You’re Still Wrong Mykel's Blog for September 2019 or We’re Number Two

You’re Still Wrong Mykel's Blog for September 2019 

or We’re Number Two 

Mykel’s Post-MRR Blog

September 2019

We're Number Two

by Mykel Board

"Travel  is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."
―Mark Twain

It was a more brilliant idea than the invention of masturbation…. a bigger adventure than petting a live crocodile… a riskier task than walking into a room of black lesbian feminist vegetarians. Disappear! Go away… vanish. Not permanently (sorry folks), but for more than a month. Just go off and not tell a soul where I’m going. POW! Be gone.

By the time you read this, I will be gone… a brief trip to help celebrate my nephew’s college graduation. Then POW… off to I-know-where to disappear with only a few scattered traces. Here are the first two of a slow series of hints to my location:

1. Saturday Night Live

2. It’s a place I’ve never been to, but MAYBE not a country I’ve never been to.

More to come (check my travel facebook page for hints).

So for my last blog before I go, I want to talk about travel.

While I make the necessary preparations for my disappearance, I’ve been thinking about my trips in the past. Once, while hiking through the woods somewhere, maybe Estonia, I squatted to take a shit. There’s something wonderful about being alone with nature… trees, leaves, shrubs. And then just squatting and taking a shit. It’s a Buddhist-like communion. I am one with the bears, the chipmunks, the boars… my fellow creatures who shit in the woods.

It’s a medium shit… the consistency of toothpaste… the size and shape of Katz’s pickles. But the wipe… What about the wipe?

I open my wallet to look for an old receipt or any other scrap of paper…nothing… only green bills: three ones, four fives, and a twenty. It would be a great statement to wipe my ass on hard cash. It’s a statement I do not make. I pinch my cheeks together and pull up my pants.

FLASH TO GREENLAND: Until Trump’s offer to buy it from Denmark, most Americans had never heard of Greenland. Half of those who have confuse it with Iceland. Denmark controls much of Greenland’s foreign policy. It issues passports and prints the money for the country… but it does not OWN the country… at least not in the way the US owns Puerto Rico.

It’s 2017, I step off the plane from Oslo, Norway to Nuuk, Greenland. At the door to the plane is a roll-away staircase. The other end sits on the small tarmac below. I climb down and follow the other dozen or so passengers into the main building… fishing out my passport ready to present it to the immigration officer who’ll ask why I’m there, do I have anything to declare, and can I open my bags so he can see if I have any booze or munitions.

I don’t see an immigration officer. There is a guy in a sort of uniform (black shirt and pants), sitting at a desk.

“Are you immigration?” I ask.

He nods.

I hand him my passport. He opens it, looks at my picture and hands it back.

I clear my throat.

“I know this is an odd request,” I say, “but I like to keep records of places I’ve visited. Would you mind stamping my passport?”

He shrugs.

“Sorry,” he says in better English than mine, “we don’t have any stamps. We don’t do that in Greenland.”

So began a journey, like all others, different from any journey I’d had before. A country with NO SECURITY. No x-rays at the airport, no immigration, no bag inspection, no taking off belts and shoes. A country where people watch whales frolic from their windows… and then eat them. Where locals can see the aurora from those same windows. It’s a place where caribou hunters video their kills on iphones. A place where a fine halibut steak costs $5… and a single cucumber costs more. All the land is owned by the government. You have a right to use the land where you want to build a house, but you can't buy or sell it.

We sit at a bar near the center of town. I’m with Inuarq my couch-surfing host for my time here. I raise my glass.

“Kazuta!” he says.

“Kazuta!” I reply, downing the beer.

A beautiful Greenlander enters the bar with a bunch of young men in tow. She reminds me of those young Japanese women who die their hair blond. Oriental-looking, like most Greenlanders, she’s tall and thin, unlike most of the other locals. I figure she’s a local celebrity. I figure right.

“That’s Ursula,” says my host. “The only transsexual in Greenland. She’s a superstar here. On television... people follow her around. The biggest thing in Greenland since the igloo. EVERYBODY wants to be her friend” [NOTE: I forget what her name REALLY is, so I use Ursula, because it’s a sexy name.]

In Greenland, the stranger, the novel, the outsider revels in her strangeness, her novelty, her outsiderness. Rock-star status… The way it should be.

