December 19 , 2002: Random Random Shit 2

Lonely Man XXL

I saw some of those "Night Hawk" brand frozen dinners at Wal Mart the other day, and almost thought about getting one. In case you didn't know, these are like your basic TV dinners, except instead of stuff like chicken and those three slices of lunchmeat they try to sell as "turkey," these have stuff like steak and pork chops and stuff. Really manly stuff. It really sounded like a good idea, but then I thought back to my days working at Kroger, and thought of the negative stigma buying a Night Hawk dinner would place on me. You see, in two years, I never saw any regular people buying one of those. All sorts of people would come through there, ranging from plumbers to teachers to football coaches and farmers, and none of them ever went anywhere near one of those things. But the people who did eat those things all seemed to fit the same description. Overweight, over 40 years old, smartly dressed in something like ripped jogging pants or a stained, much-too-tight Star Wars-related T-shirt, sporting greasy hair that apparently hadn't been washed in weeks, and carrying with them the most unique of odors, to say the least. These were the dregs of humanity. Reduced to living on $1.95 steak dinners, since no female in their right mind would ever stick around long enough to cook for them and they don't make enough money to buy real meat, they drag their asses through life, taking their only brief moments of joy from the cartons of Doral cigarettes and copies of "PC World" that often accompanied their frozen block of failure to the register. These were people who had lost all hope.
Needless to say, I passed up the Night Hawks and bought a few pot pies instead. Mmm-mmm good!

Christmas Up Your Ass

It's December, so all you hear about is Christmas. Unless you're going out in public, then you don't hear a damn thing about it. What's that you say? Christmas trees and green-and-red decorations everywhere? Look and listen a little closer. Look around and count the times you see the word "Christmas" on the decorations or in the advertising. Couldn't find any? Exactly. Everything says "holiday" now, because some goddamn hippies can't stand to hear anything even remotely Christ-related in their daily life. Look. I'm as big an athiest as anybody, but the day you start hearing me talk about "buying holiday presents" or "going home for the holiday season" is the day you also see me find a tall building with a flagpole in front of it, then jump off the roof in the hopes of impaling myself on the flagpole. It's Christmas, it's always been Christmas, it always will be Christmas, and if one simple word offends you that badly, you're a pussy who needs to be punched repeatedly, until you go insane. What's that, you say? You can't drive someone insane by repeatedly punching them? Well, then, I guess I'm going to be punching you for a real long time, pussy.
Also, at work, the Christ-I mean holiday music has started big time. I never knew there were so many variations of "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" and "Jingle Bell Rock" were out there, and I must say, I despise every single one of them. But that one instrumental Christmas song they play kinda rules, but I don't know what it's called. It kinda goes, "toot-toot-toot-toodily, toot-toot-toodily-toooo" or something like that. There's words to it, but I don't remember them, which is odd, since they play the version with words too, and I've been hearing it since I was a little kid. They still play the normal store backgound music some, too, though. There's this one song that sounds like it's from the 80s, and the chorus is like this chick going "uh-oh, UH-oh" while these weird voices in the background go "fallin' in love, fallin' in love", and there's this other newer-sounding song that keeps saying something like "you can't escape my love." Man, fuck both those songs.

Goddamn Avril Lavigne

Exclusive photo of the original idea for Avril Lavigne's look, before someone finally said, "fuck it, we better do the 'punk' thing."

I was watching MTV the other day, because I hate myself, and I once again discovered someone new to piss me off for completely irrational reasons. You can't see her or read anything about her, without seeing or hearing the word "punk," and goddammit, I'm not exactly Ian-fucking-MacKaye over here, but even I know that's bullshit. I dunno, I just can't picture her smashing bottles on cop cars or using those spikes she's always waving around to grind them in someone's face to escape a ten-on-one beatdown from a bunch of drunk skinheads. Maybe it's just me. And the one song they keep playing all over the place that I cannot find any escape from is her telling some guy to be himself and stuff like that, but goddamn, look at yourself Avril, if that is your real name. If you're such a crazy punk rocker, with your spiked armbands and muscle shirts and whatnot, why are you doing manufactured cheesey pop, instead of, oh, I don't know... BEING IN A PUNK BAND?
This all reminds me again of one of the subtle things that makes heavy metal so cool. No matter how hard they try, MTV/Rolling Stone/Spin/bla bla bla just can't assimilate it, like they have every other form of music. Oh, they've tried, but in order to make it acceptable to a mass audience, they've had to change it to the point where it's no longer considered metal, like the whole glam rock thing or the more recent addition of what some scholars refer to as "phat beats." They can parade out a teenage Britney Spears fan with a pair of spiked bracelets, and the public will eat it up, but the moment they send someone out there in corpsepaint or a Mortician "Chainsaw Dismemberment" T-shirt, the public will fart on it louder than any Tiger Ali Singh match was ever farted on. And I like that.