty rough, to be sure, but give me a break.  I have no experience whatsoever.  I’d like to see you learn in public sometime.

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As the world changes, so do our needs.  As our needs change so does the world.

Who needed literacy 20,000 years ago?  Who needed the internet just twenty years ago?  In just twenty years hence, you might need a garden and a second head complete with penile attachment.  To show you’re stylish and forward thinking, perhaps you’ll grow the garden on your clothes and your second head not only has the penile attachment but a matching scrotum chin.  There,  you keep your DNA computed, semen tweets translated direct from thoughts.

You meet up with a friend who has a head womb to ejaculate and  impregnate with a dream.  Few days later, its head gives birth, via self-organizing vomit, to a chimera that acts like a carnival barker, spouting your combined ideas on street corners, hawking only the finest dream images  to bored commuters for credits uploaded into your organ banks.  A good portion of this is paid as a bribe to the cancer corporations so they keep your substitute kidneys healthy.   The rest is spent on dream improving drugs.  After all, you’ve gotta stay current or get left behind.  Get left behind and all your replacement parts get the fucking cancer.  It’s a fierce ecology.

Just ask your chimera.

Right now, it’s wrestling over the prime real estate with other creatures of the same type.  Winning some battles, losing others and every minute becoming obsolete.  When it’s not fighting it’s desperately mating to birth fresh fantasies, hoping to get its own cash flow going, hoping to sell little monster dreams to other chimeras and save the money to buy an upgrade into full human status.   It’s not likely.  But it’s the only chance it has.

More likely, it’ll just collect wounds and weaken until the young drive it off into some death ghetto where it’ll be eaten and turned into compost by the garden trolls.   Those god-damn garden trolls.  With their pointy hats and big blind eyes, selling the compost back to humans as dream enhancing drugs.  Always pricing it beyond reason.

They only come out at night.  Preserves the skin.

And they’re vain about that.

Crossposted at The Wordwide Culture Gonzo Squad Inc.

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