FLASH TO MONGOLIA: In Mongolia, at least in 1996 Mongolia, there are no roads between the cities. You drive over the desert in the general direction of the city. When you come to a ger (one of those big round tents Americans call “yurts”), you ask the way, and the ger-owner adjusts your path a bit, and you go on to another ger and get adjusted again. When the sun begins to set, you stop at a ger, tell ‘em you’re a traveler, and the people feed you, put you up for the night, and adjust your direction the next morning.

It’s the evening, I sit with a family I’ve never met. We’re someplace in the Gobi desert… not a city… not a town… just a ger, not close to anything else except sand and a few mountains. It looks about 6 o’clock from the sun and the sun is all we have to go from.

I’m the only one here who doesn’t speak Mongolian (except for the phrase Mongol-hun bain? (Are you Mongolian? Not very useful in Mongolia.) Tsengel, student and the driver on this trip, translates when it’s necessary.

Dinner tonight is lamb, bread, and vodka. Dinner EVERY night is lamb, bread, and vodka. Our hosts, a man and woman in their late 40s, open the cupboard to fetch the bread and vodka. There is one loaf and one bottle. The man pours a rather large single glass of vodka, then dips his ring finger into it. Holding his finger with his thumb, he releases it spraying vodka into the air.

“It’s a first offering for the Gods,” Tsengel tells me.

Then the host passes the glass among the rest of us… and we all take a sip. Then he refills the glass, takes a drink and passes it around again. While we’re drinking, his wife takes the loaf of bread and cuts it into the same number of pieces as there are people. She passes it around.

After we finish, there is no more vodka and no more bread.

“What are they going to eat or drink tomorrow?” I ask Tsengel. “They have no more bread. No more vodka.”

“It’s never tomorrow… always today” says Tsengel, “so we don’t worry about it.”

Further on in the desert, we’re almost out of gas. There is a small town with a handpump filling station that will be our last stop for 2 hundred miles. I suggest we fill all available containers with gasoline. One of them is ¼ bottle of vodka.

“We’re going to need that container,” I tell Tsengel.

“I can’t drink a quarter bottle of vodka,” says Tsengel. “I have to drive.”

“Then dump it out into the sand,” I tell him.

“That’s vodka,” he says, looking like I’d asked him to cut off his testicles.

“I know,” I say, “just dump it.”

“But, that’s VODKA!” he says. “You can’t dump it out.”

But we do. I can see the tears in his eyes as he pours it into the Gobi sand.

FLASH TO NY: Gavin, a pal from Guyana, is visiting me. He’s spent some time in the Amazon, trying to synthesize traditional music from escaped slaves with punkrock. You can see some of what he does here.

It’s Drink Club night at the Peculier Pub, Gavin shows up late as the Guyanese are wont to do.

“This is my friend Gavin,” I say by way of introduction. “He’s from Guyana.”

“Really,” says a friend from New Jersey, “tell me about it. I’ve always wanted to visit Africa.”

Flash to any American patriotic rally. I’m here because I have to be doing something ELSE… and the rally is blocking my way. This one is on some street in a small town between New York and Baltimore. I’m driving to visit my friend Kesha and it’s Memorial Day (or Labor Day-- I always get them confused) weekend.

WE’RE NUMBER ONE! WE’RE NUMBER ONE! WE’RE NUMBER ONE! comes the shout from the crowd.

“More like we’re NUMBER TWO,” I think-but-don’t-say for personal safety reasons. Then, the idea strikes me, what do these people REALLY think is the number two country.

I tap the shoulder of a blond girl in a blue tanktop.

“Hey!” she says –not in a friendly way.

The massive white guy standing next to her turns around. He looks down at me, like a vengeful god might have looked down at Moses when he (Moses) smashed the Ten Commandments.

“What’s up with you, Mister?” asks the white guy.

“Sorry to bother you,” I say, “but I was just wondering. If America is number one, what country is number two?”

“What the fuck?” says the big white guy. “They’re ALL number two.”

“I see,” I say. “Well then, of all the countries you’ve been to, what’s the difference between them and us?”

“Are you serious?” he asks. “What kind of question is that? I’ve never been out of the U.S. I don’t need to go. Everything is here. Purple mountains majesty… that kinda shit. And the biggest army in the world. We RULE! Don’t you know that? Are you some kind of foreigner?”

“I don’t really know,” I tell him.

One facebook friend says he’s been to over 100 countries. Turns out he went to most of them with the army. Spent all his time killing the locals, so he knows how awful they are. Otherwise, he was with Americans and it’s just like he never left home

Others of my “friends” tell me LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT. These are usually the same guys who want to ban immigrants.

“I can’t leave it,” I tell them. “The other countries are banning immigrants and won’t let me in.”

