So it wasn’t until just recently (this year in fact) that I finally jumped on the cellular telephone bandwagon. I had been reticent for a long time to join the cellular fold for a multitude of reasons. I have always felt that if I need to make or receive a phone call I will make sure I am by a phone. I value my time alone highly and I don’t need any of my douche bag friends interrupting a nice relaxing drive on the freeway. No offense to my douche bag friends of course. Above all I absolutely hate being “that guy”. You know the one I’m talking about. The guy in the gas station, super market, dildo supply warehouse, liquor store, et all who is SO damn important, whose time is SO valuable that he cant hang up the phone for two minutes so he can pay for his fourteen inch black rubber phallus. However the one piece of cell phone related culture that drives me up a wall faster than any other is the dreaded fucking headset. It makes me want to knock out every one of your blue teeth with a fucking hammer. It takes a very special kind of self absorbed vapid asshole to walk around with one of those things strapped to your head. If you hold your finger up to me one more time with the intent to inform me that I must wait a moment so that I may blessed with your attention I will break the fucker off and choke you with it. As truly horrifying and nauseating as it can be I choose to walk the earth fully immersed in the world around me. I suggest you try doing the same.

I have come to realize that a precious few things actually inspire and spur me to write. Rain, rage and women. I had two out of three today so I sat down at the ole typin’ machine to do some damage. You see the problem is I can’t just sit down and think, “What really pisses me off?” and let it flow. The blind and burning rage needs to be fresh and organic. It just so happens I was served some free range, cage free, farm fresh rage today while I was at work.

            She came in first. One of the few things that actually makes me like my job… No not a woman. I work at a comic book store. women don’t go to comic book stores, unless they are there because of a guy. Kids are one of the few things that actually make this job enjoyable and I’m not talking about teenagers. Teenagers are horrible loud and mindless automatons who bug the shit out of me. And I’m not talking about babies either. Babies are disgusting, parasitic, eating, shitting, screaming machines. However when it comes down to it I don’t like all kids either. I like the shy ones, the quiet ones who are glad to be there and want to see something different, something that might change their lives, even if they don’t know it. Kids that remind me of a young Jaz Brown make me want to stop and share everything cool that I know and tell them it’s not going to suck forever… Just most of the time. This girl fit the bill. Her father however was blind heartless cock who had know idea that he was raising a little girl who would do anything to get the attention of the opposite sex just because he couldn’t be bothered to get off the fucking phone and act like she was worth it. He was a loud talking dick with a headset jammed in his ear.

            “Yeah well if they don’t get it together down there in administration some heads are going to roll… yeah well, that’s what I told her… Well I cant wait to lay off that little Russian fuck in the mail room.”

            They were in the store for about a half and hour and he was on the phone the whole time. Something would strike the young girl, excite her, light the flame under her heart and he just couldn’t be bothered. It made me want to tell her that it was going to be ok, that she could come live at the store. I did not do that however. What I did do was walk over and talk to her because her father was obviously talking to someone FAR more important about things that just absolutely COULD NOT WAIT. It took her a few moments but soon enough we were talking about what kind of art she liked, what sort of covers looked interesting and what a horrible douche her father was… Well maybe not that last part.

            I suppose the moral here is: HANG UP THE FUCKING PHONE and show some interest in your daughters life otherwise Ill be seeing her in “Tight Young Virgins 12” in ten years.

From the lofty position atop my soapbox I stand before you today to declare a new mandate. If you don’t know how to use an ATM card you are not allowed to have one. ATM cards piss me off all on their own. If you have plans to make a purchase you should consider this; get some fucking money. However, the only thing that makes ATM cards worse is when they are wielded by the elderly. If  grandma needs to have the cashier enter her PIN number for her then give her a hearty bitch slap and send her home to watch her stories or tend to the kitties.

Which brings me to the greater issue… Old people. We should kill them. If you don’t have any means to contribute to the community then you are a drain. More pressing than that is the fact that I have shit to do so you and your ridiculous little cart need to get the fuck out of my way. Plenty of other cultures who are allegedly less advanced than we have the common sense to load the old and useless onto a fucking ice flow and send them off to sea. So why is it that we insist on keeping ours around to get in the way? We certainly don’t have one of those societies where the elderly are given an opportunity to contribute by keeping oral history alive or to impart wisdom. At this point the bulk of our elderly are around simply to burn up my social security and generally slow things down. Whether they are standing at the check stand staring glassy eyed at the ATM machine or cruising at 45 miles an hour in a 70 the solution is always the same… Gas em.

I know what you’re thinking…

“But Jaz, what if it was your own father who had nothing to offer society?”

Great question.

I would sit down with him and we would decide upon his preferred method. Then we would go out in the back yard and handle it… And I don’t doubt that he would thank me for it.

