Torso At Babyland, 4/3/2019

     Here are pictures that I took at Babyland on April 3rd, 2019.  The lineup was Torso, Eel, Peace Talks? and De Rodillas.

Torso:

Eel:

Peace Talks?:

De Rodillas:

Gooski's, 3/30/2019

     Here are pictures that I took at Gooski's on March 30th, 2019.  The lineup was Hub City Stompers, Submachine and the Microbials.

Hub City Stompers:

Submachine:

Microbials:

Oh, Shit

     Earlier this week, a column about office bathrooms appeared on the City Paper website.  This brought up a slew of bad memories from my time in corporate hell.  In addition to the previous bit of awfulness that I had described here, flashbacks to other instances came flooding out of the depths of my brain.

     Over the course of twenty years, I have worked at four different buildings around town for the same company.  Each location has been a nightmare in some way, shape or form when it comes to the restrooms.

     Lightbulbs blow out and never get replaced so donning a reading light or a miner's helmet is necessary when something goes south.  Hot water tanks have broken and have taken a fiscal quarter to be repaired.  Someone had once ripped a paper towel dispenser off of the wall and it was replaced with an additional soap dispenser.  At one location, the thermometer for the radiator broke so the heat was on full blast 24/7.  It would get so hot that the door handle on the outside of the bathroom would be warm to the touch.

     There is no one to reach out to directly to fix maintenance problems.  There is a website to submit building issues to and the mythical “they” will get to them when they get to them.  I'm sure this is part of the company initiative to make it suck so bad to come to work that everyone will quit.

     I have survived the bathroom at CBGB's and lived to tell the tale.  What some of my fellow humans have done in an office setting is downright fucking bizarre compared to anything that I witnessed go down at CB's.  Since I probably spend more time at work than anywhere else, I try to treat the men's room with a little more respect than the trough at the average sports stadium.

     One of my earliest encounters with the weirdness of office bathrooms was when I worked the evening shift at a building downtown.  I walked into the restroom to find a group of homeless men freshening up in the sinks while in varying states of undress.  There was an odor that I could only describe as a punch in the nervous system.  These guys clearly needed to wash up.  As I am no rat, I politely turned around, exited the bathroom and ventured to one of the other floors in the building.  I'm guessing that they gained access to the building because of the post 9/11 vigilance of the security guard that could usually be found sleeping at the front desk.

     There was also a guy that used to make his morning oatmeal in the men's room.  That is not a euphemism.  He would literally dump a packet of oatmeal into a bowl and mix it with hot water out of the tap.  In the men's room.  Instead of using the sink in the kitchenette that was around the corner from the bathroom.  He would make his oatmeal after he did his lunges across the row of stalls and urinals.  He would also try to have a conversation with anyone and everyone that would have poor enough timing to end up in the bathroom at the same time as him.  While he was making his breakfast and doing his exercises.  As if using a public bathroom wasn't harrowing enough, let's add in food prep, a Jane Fonda workout and an unhealthy dose of idle chit chat.

     Then there was the guy that would gorge himself on McDonald's until he would end up in the bathroom heaving it all back up.  Every day he would come walking into the building with a large enough bag of food that you'd think he bought it for his work group but no.  He would sit in the common area and jam McMuffins and pancakes in his face until start time and within the first hour of his shift he'd completely destroy the bathroom for everyone else in the office for the rest of the day since the cleaning crew only showed up once a day.

     More recently, there was a member of management that was always in the bathroom yelling into his cellphone while on conference calls.  Not only would he talk at ear splitting volumes, he would slam the stall doors and flush multiple times, not really concerned with concealing the fact that he was in the shitter to all of the other people on the conference call while his phone was on speaker. And I'm astonished that this animal didn't have a persistent case of pink eye.  He wouldn't think to put the phone down long enough to wash his hands.  He would go from the stall, right out the door and touch everything along the way back to his office.  I wouldn't have been shocked to have seen him scoot along the floor on his bare ass at some point.  Luckily, he failed upward and took a job somewhere else in the company so he now has the opportunity to wipe his butt germs all over a different building.

     Humans are gross and unbearably selfish creatures that don't seem to pay too much attention to their impact on the world around them.  They don't really think more than five minutes ahead of where they currently are.  And if things don't affect them directly, then who gives a shit, someone else will have to deal with it.  No wonder our species is walking backwards into extinction with blinders on.

At The Intersection Of “What The Fuck Is Going On?” And “I Guess We Are That Dumb”

     Between an outbreak of the measles and passing laws to punish women for practicing bodily autonomy, we are plummeting back to the good old days of the 1600s.  Not to mention another school shooting and trying to “middle of the road” the earth turning into Arrakis.  Way to go humans.  We have really stuck the landing over the past few weeks.

     The nationwide outbreak of measles has finally hit the Pittsburgh area.  Personally, I'm shocked that it took as long as it did to get here.  With the amount of nostalgia that people clamor over themselves for in this town, bringing back an eradicated disease like it was the McRib seems like it would be right up every Yinzers collective alley.

     I don't know who would be more insufferable to be stuck in an elevator with: the person who takes medical advice from a celebrity known for sticking her tongue out and farting on MTV or the person that thinks they can pray away illness so they don't feel the need to take their children to a doctor.

     I want to know what it's like to be able to firmly believe that a figment of my imagination would be able to save me from illness thus forgoing modern medicine.  These folks are the Flying Wallendas of logic.  If they do have a medical procedure done, they will praise God for a positive outcome instead of the doctor that performed the procedure.  Claiming that God created the doctor and gave said doctor the knowledge of medical science.  By that logic, they should be all about getting a vaccine because God created the scientist that discovered the vaccine.  I guess that leap of faith only goes so far before landing head first in the holy water.