It’s a facile answer, I know. I have a cousin and several friends who’ve left. I’ve already written about the colonies of American expats in Mexico City, Prague, Paris, Roppongi Tokyo, Belize, Thailand… and more. They had the courage to leave. I don’t.

Americans don’t know who won the Civil War or that Guyana is in South America or who was the “enemy” in World War Two.

“Americans are the dumbest people on earth,” Michael Moore once said. I think he was giving them (us?) too much credit.

Americans don’t know what it’s like being able to go to the doctor when you’re sick without having to worry if that’ll take away your ability to pay rent. Americans don’t know how it feels when the stranger is a hero, rather than an “invader.” Americans don’t know how good it feels to shit in the woods.

Yeah, there are some exceptions. But they are rare.

Is that a surprise? In a country where school students grow up pledging allegiance to a flag… and a nation under God… what space is there for looking at things a different way.? And in a country, where parents can opt-out of the school system completely, and teach their kids that God made the universe in seven days, how can it possibly be common knowledge that the North won the Civil War and that Ghana is in Africa and Guyana in South America? How can there be common knowledge at all?

Common knowledge is international. Ask anyone in the world what the capital of the US is, and they’ll give you the right answer. How about the capital of Guyana?

The U.S. is a big Number Two. I stay here because I have a cheap apartment in NY, a job I like, 6 weeks a year to just disappear… and I don’t have the courage to say Fuck You and take off for a better place.

Still, we do share things with the rest of the world. Sometimes that commonality loses itself in the details, but it’s in our combined humanity. Is the reluctance to dump vodka in the desert any weirder than the reluctance to use dollar bills to wipe my ass? Only the material is different.

ENDNOTES: [You can contact me on facebook or by email at god@mykelboard.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137, New York, NY 10012-0003. If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available. Subscribe to the MYKEL'S READERS Yahoo group readmboard-subscribe@yahoogroups.com]

→ An actor in one of my favorite movies portrays a transsexual Thai boxer who literally kicked ass. The actor was asked what he thinks when people say that, because of his portrayal of a transsexual , he himself must be transsexual. He answered. “That is the highest compliment. It means I was so convincing as an actor, that people believed the character was me.”

That’s how I felt when several people asked me if I really fucked a guy with two assholes. I know I usually save the blatant lies for my April Fools column, but this was not a lie. It was a story with a purpose. It was a literary way to explore an opposite point of view from mine… and give that point of view some credibility. It was a case where I didn’t have all the answers, and wanted at least to make sure of the questions. The activities did not take place in the “real” world. The questions they raised, however, were real questions.

All the events related in THIS blog are true to the best of my recollection.

→ As Freedom Erodes Dept: The U.S. representative at the UN made the right call. Kelly Knight Craft, presumably on D.T.’s instructions. made the U.S. one of only three countries to vote against a “condemnation of Nazis” resolution. While condemning Nazi ideology, Craft voted NO on free speech grounds. She recognized that denying speech to one is denying speech to all. It was a brave act, especially since D.T. is such a Netanyahu lapdog. But it was the right decision.

→ Speaking of Israel Dept: Since the U.S. has practically abandoned international news coverage (unless we’re overtly involved) that task has to go to the foreigners. Two of the best are from the Middle East.

One is Al Jazeera, from Qatar. They have reporters everywhere, and have more real news than any 10 American newspapers. The other is Haaretz from Israel. I don’t know how they’ve escaped government censorship, but they continue to publish what really happens in the middle east without kowtowing to the official line.

The latter does, however, seem to be kowtowing to their advertisers, refusing to show their website to anyone using an ad-blocker. No comment here about confirming religious stereotypes.

 → Pimp yourself dept: I’m rebuilding my LINK CONNECTION database. If you have a cool blog, or newsletter, or something else with a URL, let me know (even if you’ve already done so). You show me yours… you’ve already seen mine. If I like it, I’ll link to it and let you know. Then you link to me. It’ll give us both two extra points in the Google search engine. If I’ve linked to you in the past, send me the link again and I’ll relist it. Send the link via email to god@mykelboard.com Subject: LINK EXCHANGE. No YouTube links allowed.

In the meantime, I’m pimping a couple links here. Ones that I’m sure of.

My spiritual foil, who calls me on my shit Richard Goldberg has a great photo-centric blog at: https://goldberg.wordpress.com

Jailbird noise musician and intense critic, Kyle Nonneman has a blog at: https://apothelema.blogspot.com

See you in hell...  er… the location’s a secret.

--Mykel

  

Mykel's Blog for August 2019 or Someone Special

Mykel’s Post-MRR Blog

Number ??? August 2019

Someone Special

by Mykel Board

Sometimes it’s hard to explain how great it is being Mykel Board. It’s complicated… like explaining humor to a feminist. I’ll give you an example. Here’s an email I got early last year:

Dear Mr. Board,

I feel funny calling you Mister, maybe UNCLE or PROFESSOR would be better. I feel like I’ve known you for a dozen years. I read your column in MRR since I was 15. (Yeah, When they bit the dust I was happier than a liberal at a book-burning.) I’ve been following your blog since you were fired. I feel like I know you. And I also feel like you’re the only person in the world who would understand —maybe appreciate— my uniqueness.

I’m telling you about this now, because I’ll be in New York City for the first time ever. I’m arriving at the beginning of September and staying a week. I hope we can meet up. I’m as big a beer fan as you are —ALL Buds are for me— (LOL) so we’ll hit the bars. But that’s not what I want to tell you It’s something I’ve never told anyone else. Yeah, my mother knows but she never talks about it. We pretend there’s nothing special to talk about. LOL

Okay, I’ll stop beating off around the hairy bush. LOL. You ready? Well, here it comes:

I HAVE TWO ASSHOLES

No, I’m not talking about relatives. I’m not talking about a surgical drillhole for some artificial hanging shitbag. I’m talking about biological, rectal, anal me! I don’t know how it happened. One doctor said it could have been an undeveloped twin, like those two-headed babies in sideshows. Whatever it is, there are two of them.

Both are puffy, rectal rose-shaped. Both are sensitive to the touch. About 3 inches from each other. One is in the normal asshole position. The other about 3 inches up the crack. In case you’re wondering, I only shit out of one of them. But both of ‘em give me pleasure when I stick stuff in ‘em

I hope I was right in deciding to write to you about this. You’re the only person I “know” who would think this was cool. Everyone else would just go YUCK!

See you soon,

Jorge Matias

Holy… er… shit! Who else would get to meet a guy with two assholes? Despite prostate, penis, hairline, and stature problems… there are really some advantages to being ME.

Our email goes back and forth. We set up a date. He’s going to visit in September. I warn him against coming too close to Yom Kippur.

“What’s Yom Kippur?” he asks. “Is that a kind of fish? And why shouldn’t I come too close to it?”

I’m not sure if he’s joking or not. He does live out in the boonies. Besides, who knows what sense of humor a guy with two assholes might have?

He arrives just after Sukkot… knocks, doesn’t ring the bell like a native would. Um yeah, there he is. I hoped he’d be better looking… a modern version of a young David Cassidy… or with a name like Jorge… some skinny dark boy from the DR. Nope. It’s not that he is ugly. He’s just… I donno… plain. Light brown hair, just starting to recede. a chubby face that’ll probably droop into jowls by the time he’s my age. Taller than me… but who isn’t? Not fat, but soft… like a teen muscleman gone to seed at 30. His skin is the kind of white that nobody in New York is.

He’s smiling, but doesn’t say a word... just walks in the door holding an ART record.

  “First thing,” he says, “before we talk you gotta sign this. My friends’ll be jealous when they see it.”

“Are your friends better looking than you are?” I don’t ask.

I sign the record and we sit on the couch.

He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand.

“Sure is hot in New York,” he says.

“It’s September,” I tell him. “It’s 65 degrees outside.”

“Yeah,” he says, “hot isn’t it.”

“You want a beer?” I ask, getting up and walking to the refrigerator.

“Sure,” he says.

“Allagash or Founders?” I ask.

“Naw,” he says, “I’ll just have a beer.”

I laugh and bring an Allagash for him and a Founders for me.

We click bottles. “Baka yaroo!” I say.

His eyebrows move closer together.

“It means CHEERS in Japanese,” I tell him. (Actually it means you fuckin’ idiot in Japanese, but I like to tell people it means cheers.)

“Besa mi culo,” he says back. “It means cheers in Spanish.”

“Where are you from?” I ask. “You speak Spanish, have a Spanish name, but are whiter than a Klanman’s sheet.”

He laughs.

“I’m from Idaho,” he says. “You can’t get more backwoods than me. My mother picked the name. I guess she had a lot of choices…. I think it comes from some TV show or something… never knew my dad…. but enough of that. I want to show you my assholes.”