Couple fights to name baby Metallica.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Metallica may be a cool name for a heavy metal band, but a Swedish couple is struggling to convince officials it is also suitable for a baby girl.

Those Swedes sure do love the metal.

            When my father wasn’t dealing with live stock invading our house he was often busied with the logistics of home surgery. It seemed as if my Dad always had some kind of strange growth popping up on his neck or back. Being the man that he was he rarely chose to spend the money to have it handled properly. I would be in my room reading or playing video games on my Commodore 64 when the call would come in.

            “Jaz! Come here. I need your help!”

            I learned to dread the horrible phrase “I need your help”. Those four words most often meant that I would spend the rest of the day watching while my Dad swore at a broken lawnmower that would never work again or I would be asked to perform some gross and nauseating task that no child should ever be subject to.  I would begrudgingly walk into the bathroom to find him standing there with a flashlight, a couple of mirrors and some towels.

            “You see this thing here!?” he would say pointing to the back of his neck.

            There just under flesh would be some strange growth at least the size of an eraser. He would calmly explain that I, his only son would have to remove it for him because no matter how he angled the mirrors he just could see it properly. His request was always followed by a great amount of reluctance on my part. After which I would finally break down and take the dirty and dull X-acto knife that he had been trying to force into my hand. He would bend his head down over the sink and hand me a rag.

            “Just cut that fucking thing out of there!”

            Perhaps it was because I was never provided with the proper tools but I was always amazed at how resilient human flesh is to slicing. After a few tenuous passes he would insist that it didn’t hurt and that I needed to push harder. I would force the tip of the blade into his flesh cutting a deep gouge into his neck. At which point a white or yellowish mass would breach the crimson gash crowing as if his neck were giving birth to a cartilaginous blob. He’d slap a band aid over the hole in his neck and spend the next half hour to an hour inspecting whatever it was I had removed from his body.

            “Would you look at this fucking thing!” he would say as he pushed it toward my mothers face for closer inspection.

            “Throw that thing a-way!”  She would demand thoroughly disgusted.

            But he never did. All the odd pieces of gristle and viscera that came out of his body ended up in a mason jar that he kept in his truck. Perhaps he kept it there to show off to his co workers.

            “My boy cut this out of me last night!”

            “No anesthetic. No stitches. No nothin’!”

I’m sure they would the would turn and tell him to get that disgusting shit out of their faces because they were trying to eat and that he was just as bizarre as the day is long.

On the day they were handing out parents I must have bee characteristically late. Not by a lot, just by my standard five to ten minutes. Perhaps I had forgotten my smokes and had to race back to the house to get them. Maybe I was rushing around the house desperately trying to find my keys. Regardless of the circumstances judging by the parents I ended up with I was obviously late. Not late enough to end up in the back of the line where there was nothing left but child molesters and parents who’s affinity for corporal punishment would frequently leave their children with an inability to sit comfortably for days at a time. I certainly hadn’t gotten there early enough to reserve a place at the front of the line where perfect parent were distributed. I had obviously landed directly in the middle where the parental stock and trade ranged from eccentric and bizarre to downright insane. My parents exhibited all of these traits at one time or another and when they weren’t behaving strangely themselves strange would invariably come to them.

            One of my earliest memories would undoubtedly feel right at home in the pages of a David Lynch film script. It was early one morning and I was sprawled out on the living room floor with a bowl of frosted flakes completely engrossed in Saturday morning cartoons. It was a comfortable summer morning and all the doors and windows had been opened to allow a crisp breeze to wind through the house. My father sat on the couch behind me allowing him self a rare moment to relax and enjoy the paper while my mother busied herself in the kitchen. I chuckled to myself as Wyle E Coyote managed to fowl up yet another fool proof plan. Just as I hand lifted the bowl to my lips to drink down the last of the cool sugary milk my mother let out a blood curdling scream from the back bedroom. Within seconds my father and I were up and racing toward the back bedroom. What was happening? Had she caught a prowler digging through her underwear drawer? On a Saturday morning no less. Was there a masked man in the back yard brandishing high powered weaponry? As we rounded the corner and rushed into the bedroom the scenario laid out before us was far more unthinkable than any I had previously considered. My mother was standing in the corner of the bedroom with her hands over her face and there standing on top of my parent king size bed was a full sized horse. I haven’t the faintest idea about how it got in the house let alone how it got on top of the bed. Yet there it stood balancing on top of the bed, obviously just as frightened as my mother and equally dumbfounded as my father and I. Once he had recovered from a paralyzing bout of riotous laughter my father led the horse out of the house and back to the pasture from which it had come. For months afterward my mother would complain endlessly about her bedroom stinking of horse. Invariably my father would inform her that if she hadn’t wanted her bedroom to smell like horse she shouldn’t have let one stand on her bed.