You’re too stupid to figure out how to use the Silk Road and the dog has eaten all of your weed again. What are you gonna do? Well, in a sane world, you do what generations of stupid, bored children have done before you and reach for the medicine cabinet. A few of Mum’s valiums and a wine glass of Calpol never hurt anyone, right?
I first heard about Spookhaus (or Bruce Campbell) when I was on tour a few weeks ago. Our driver said he had bought weed off of this guy in Vancouver who was a real vampire. Anytime I hear about someone like this in my beautiful, boring city, I get really excited about befriending them. When I found out that Spookhaus allegedly sleeps in a coffin, I was sold.
50 Cent is kind of like the Pope in that people depend on him to do stuff, and also he is anointed by a team of bishops or something. If you take a little trip down Wikipedia Lane, you’ll discover that 50 Cent has written over one million books.
Our super-enthusiastic friends over at VICE Netherlands recently got to kick it with the cutest MC with the stupidest hairdo, Mr Danny Brown. Our Dutch colleagues claimed that Danny “enables shy boys from the Dutch countryside to love him like pregnant women love rolled herring”, which is about the most Dutch sentence ever.
What seems as a sadomasochistic esoteric ritual is actually a holiday party on Ameland, a small island of the Netherlands. Called Sunneklaas, yesterday they celebrated it again. Masked men go out on the streets, blow horns, smash the ground with sticks, and do other stuff people rarely ever do. Women and minors can’t go out because they will be chased back home or get their asses beaten with sticks. Do they actually stay inside? What do you think?
Here’s a paradox worth revisiting as I sit here paralyzed with a mean case of writer’s block/procrastination fly trap: more people commit suicide in locales that self-identify as “happy.” Like Utah, which is full of happy jerks being athletic and having great diets and a fulfilling spiritual life. If you’ve never spent much time in the Salt Lake City suburbs, it’s a bit like an Applebee’s commercial crossed with an REI store. It’s also beautiful and fairly clean-feeling.
ManWoman, a Canadian artist and poet, has been trying to reclaim the swastika from cue ball-headed bigots since the 1960s, when he was tasked with the mission via a series of powerful dreams. Two hundred swastika tattoos, a couple of near-beatdowns, and one failed marriage later, ManWoman’s mission is finally starting to pay off. He is now the unofficial grandfather of the Reclaim The Swastika movement. In case you were wondering, ManWoman is not transgender. The name was given to him by the same “dream people” who gave him his quest. It has been his legal name since 1971, but for some reason Zuck still kicked him off Facebook. You can call him “Manny” for short.
At Parliament Square, police were quite friendly. We asked if we could join the demonstration, and they were like, “Be our guest!”
There was no direct road map or GPS tracker to guide me on this journey. I had no idea where I was going. All I had were Earl’s tweets from the day before, which I had already memorized but also saved on my phone just in case I blanked on any important details. He had posed a tantalizing offer to his followers, and I was determined to take him up on it. He had tweeted, “Hai. If you’re in la come to the 7-11 on Olympic and barrington and buy this jersey and meet me. I need lunch money. We’ll be there for 15.” My heart skipped a beat. My favorite living rapper, one who had been missing in action for more than a year, was now back and willing to reveal himself to anyone who would buy an article of his clothing so that he could get a bite to eat.
My brother has hemiplegic cerebral palsy, and he’s a total dick about it. He’s always like, “Oh, I’m crippled so I can’t do the dishes,” or he’ll just blow all of his disability checks on video games and take-out food. For two decades I’ve been secretly jealous of him, yearning for all that extra attention, free stuff, and lowered expectations. I was so envious I hijacked a wheelchair from a loading dock when I was six years old. I contorted my hands and feet and drove it around like I owned that motherfucker, just to see what it was like. People were smiling at me and waving; it was like being a celebrity.