     Some people are so smart that they fell for the Russian internet bots that push anti-vaccine horseshit for no other reason than to try to plant the seeds of divisiveness among the American populace.  Well, it worked and someone in the Russian government earned a bonus this year for their work also leading to an outbreak of a communicable disease.  Two birds with one stone, comrade. Although, it really couldn't have been that difficult since they targeted the same people that took medical advise from Jenny McCarthy because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

     As if being saddled with people that are too stupid to vaccinate their children wasn't bad enough, we've also got state representative Daryl Metcalfe introducing legislation that would protect these dipshits from discrimination, on the basis of religious grounds.  They'll be able to go wherever they want within the Commonwealth to spread disease and the rest of us will be powerless to stop them unless we want to face a lawsuit.  This means that protections for made up bullshit is more important to Metcalfe than protections from actual disease.

     I used to always wonder how Metcalfe kept getting reelected until just recently.  I had to venture into his district for a family dinner at Cracker Barrel, of all places.  Not only is there a mountain of white flight wealth in his district, I also noticed that there seems to be some sort of inbreeding program going on in the northern suburbs of the Pittsburgh area.  On a cursory glance, a lot of my fellow diners shared more than a few facial features.  I don't know if it was from the water that's been polluted by fracking or if everyone was cousins but I felt like I was stuck in the Twilight Zone.  There was a definite vibe in the room of the lights being on but absolutely no one home.

     Metcalfe's special flavor of home spun hate and bigotry would most certainly play well with that crowd.  His constituents wouldn't really care how much he sells them out to big business as long as he keeps them safe from the gays, the non-whites and women that aren't subservient.

.     .     .

     Frightened, white boy infested state legislatures are becoming quite the problem of late, believe it or not.  Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Ohio have all passed some of the most aggressive, misguided and anti-science abortion laws, in recent history.

     Even Pennsylvania started to test the waters this week with the passage of a partial ban.  Hopefully, our governor will see fit to get his favorite pen out of the drawer and veto the living daylights out of the thing.

     In some of these bills, exemptions for rape and incest have been removed.  Miscarriages can somehow be prosecuted.  If a rapist is acquitted, the victim can be charged with a crime for terminating the pregnancy because that makes sense.  And I'm sure I'm missing a few other awful details that have been jammed into these bills.

     The bill in Ohio beats out all of the other states to win the science fiction prize for dumb assery. They have included a provision that would force a woman to undergo a medical procedure that doesn't exist.  In ectopic pregnancies, the egg has not left the fallopian tube before fertilization.  The fetus ends up implanting itself and growing in the tube.  Once this happens, the fetus is no longer viable and the woman's life is in danger.  The Ohio legislature thinks there is a medical procedure that can transplant the fetus from the tube to the uterus.

     No such procedure exists.  They made it up and now it's a law and my brain hurts.  A simple Google search by a staffer could have shed some light on this information but no one seemed to be too concerned about it.

     One of the intentions of this series of laws is to get in front of the Supreme Court in an effort to have Roe v. Wade overturned.  With two incompetent judges recently appointed, that seems to be where this is headed.  This is the outcome of people not liking Hilary Clinton enough to get off of their couches to cast a vote.  Pigfuckers of every stripe and on every level feel emboldened by the current situation and lives are in danger.

     Apathy toward off-year, local elections is another reason why we are knee deep and head first in this shit.  State legislatures and courts are stacked with idiots all over the country because most people care more about American Idle results than who ends up being their representative in Congress.

     Local elections do matter.  I forget who pointed it out to me but always remember that the mayor from Jaws was still the mayor in Jaws 2.  And if there was ever a pigfucker that deserved to be sent packing it was that guy.

     Imagine the uproar of white male privilege if we started regulating jerking off and medications for broken dicks as much as these assholes are trying to regulate the bodies of women.  This is all about control.  If this was about the lives of children wouldn't our schools be funded?  Wouldn't social programs that aid in the nurturing of children have some much cash laying around the social workers would be tripping over it?

     If this was about children, maybe something more than thinking and praying would be accomplished when a school gets shot up.  Maybe we should put the guns away until folks learn how to deal with their feelings without hurting others.  Let's take this idea of living in a made up past as far as we can and live in a time without firearms.  Sure there were clubs and rocks but those are a little more manageable for bystanders to get by than a fully loaded magazine.

     This has nothing to do with children.  The fragile, white male ego feels power slipping from its grasp so now it's lashing out in all directions.  Fuck immigrants.  Fuck people of color.  Fuck the LGBTQ community.  And fuck women.  Progress is showing these shitheads the door and they are trying to do as much damage as they possibly can on their way out.

.     .     .

     The Great American Stupid is clutching to a history that never existed.  Nostalgic for fictitious times, this beast is trying to make us all adhere to its narrow worldview no matter who or what gets stepped on.

     Earlier this week, Joe Biden tried to say that measures to combat climate change were negotiable. This was a perfect demonstration of Stupid not having a party affiliation.  When the world is burning and there are wars over food and water I'm sure we'll be able to negotiate the terms of our extinction. Dumb ass.

.     .     .

 Hopelessness abounds.

Mulberry's, Cleveland 3/23/2019

     Here are pictures that I took at Mulberry's, up in Cleveland, on March 23rd, 2019.  The lineup was Minority Threat, MAAFA, Soul Glo, Killer Of Sheep and For Your Health.

Minority Threat:

MAAFA:

Soul Glo:

Killer Of Sheep:

For Your Health: