YOU'RE STILL WRONG Post MRR Columns: Number 3

YOU'RE STILL WRONG

POST MRR COLUMNS Number 3

aka How You Think

by Mykel Board

(Note: Parts of this column have appeared in different form on the STREET CARNAGE website.)

“Ok class,” says the young sexy teacher. “If there are 10 birds on a telephone wire and Farmer John shoots two of them, how many are left?”

Little Tommy raises his hand. The teacher calls on him.

“None,” he says. “the bullets would scare the other birds and they'd fly away.”

“Actually,” says the teacher, “the correct answer is 8... but I like the way you think.”

“I got one for you,” answers Tommy. “There are two women eating ice cream cones. One takes deep bites and eats it right down. The second one slowly licks the top of the cone, swirling her tongue around the tip and then slow widening her lips to suck in the goodness.... Which one is married?”

The young teacher is visibly embarrassed, but she decides to stand her ground. “The second woman, of course.” she answers.

“No,” says Tommy, “the one with the wedding ring. But I like the way you think.”

--Old Joke

It's the mother of all beershits... a massive movement... I trace it inch by inch... starting on the lower right side like appendicitis. The massive ball of excrement moves inch by peristaltic inch through my large intestines... upwards... from right to left... downwards... exquisitely... to the final sphincter where it forces a relaxation and downward blast... like a rocket exhaust... propelling me upwards toward the ceiling... an anal orgasm... After landing, I tilt to the left, raising one cheek from the pot... to examine my accomplishment. Wow! All that! It's like giving birth. I sit down flat again and allow a few straggling turdlets to make their final escape. When I stand up, I see that the toilet seat is covered in squished shit. So is my naked ass. I guess that when I twisted to examine my achievement, fecal remains must've clung and rubbed off on the seat. When I righted myself, I squeezed them down fouling the toilet and myself.

CLICK: Belly sweat collects in the folds, forms little rivulets... puddling in my navel... spilling over... streaming midrifly downwards... curling... running through pubes like swamp water through mangroves. Collecting salt to feed my already chafed groin...turning the pink to black-speckled red. One. Two. Three showers a day. Doesn't help. As soon as I step out, the heat and humidity again start the sweat. And the atmosphere refuses to evaporate it. A kind of diaper rash covers every crevice from knee to navel. Mosquito bites cover the rest.

I start writing this column in Georgetown Guyana. Both paragraphs above happened here. Readers over 40 might remember Guyana from The Jonestown Massacre in the late 1970s. The rest probably think it's some place in Africa.

If you imagine South America as a breast, halfway between the shoulder and the nipple... facing the Caribbean Sea... is Guyana. But I don't want to write about Guyana here. You can read it in my travel blog or in a special article I did for Street Carnage.

I want to go back to that joke at the beginning of the column and tell you that I DON'T like the way you think. Self-evident logic makes as much sense as 8 birds on a phone wire after two are shot. Self-evident logic is wrong. What your life experience has taught you is mistaken. I want to take a look at some of your thinking. Examine it carefully. But you've been warned. After the examination, you might find your ass in a mess.

FIRST CASE: What inspired this revelation was my pre-Guyana visit to Trinidad. In New York City, there are no Costcos, SamsClubs or other giant warehouse companies. I never had the experience. In Trinidad there is at least one: PriceSmart, a San Diego based chain specializing in warehouse stores in the Caribbean.

I go shopping there with Randy, an oft-mentioned pal from ANTI-EVERYTHING, the only punk band in the country. Floor to ceiling metal shelves. Bins, boxes, tables filled with useless things... and one or two things I might need one or two of. There are huge hunks of meat, whole cows, unrecognizable pieces of unrecognizable mammals plastic wrapped and ready for massive consumption. (One package says BEEF OXTAILS, and guarantees me it is halal. Aren't ALL beef oxtails halal?)

Why would a family of four buy a half cow? What the hell are you going to do with 240 rolls of toilet paper? But the thinking goes like this:

If I use one roll of toilet paper in a week, then 240 rolls will last me 240 weeks. I'll eventually have to pay for those 240 rolls. So, here they'll cost me 50 cents each, that's $120. If I pay for them one at a time, they'll cost me 75c each. That's $180. I'm saving sixty bucks.

THIS IS SO WRONG! If you have 240 rolls of toilet paper lying around, you'll use twice as much. You'll use it to blow your nose, to wipe up last night's beer puke, to sop the pus up from a broken pimple. You'll throw one to a friend with a cold... here, take this, I've got hundreds more. You'll use a fistful to wipe after that dainty superclean dump. You'd use one sheet, if you only had one roll. Those 240 rolls will last less than half the time and make twice the waste of your one roll a week. With that roll you'd stretch... use less... maybe buy a handkerchief for the occasional sneeze. Your savings are flushed down the toilet.

With food it's worse. You have more, so you eat more. A never ending supply of beef oxtails or whatever else you don't need. Nothing fresh and healthy... only in gross and grosser for it. Sure,if you're having an oxtail barbecue for 20 people, buy at Costco. If you're in Endangered Feces and need Charmin to throw at the crowd, buy at Costco. But if you're just this guy (or gal) and you think that buying a gallon of ice cream for $40 is cheaper than buying a pint for $7.95... WHAT YOU THINK IS WRONG.

SECOND CASE: Right now, the internet in the Guyanese house I'm staying in is down. All the electricity is off. It happens a few times a day-- like in California during the Enron era. I wonder how many times the average Californian was blacked out then. I can just Google it and find out. No I can't. I forgot. There's no electricity. Too bad... NO IT'S NOT!

I can still wonder. Speculate, imagine, use my mind. WONDER is NOT the same as WANT TO KNOW. Wonder is the joy of thinking, imagining, guessing.

I've seen pictures of the Amerindians here in Guyana. They look like the pictures I've seen of the Brazilian headhunters-- or the New Guinea ones that shrunk a Rockefeller's head in the 1960s: Vaguely oriental features, a bowl-cut haircut, loin cloth (probably an evil relic from some Christian missionary), curare-tipped spears, a bone through the nose. Just what you'd expect. I wonder if the local Indians were cannibals in per-Christian times. I wonder what cooked human flesh tastes like... but, I DO NOT WANT TO KNOW.

Google and Apple have destroyed wonder. Everyone and her pet pig walks around i-plugged into Wikipedia. If I wonder out loud what animal has the largest penis, BLAM, someone comes up with THE BLUE WHALE at 8 feet. End of wonder. Before I can fantasize about some unknown rodent dragging a 5 foot tube of flesh around... bigger than its body. My wonder's been killed. Like my foreskin, it's something I can never get back. I want to wonder without wanting to know. WHAT YOU THINK IS WRONG.

LAST CASE: Cut to a typical Guyanese house. Two stories, wood, the second floor has a covered porch as wide as the building. It's where the parties are... especially here in this house. Jamal, my host, is a gadabout, a man around town, party at his place every night. Beer, rum, and girls.

One of the many things I like about Guyana is the girls. Not that they're so beautiful. Some are. The average Guyanese woman is not average, though they all have some beautiful shade of skin color that puts any white guy/gal to shame. (No wonder tanning salons are so big in America.)

Except for the universally erection-inducing color, the girls here are either spectacular... combining the best of the Indian and the Negro... big eyes, Caribbean S-shape... strong, muscular legs that look like they'd squeeze the life out of you... and you'd love it... OR... ugly as an anal wart, rotund, hairy as a coconut or … so concentration camp skinny you're afraid to touch them. They might break.

I just like the fact that they're THERE! Unlike in many other third world countries-- Gambia, Senegal, Trinidad, for example-- girls go out by themselves... singly... just to lime (hang out). They don't need to be attached to anyone... they just are some of the guys. And many of these girls, not conventionally attractive, have such great personalities, that you WANT to be with them. They've got friends up the ass... as they should.

My favorite bar is a place called Buttsy's. Reminds me of the scummy bars on the Lower East Side when the Lower East Side was good. A couple pool tables, cheap beer ($300, about $1.50US), the kind of loud people others call characters, rather than the kind of loud people others call jocks. Girls as loud as boys. ID? Hah, if you can see over the counter to buy a beer, you buy one. If you can't see over the counter, the guy behind you will give you a boost. At the outside tables, you'll find easy banter among friends-- and friends to be made at the other tables. All they need is a stage and it's CBGB.

Conversation is not about whale penises, but it could be. Lots of laughter, body touching, innuendo. Makes me happy to be here. One of the guys says, let's just buy beer and come over to my place. The party continues... smooth and as easy flowing as a beer shit. That's where we are now. On the balcony, limin', drinking Banks beer. (I know the Beer Advocate doesn't like it, but it's the perfect beer for this hot humid climate... meant to be drunk ice cold.), a bottle of rum and a liter of coke make the rounds. There aren't enough cups, so we use the tops and bottoms of old water bottles to make our own.

“How do you like living in a primitive third world country?” I ask the goddess pouring rum into my half-water bottle.

“Depends on how you count,” she answers with a twinkle in her eye that make my nether parts ooze. It also gets me thinkin'.

Who decides which countries are in which world? Are they in order of average annual income? I don't think so. That would put Saudi Arabia in the first world and Greece in the third. How 'bout majority race? Nope, by that criteria, Japan and Cambodia would be in the same world.

I've heard lefties talk about North countries and South countries, instead of numbered worlds. That doesn't work either. Australia is south of the equator and Afghanistan north. Which one is first world?

How about flush toilets and internet access?

I haven't been in a house here that doesn't have both.

Gap between rich and poor? By that criterion, America would be fifth world... or sixth.

And what is the second world? Anything that used to be SOVIET? Anything with a -STAN at the end?

Has a country ever graduated? Moved up? A former third-worlder now second... or even all the way to first? I don't think so. Countries have moved down: Azerbaijan, for example. Maybe most of the seconds moved to third after the fall of the Soviet empire. Maybe the only second worlders left are Russia, Cuba, North Korea, and whoever the US is attacking at the moment. In any case, I've never heard any country called second world.

I figure is it's a cold war relic. In commie times, America and its friends were the first world. The Soviet Union and its allies were the second world. Everybody else was the third world. These terms stuck. After Russia broke up, the newly independent republics instantly joined the third world-- or the first.

This is just wrong. Countries are NOT in worlds. They are not worlds apart: luxury vs poverty. Flush toilets vs holes in the ground. It's much more complicated than that. Either there are no worlds or there are hundreds of worlds-- not three. WHAT YOU THINK IS WRONG.

This weekend I'll be in Suriname. That's not in Africa either.

ENDNOTES: [You can contact email me (god@mykelboard.com). Postal contact send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137, New York, NY 10012-0003]

-->How Much Punk Rock Do You Hear in Guyana dept: Most of my time here has been with members of the only punk band in the country: Keep Your Day Job. (How come counties with only one punk band have punk bands with such great names?) I sang an acoustic version of BEER IS BETTER THAN GIRLS ARE and will be a roadie for them in Suriname. In a country with very little live music, and no punk, they've got a tough job ahead. I hope they keep it.

-->Related dept: Those of us old enough to remember the 80s, put down later punkrock as bland and commercial. Green Day? Blink 182? Sellout arena bad punk copies, we'd say. But, for many people (like Keep Your Day Job), they are the bridge between the punk we know and the punk they're going to forge. If it weren't for those bands we dismiss, there'd be NO punkrock in places like Guyana. So we gotta give 'em credit... THEN, we teach 'em about GG Allin.

-->Beer and girls dept: A great man (me) once made a song by rhyming those old gas station posters of 20 Ways Beer Is Better Than Girls. Clearly, the list is a comic lament by some teenage guy who can't get laid and drowns his sour grapes in beer. It's almost feminist in its pathos. But, with the typical sense of humor of feminists, they don't get it.

Now, a Texas beer company has introduced a new beer with the motto: Goes down easy. The reaction has been predictable. Check it out here.

-->Keeping on the pressure dept: If you want to see me back in Maximum Rock'n'Roll (or if you don't) you can tell them directly with an email to: mrr@maximumrocknroll.com You SHOULD contact them.

--end

[My sadly under up-kept travel diary is available at: mykelsdiary.blogspot.com. And you can subscribe to updates, and notification of new columns and other writing by joining my Yahoo group at: http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/readMBoard/]