Ghost-Hunting Shows and Social Decay

Last week I watched a ghost-hunting show on the Travel Channel. I suppose anyone who buys fancy equipment can be a parapsychologist nowadays.

The leader of the expedition into a haunted insane asylum was a guy who looked like a typical L.A. metrosexual.

Every other word out of his mouth was a swear word. If there was a bump in the night or a good EVP (Electric Voice Phenomena) he exclaimed "Holy bleep! What the bleep was that? Oh my bleeping God! That was frickin' awesome!" Fratboys are now exploring the mysteries of life and death?

I wanted to wash o ut his filthy mouth with Palmolive dish detergent.

Is he a parapsychologist or just a bum on the street? Shouldn't a parapsychologist at least try to pull off a professional image?

Speaking of bums and sloppiness, the rest of his parapsychology team looked like rejects from a Sublime concert. They had beards, earrings, nose rings and tattoos (probably tribal and Cadillac tattoos) covering their arms and legs. How can I trust a team that looks like Limp Bizkit on crack?

What's most funny is that even the ghosts seem to have no respect for them. Don't forget that most of these people died before Kurt Cobain and reality television.

The EVPs seem to pick up voices that ask questions like: "Why don't you - static - wear a shirt and tie you - static - bum?" Or "Geez, why don't you - static - have enough respect - static - for the dead to - static - cover up your ugly - static - tattoos?"

Snooki from The Jersey Shore

Doesn't Snooki from the hit MTV show "The Jersey Shore" look like she'll grow up to be the kind of blue-haired dago cunt you see at Sunday Mass? You know the type: still stupid, still hateful, still bigoted, still shoving cannolis down her cocksucking pie-hole and talking to the gay Irish priest about her bunions. "Oh, Father, my bunions are killing me!"

That's all I really have to say about the Jersey Shore. For me it is now like the Dave Chappelle show once was: TOO MANY HERD ANIMALS ARE TALKING ABOUT IT FOR IT TO BE FUNNY OR ANY GOOD!!!

The Sundae, Part 2

My Dad seldom tired of ranting and raving about Sandy. Sandy was our neighbor, his cousin and a Born Again Baptist.

"Oh, she can go to church every Sunday, but she can't even say hi to her neighbor! That's not Christian! What kind of a Christian is she? But I am one of God's chosen people! I read the Bible," he would bellow in a Messianic voice.

"But Dad, you NEVER go to church!"

"Well, son, I'm saving the seats for people who need it more than me!"

I was confused. Whenever I had run into Sandy she had always been really nice and cutesy, in the way people are cutesy with little kids.

"Hey, so what are you up to, big guy?"

To whatever I would answer, she would say "Well, that's really cool!"

She seemed really nice and my instinct was to think of her as being really nice, but my Dad said she was nasty so she must be nasty.

"Oh, Sandy! She's miserable! Too miserable to even say hello to her neighbors! Some Christian she is!"

So my sister and I decided to "get her" with our milkshake.

We put it in the freezer and waited until morning.

There was only one problem. Our parents came home and found our creation.

To Be Continued...

The same person gets murdered over and over again. Every 19 year old hoodlum who gets gunned down over petty beef was "an aspiring rapper and basketball player who enjoyed video games."

Why such a lack of originality in hoodlum murder victims? Aren't there any "fervent Nietzscheans who despised video games and committed crime for evil's sake"? Or "guerilla ontologists who sold drugs for both fun and profit"? Why such unoriginal specimens?

However, yesterday at Grand Central I saw an inspiring sight: 5 or 6 thuggish-looking black men in baggy pants and du-rags playing the most beautiful chamber music I have ever heard on violins and cellos.

Hopefully they will never be victims.

The Sundae, Part 1

My sister and I took a large milkshake glass. We coated it with Hershey's syrup. Then we added a tablespoon of sugar, a tablespoon of salt, a tablespoon of pepper, a handful of dried elbow macaroni, a pinch of coffee grounds, a shot of milk, a shot of half and half, a shot of whiskey, a shot of Pepsi, a shot of orange juice, a pinch of flour, a pinch of powdered sugar, a pinch of cinnamon, a dash of oregano and thyme, a dollop of cottage cheese and sour cream, two or three green olives and one or two hot peppers. The we pressed it down and topped it off with several scoops of chocolate and vanilla ice cream. By the time we were done our concoction did, surprisingly, look like a real ice cream sundae.

We were planning to leave it on our neighbor Sandy's back porch in hopes that she would drink it.