As he speaks, he unbuckles his belt buckle, unsnaps his pants and lowers them to his shins. Then he lowers his boxers, turns away from me and bends over… hands resting on his knees. Normally this is a guest position I’d relish, but there is something oddly… I donno… non-sexual about this.

“Come on,” he says, “look close. You can touch ‘em if you want.”

I bend to inspect that dark crack. Right in the middle —where you’d expect it— is an asshole. I rub my finger against it, and it puckers as rubbed assholes are wont to do. And sure enough, there’s another one a few inches toward the backbone.

I put my middle finger in my mouth getting it nice and wet. Choosing the uppermost of the two holes I press it against the puckered muscle.. The sphincter sucks it inside. It feels softer and wetter than when I do it to myself.

Jorge groans.

I remove the finger so I can bring my hand to my lips again. I suck on the previously inserted finger. There’s a faintly familiar taste… something like... marmalade? This time, I also wet my index finger and bring both to the same opening. I press them in together.

“Yaaaa!” he moans sounding more in pain than in pleasure.

Then I pull out and move up to the other hole.

This one is looser… the slide in is easy. Both fingers… deep and immediate. This must be the poop chute. It’s more relaxed… more flexible.

I unbuckle my belt and drop my pants. I’m hard and ready… I spit into my right palm… twice… then rub the spittle onto my throbbing three inches of love muscle.

Then I plunge in.

Grabbing him around the waist I push my hips forward, burying myself in his lower hole. I can feel him tighten around me. It feels like a fist… a very friendly fist.

Oh yeah, baby! Ride ‘em cowboy! Buck that bronco! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!

I pull out and hand him a kleenex, taking one for myself.

“Thank you for that, Mykel,” he says. “Until just a few minutes ago I was a virgin.”

“You’re shitting me,” I say… instantly regretting the phrase.

He wipes himself... pulls up his pants... and turns to me shaking his head.

“Mykel,” he says, “I’m a freak. A side-show attraction that didn’t happen… How many people do you think want to screw a mutant?”

“There must be a ton of ‘em,” I say. “Back in the days where people actually looked at things on paper… turned pages… there were whole magazines devoted to sex with freaks. You have no idea how many pages got stuck together from semen spilled over freaks.”

“You don’t get it, do you?” he asks, still shaking his head. “I’ve read you for years. I know you grew up in a normal family, in the suburbs, near the city. I know you acted weird because you were afraid of being normal.”

“My father only had one arm,” I tell him.

“I know that,” he says. “But that wasn’t you. That was a war vet… almost normal for the time. You tried to be different to avoid normal. But you don’t get what it’s like BEING different, and trying to pass for normal.”

I must look puzzled, because he sits on the couch and sighs deeply… taking a slug of Allagash. He talks to me like a special ed teacher trying to explain algebra to a retard.

“Look Mykel,” he says, “the reason I never had sex before is because I’ve been hiding my difference. Screwing… guys or girls… anybody… would give away my secret. How long do you think I could last in Podunk Idaho as the guy with two assholes?”

I shrug, trying to figure out what percentage of girls are willing to fiddle with your asshole. A small number according to my own peter meter… but I let him talk.

“Okay,” he says. “Let me put it this way. You write about how people should celebrate their differences... how homos… as you call them... should demand the right to flame, rather than the right to get married and be like everybody else… how Negroes… as you call them… should demand the right to be different… celebratory… unique in culture… rather than the right to work as a clerk in a law office. That’s because you’ve been normal your whole life.”

“Hey,” I say, “that’s not fair.”

“But it’s the reality, Mykel,” he answers. “You can deny it, just like some straight guys did the homo thing because of David Bowie… But the reality is… you’re one of THEM. A little shorter than average… a little smarter… a little more sawed-off, maybe… but when push comes to shove, you’re one of THEM.”

I can feel tears welling up. Normal… every day… average… these words are curses to me. Maybe the only taboos I have. And now... someone I’ve just fucked in the ass is… if not saying those words... at least implying them. No fuckin’ LOL here! I blink and hope he doesn’t notice the eye liquid.

He continues, “Before now, I never even tried to have sex. I’ve been afraid that once someone finds out I’m… you know… different... our relationship will change. Either they’d back off because I’m a freak… or they’d want me more… because I’M A FREAK!”

He’s shouting now.

“I picked you,” he continues, “because you have no fetishes, or maybe all fetishes, I donno. And you have no fear.”

“I’m afraid of getting Alzheimer’s,” I tell him.

“Come on,” he says. “You visited that girl in the hospital who just had a kidney transplant… You wanted to look at the stitches. You never met her and —for you— what people don’t talk about… their taboos… that’s what fascinates you. That’s what you go for first.”

“Did I write about that?” I ask. “I forget.”

He nods… and continues almost whispering, “I knew I’d be an adventure for you. I’ve done it. It felt good, but what now? Why can’t I just be normal?”

Me? I’ve spent my literary life celebrating not being normal. I’ve scolded homos for wanting to get married, have children, live like every suburban clone. I’ve complained about women who take offense at being complimented by strangers on the street… instead of just ignored like everyone else. I’ve railed against punkrockers who take jobs on Wall Street. The idea of being normal has disgusted me for almost three-quarters of a century.

And now what do I do?

ENDNOTES: [You can contact me on facebook or by email to god@mykelboard.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to:
Mykel Board, POB 137, New York, NY 10012-0003.
If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available. Subscribe to the MYKEL'S READERS Yahoo group:
readmboard-subscribe@yahoogroups.com]

-→Full of shit dept: Japan Travel reports that a new museum has opened in Yokohama. It is a TURD (unko, in Japanese) museum. Its focus is on attractions rather than academics. The travel site says it’s designed for the Instagram generation, Unko Museum is less education and more interaction. Step on turd-shaped projections in an interactive game, try your hand at unko mini games, explore unko art and poop-inspired goods from around the globe, and come face to face with feces at the photo section.

-→Kill the Messenger dept: Facebook has come under fire for its super-duper face recognition software that will soon not only identify everyone on the platform, but all their friends… whether they’re on facebook or not. And even if facebook doesn’t sell that information… or the technology (yeah, right)… It can be hacked. Just this month hundreds of facebook users were infected with the MESSENGER virus. It was transmitted by a link to a fake YouTube site. IS THAT REALLY YOU? Asks the fake message over the link. Click on it and you’re infected. From there, the virus sends similar messages to all your friends. That means your face too is now in the hands of… I.C.E.? ISIS? Who knows?

-→Have your cake and eat it too dept: The Times Record News reports that a woman in Texas was banned from Walmart after she ate half a cake in the bakery section. Then she brought the other half to a cashier and demanded to be charged half price. In what appears to be a new non-police policy, the store didn’t call the cops. Instead, they banned her from Walmart for the rest of her life. I’d like to know how they KNOW which banned people are trying to enter the store. Are they getting their facial recognition software from facebook? Can you say shoplifter database?

→ Pimp yourself dept: I’m rebuilding my LINK CONNECTION database. If you have a cool blog, or newsletter, or something else with a URL, let me know (even if you’ve already done so). You show me yours… you’ve already seen mine. If I like it, I’ll link to it and let you know. Then you link to me. It’ll give us both two extra points in the Google search engine. If I’ve linked to you in the past, send me the link again and I’ll relist it. Send the link via email to god@mykelboard.com Subject: LINK EXCHANGE. No YouTube links allowed.

In the meantime, I’m pimping a couple links here. Ones that I’m sure of.

My spiritual foil, who calls me on my shit Richard Goldberg has a great photo-centric blog at: https://goldberg.wordpress.com

Jailbird noise musician and intense critic, Kyle Nonneman has a blog at: https://apothelema.blogspot.com

→Belated Thanks Dept.: I want to thank my editors Marlene W and Ray D. Between them they have straightened out my writing, though that may not be the best verb to use considering the topics.

See you in hell,
Mykel Board
 

Mykel’s Post-MRR Blog

Number ??? July 2019

Johnny Pissoff vs 
Mykel Pissed-Off

by Mykel Board

FLASH TO 1968: The Fugs release one of their greatest albums: It Crawled Into My Hand, Honest. On that album is a song called Johnny Pissoff Meets the Red Angel. I don’t really understand what it’s about, but I love the name. Johnny Pissoff! I can see him… dressed in black… wearing a fedora-- like Dick Tracy… walking into any room… just his personality making people clench their fists and want to get up and leave.

FLASH TO MARCH 2019: The facebook message comes from some guy named Gary. I never met him in person, and don’t know anything about him… except he likes NO FX, “but I never wear shorts.”

Hi Mykel, starts the message, your columns lately, I donno, they seem like retreads. I’ve been reading you since like 1942, so I guess I’ve got more on you than most. But what I want to know is what is it like being Mykel Board. I mean, what are your days like. What do you do in ordinary time, when people are just driving to work or walking down the street? These days, you just write about politics, but I can get that anywhere. Please, Mykel, be punk again.