To Be Continued...

The Solipsistic OCD is a Sign of Convalescence

My latest OCD is a sign of improvement. Is it even a "latest OCD"? Probably not. I've done a fairly good job of ignoring the Obsession and the Compulsion which, ironically, only serves to strengthen the Obsession.

My latest Obsession is that I am living in a simulated reality and that I am the only person that exists. Now don't get me wrong I am a proud solipsist, but I define myself as a solipsist in the loosest definition of the word. I would sure hate to be the only star of "The Will Johnson Show".

My Compulsion is to endlessly argue against such a possibility. I will not be a Dr. Johnson and say "I refute myself thus!" I won't indulge in the argument at all and I will try to give my dialectic-loving brain a rest.

This OCD is a sign of returning mental health because it is always the one I obsess about through convalescence. When depressed I am simply too depressed to feel anything about anything.

And what makes this OCD less scary than others is that the idea of a simulated reality is hackneyed even to a five year old. It was done to death even before "The Matrix".

I remember pondering the same questions when I was 7 years old. I remember going camping when I was 12 and wondering if the pine trees were simulated just for my simulation. Boy, those super-intelligent alien beings sure went to a lot of trouble just to be entertained by little old me!

Caroline's

When I was 19 I did Caroline's, the biggest, best, brightest, most popular and famous club in NYC, literally on Broadway. I was scared and not ready. I mean, I had prepared for weeks, but I was still too much of a 19 year old know-nothing.

In the green room I chainsmoked Newport Lights. I was a huge Hip-Hop fan back then (I idolized 2Pac and Biggie) so I was in the mood to smoke a cigarette popular with minorities. I smoked an entire pack and inhaled so deeply that I had a bad wheeze by the time I got on stage.

In a hack move I mostly talked about masturbation. Being a virgin I had no idea that sex was more physically demanding than masturbation so I talked of being able to have sex 10 times a day, revealing myself as a virgin to over 300 audience members.

But even back then I had that Will Johnson charisma (something I always have had and always will have) so I ended up having a pretty good, funny, raucous set and I left the stage feeling like a million bucks.

After that, I just needed to get laid!

T2

Last night I watched "Terminator 2" on VHS for the first time in a long time. Before the film they showed a Subway sandwich ad. Wow. No web address at the bottom of the screen.

Watching "Terminator 2" I am reminded of who I am and who I once was. It feels like I was a different person in a different lifetime.

While watching Eddie Furlong run from the T-1000 it struck me that I was not depressed. And it was only 3 in the morning! The night was still young! I usually go to bed at 5. How was I able to actually handle two hours of not being depressed? It was frightening, overwhelming - and better than anything I have ever hoped for - to actually feel again, to feel emotions, to feel like a human being. To feel like the old me.

I used to watch movies like that and get excited for whatever girl I was crushing on at the time. Maybe I was like John Connor, destined to be the leader of the human resistance and this one special girl was to be by my side.

This was way before I was a cynical romantic and jaded idealist.

The Perfect Girl

What I want to find is a girl who always wants to stay home. Who says: "Go out? Go out and socialize? What for? Why would I want to go out and be packed in a room with a bunch of smelly Herd Animals! These people are, quite simply, beneath me! What I want, my dear William, is to sit in the house all night and discuss philosophy. Let's fuck and ask: 'Why is anything here at all? Why is there not just nothing? And even if there was nothing if there was nothing there would have to be something because even if there was just nothing then nothing would be something.' I want to stay home all night and discuss unknowable, unsolvable ontological discussions. Cosmicism? Let's hang on to each and every single last moment, my dear William! Who wants to die, fade into eternal nothingness, and end up as dust in a dead, cold, empty universe? Let's talk about that. It is better than going out with a bunch of Herd Animals, is it not? Isn't it more fun to stay home and play hide and seek? Or to wrestle? Or to do experiments?"

Seth Rogen is the Anti-Satan

I wear a checkered, short-sleeved, buttoned-down shirt, like a "nice kid" from the 1950s, the kind who walks a poodle mutt and works on neato science projects. Individuality and all the best of conformity. I have Ray Bradbury's optimism. I think of the 1950s Suburban Florida of the "Porky's" movies. I'm Pee-Wee with a morning erection. Scientists work on the atomic bomb. Forgotten transistor radios in a 1950s house on the island of Kauai, Hawaii. The musty smell of an older and forgotten house - with screen doors - close to the beach. My bare forearms press against a cool desk. I read of aliens from outer space, the Montauk Project (a Top Secret physics/mind control project involving Nikola Tesla and the psychologist Wilhelm Reich) and the Greeks.

All of my work is fodder for those "up until 5am" phone conversations. Those priceless conversations about life, death, life after death, the existence or non-existence of God, and the vastness and complexity of the universe and the high strangeness of Being itself, the very odd fact that anything - space, time, and the rest of it - exists at all. These may be High School conversations, but she makes me feel like I'm in High School.

I own all the pretentiousness and self-importance of a High School poet or a Morrissey-listening, Camel-smoking contributor to a community college literary magazine. Now if only I could learn to fully write like that again I'd really be on to something! She makes me feel that innocence, naivete, and hope in a time when Seth Rogen is the only God we have ever known. I love Ronald Reagan and 80s-era NASA! Sue me! Late-night existential conversations are both innocent and terrifying. They remind us that we are human, mortal, and trying to grapple with the big questions. Perhaps I am maturing. Isn't it better to make love to a human being? A quirky, unique individual who is just as strong, tender, lost, and found as myself? Seth Rogen is the anti-Satan. He hates joy and sex. He will not be happy until sex is reduced to two mannequins rubbing their genitals together. Okay! Sex is a big deal and not such a big deal! We get it! Now put on your shoes (your socks are stinking up the joint) and put down the bong, you hippie fratboy! As for me, I think a smidgeon of 1950s-inspired romance is a good thing. Aren't sex, love, and the starry sky above Grand Central wonders of the universe?

Whatever happened to innocence? To wonder? To glorification?

My review of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"

Interlude: Fraud of the Month Club

Cormac McCarthy is like a girl with AIDS - I will never give him a second glance again. I won't touch him with a ten foot pole. I'm open to everything, from James Joyce to Stephen King. Very rarely does a writer make me foam at the mouth. Cormac McCarthy is an exception.

I don't care how many people in my writers group say: "Forget about The Road! Read Blood Meridian! You'll love it!" I won't listen. While reading The Road I learned that Cormac McCarthy lacks what is most important to a writer: Integrity.

Even the title, The Road, is hackneyed. The entire book is a pastiche of stale cliches. If the cardinal rule is to "write what you know" then all McCarthy knows are stale t.v. cliches. The subject, plot, theme is hack. The very premise itself is as hackneyed as one could get. And speaking of Stephen King, Stephen King did a better job with "America as post-apocalyptic wasteland" in The Stand.

No wonder that horrendously stupid, stone-ignorant, uneducated know-nothing cunt Oprah (the greatest mediocratizer in the history of the world) recommended it. She wouldn't know a piece of art from the ponderous turds dropped from her fat, black ass.

Not only is McCarthy's novel cliche, but it is pretentious.

Here's an excerpt from the novel that I actually made up. You may ask me how I can "make up" an excerpt from a novel. Well, in this case it's not hard, anyone could do it:

He lit a fire. Warmth.
He lit the fire.
He gazed at the coals.
He thought.
Thought.
Cold.
Another morning.
Morning.

People get paid money to write this shit and a true genius like me goes through degradation after degradation? (At least I like degradation.)

A true artist like me is expected to work for a living?

And what really pisses me off is that other "literary" writers are now imitating this shit. There was a story in the New Yorker recently that was a wannabe of The Road.

Slot-Car Wars

Down the street from my house is a slot-car racing club. For those of you who don't know, slot-cars are the little tiny electromagnetic toy cars that run on a plastic track. Enthusiasts can race against one another.

On a Friday night this place is more crowded than any local bar. Swarms of grown men in team shirts lean over one another's shoulders to get a view of the action.

I'm not knocking these men or their hobby, but I wonder what their subculture is like.

Every interest has a subculture.

For example, if you're into Jeet Kun Do, the martial art founded by Bruce Lee there will be an entire subculture around Jeet Kun Do. There will be cliques, subcliques, leaders, followers and - most of all - mediocratizers.

The mediocratizers will be the ones who say: "I met Bruce Lee's widow, Linda, at a conference a few years back and she was telling me that the side kick was never meant to be thrown with both hips, blah, blah, blah..."

The mediocratizers are the dogmatists in every subculture. Investigate any subculture and you'll find the mediocratizers.

Who are the mediocratizers in slot-car racing? Who has met the widow of "So and So Smith, the greatest inventor and innovator in the world of slot-car racing"?