FLASH TO JUNE 2019: My long-term pal and Jersey Beat editor, Jim Testa, is talking to me. Jim has become a regular at our salon at the Algonquin... with Dorothy Parker. Dorothy is quieter than she’s known for being. It might have something to do with being dead. The rest of us take up the slack.

Mykel, says Jim, your columns lately, I donno, they seem like retreads. I’ve been reading you since 1942, so I guess I’ve got more on you than most.

“Okay Jim,” I answer. “I’ve heard this before. What do you want? You want me to be punk again?”

“No Mykel,” he says. “I want you to surprise me.

Wow! An interesting pair of messages… and honest too. I guess I HAVE been just treading beer lately. So maybe I should chronicle a day or two in my life. Maybe that’d be punk enough for Gary…. and surprise Jim.

But allow me one paragraph of opinion.

OPINION: Fat asses never look good on guys. On gals, they’re unpleasant when they bulge from the sides, like a deformed peach. They work wonders when they protrude from the back, coming out 3-D like one of those Gambian koras-- an instrument that look as beautiful as it sounds. Those master-asses make you want to nestle your face between the folds, and dig your pink oral organ deep… forcing the sphincteral flesh to tighten around your eager tongue.

FLASH TO MOST ANY DAY ON A NYC SIDEWALK: The three young women walking slowly ahead of me all have the width-- not the depth.

The cliché is that it’s only the tourists who creep along NYC streets...the time-obsessed locals maneuvering behind them… trying to pass to get wherever the fuck they need to go.

That’s not true in 2019. It’s not only tourists. It’s every one with a fuckin’ cellphone who walks slowly on the NYC streets. And here are three of them… walking ass to ass… leaving no sidewalk space to get by.

I come up behind them.. breathing loudly… panting. It doesn’t help. Their ears are plugged white with some Apple doodad that frees them from the responsibility to watch where and how they’re going.

I rest my hands on the nearly touching shoulders of the two girls closest to the street. I press slightly… to separate them.

They turn towards me… simultaneous what the fuck expressions on their too-made-up faces.

“You left half an inch for someone to pass,” I say. “If you spread out just a bit more, you can have the sidewalk completely blocked.”

The three girls shirk back, as if I’d asked them to look at my penis.

I pass between ass number two and ass number three and continue walking.

On the subway now, I stand, having given my seat to some geezer even older than I am. It’s only a 20- minute ride anyway. I can read my H. L. Mencken standing up.

“GRAND CENTRAL STATION!”

Time to get off the train.

The doors open. The crowd outside the steps forward. Two guys in particular, both young… jockish… wearing almost identical blue business suits… one with a navy tie with Greek letters… the other a black tie with small yellow polka dots…. push their way into the car before those of us leaving can leave.

WAIT! I shout at them.

They turn to look at me.

“Fuck you,” says the one with the Greek letters on his tie.

They’re the kind of macho muscled men that give both Wall Street and heterosexuality a bad name.

“Look,” I say, “Just because you can get married now, doesn’t mean you have the right to push people around.”

I watch his eyebrows come together until he figures out what I’m talking about. By then, I’m outta there.

FLASH AHEAD: The scene is K-Mart. I’m here to buy a cheap alarm clock. Mine broke when I was trying to set it while drunk., It slips from my hand… plunges from my sleeping loft to the hard wood floor below… smashes to plastic shards. I’m here to buy a new one. My self-imposed spending limit is $10.

A colored girl, in a red and white t-shirt is patting the blankets at the bottom of the escalator.

“Excuse me, Miss.” I say, “could you tell me where the clocks are?”

“I don’t fuckin’ work here,” she shoots back. “And I’m a MISSES, not a miss.”

She huffs off and I feel like shit.

I wander the aisles looking for clocks. A guy in a suit… light grey with fine black lines through the material… bright white shirt... a black tie with LV and those kind of symbols all over it in brown. I didn’t take a picture of him, but I found a similar one on the internet:

He’s in his early 20s with one of those haircuts that you see on posters for BUSINESS SOLUTIONS. carefully parted, trimmed-- like he gets a haircut every day… one lock precisely dripping on the forehead, saying I’m suave. He reminds me of a slightly more sophisticated version of those two guys who pushed past me on the subway.

No idea what he’s doing here. Maybe he wants to see how the 99% live. Maybe he’s just getting a snack for the train to Scarsdale.

I walk over to him and tap him on the shoulder. “Excuse me, Mister” I say. “Could you tell me where the clocks are?”

I wish I had a picture of the look of horror in his eyes. But it makes my day… certainly makes up for the faux pas with the red t-shirt girl-- at least in my Johnny Pissoff mind.

LUNCH TIME: Flash to SWEETGREEN… an awful vegetable-oriented (pleonasm?) restaurant. They billboard advertise all over the city with close-up pictures of teens with something green stuck between their teeth. I’m eating here because I feel I SHOULD. I don’t want to die from lack of lettuce.

I’ve got my salad ordered at the counter. Someone mixes a bunch of green stuff together and hands it to me. In order to make it half-palatable, I ask her to throw in some chicken. Maybe I mishear, but I could swear the salad makes a TSK TSK when I ask for the chicken.

I carry the bowl of salad from the counter to the cashier… who looks a lot like the woman I mistook for a K-Mart sales lady. She rings it up. “That’ll be $14.85,” she says.

I fix my face in a way that tries to show I’m used to paying $14.85 for a salad. I pull a twenty from my wallet.

“I’m sorry,” she says, looking not sorry at all, “we only accept Visa, Mastercard, or American Express.”

“What the fuck?” I say, finally losing it. “I have 8 credit cards here, but I’m not going to give you one! You know what credit card only means? It means that new immigrants who don’t have bank accounts yet can’t buy your $14.85 salad. It means that people on the lam from ICE… people who don’t want to leave a paper trail… can’t buy your $14.85 salad. it means that people who hate banks, who don’t want every transaction to be processed for a fee that goes to Chase or Citibank can’t buy your $14.85 salad. It means that cash, paper currency LEGAL TENDER (I speak those words in capital letters) is no good in your shop. I’m outta here.

I walk out, leaving my $14.85 salad on the counter.

Sometimes, I wonder what it is that creates the need to piss people off. Of course, that’s what punk is all about, but punk didn’t create the need. It WAS CREATED by that need. As time passes and the facebook world makes is easier and easier to piss off and be pissed off… the world does not get any punker.

Of course, those of us who live in America live under the punkest president ever… but-- even then-- I’m still not sure I get the whole thing. I’d like to look at it up close. Examine piss-offedness under a microscope. What is it? What does it do? Are there different kinds of piss-offedness? Is there good piss-offedness and bad piss-offedness?

Ben Weasel, who is no slouch when it comes to pissing people off, once said that I don’t intentionally try to piss people off. It is simply the fact, says he, that I so strongly believe in what I do, that the inevitable result is people getting pissed off. Those aren’t his exact words, but the meaning is close enough.

I donno.

I don’t try to piss off people… at least not people who are poor or those who have enough of the world against them already: cripples, the chronically depressed, those working shit jobs for shittier wages, the homeless. Sometimes, though, I can’t help it. That cashier in Sweetgreens was probably a minimum wage working poor. I wish there were a way I could piss off SWEETGREEN without pissing off the poor shlubs who work there. Let me know if you find one.

ENDNOTES: [You can contact me on facebook or by email to god@mykelboard.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: 

Mykel Board
POB 137
New York, NY 10012-0003.

If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available. Subscribe to the MYKEL'S READERS Yahoo group: 

readmboard-subscribe@yahoogroups.com]

-→Shoot if you’re sad to be gay dept: Philippine President Duterte made a speech to Philippine expats in Japan. In that speech he said that he “used to be gay” but cured himself with the help of several beautiful women. After his marriage, Duterte said “I hate handsome men… and now prefer beautiful women.”

→Forty Days Dept: This Week magazine reports that the owners of a full-scale replica of Noah’s Ark are suing their insurance company for rain damage. The arc is connected with the notorious Kentucky “Creation Museum.” The owners claim they didn’t get enough money for the damage suffered by the arc from recent “heavy rains.” I have no comment-- except a smiley face-- on this one.

→Fact is funnier than fiction dept: Congressman Devin Nunes filed a $250 lawsuit against Twitter for making fun of him. The reason? A tweet said “the Nunes cow” was “udderly worthless and it’s past time to mooove him to prison.” In 2017, Nunez Nunes co-sponsored a law called the “Discouraging Frivolous Lawsuits Act.” It did not pass.

→ Pimp yourself dept: I’m rebuilding my LINK CONNECTION database. If you have a cool blog, or newsletter, or something else with a URL, let me know (even if you’ve already done so). You show me yours… you’ve already seen mine. If I like it, I’ll link to it and let you know. Then you link to mine and I’ll link to yours. It’ll give us both two extra points in the Google search engine. Send the link via email to god@mykelboard.com

See you in hell,
MB