Oh wow if the #redhead tag was disorienting, #taylor swift is another dimension entirely. #taylorswift is tumblrier let’s someone get on telling me what that means.

But let’s not let that get in the way of acknowledging a central fact?:

You Belong With Me is our Bizarre Love Triangle Y/N?

In which the first time I meet Iraq vets in a bar they buy me drinks:

So this, like all of my good stories lately it seems, takes place at the Gold Room, about a year and change ago. Back when i was more seriously thinking about joining the Army (and then I asked everyone I knew who had been recently and they all said no very strongly).

So one day, at the bar, dude next to me with a bit of heft, a Hawaiian shirt, longish black ringlets, and a loose demeanor that altogether made him seem a bit like Benicio del Toro-as-Johnny Depp-as-Hunter S. Thompson’s-lawyer. He started up a conversation a little slurrily, said he’d been in Iraq, he’d been an 11B, and he bet I didn’t even know what that meant.

I actually did: “Eleven Bravo. Rifleman.”

So then he talked about how even yeah but no one in this bar supported our gun rights and I was like dude I literally am a card-carrying member of the NRA* and showed him my card.

And then he went on and said he had become a mercenary, which was believable, because signing on with PMCs after doing a tour is something people in Southern California actually do. I was fascinated and pressed for details but instead he brought me back to a table to meet a bunch of other guys from his unit that were out together.

One skinny kid from East LA who looked barely 17, with dayglo facepaint and feathers woven into his hair, seemed to be the natural (or, heck, maybe formal) leader of the group and introduced everyone to me and we got to talking. I told about how I’d been thinking of going Army OCS and they were generally supportive. Eventually someone pointed out that after all that I’d still just be a butter bar and they all broke into snickers.

I (truthfully) told them that my father, who was an airborne lieutenant in the early ‘60s, had given me advice on that exact situation: “act like you know what you’re doing, and let your sergeant make all the decisions”. They cheered and wouldn’t let me pay for my drinks for the rest of the night.

Eventually I got Dr. Gonzo to clarify the mercenary bit, apparently what he meant was “I have bought a gun”. When he went to the bathroom I brought it up with the neon chief, said that kind of concerned me. He said “yeah, that guy’s kind of a problem sometimes, we try to keep an eye on him.”

* I’m a member of the ACLU too, but not card-carrying, because they use this cheap glossy bendy cardstock and also do not offer select discounts with participating merchants across the country.

Frisky ft. Daniella - Clearly Now (Brisk mix)

Sharkey - E-Nuff

octavekitten:

EUTHANASIA COASTER

“Euthanasia Coaster” is a hypothetic euthanasia machine in the form of a roller coaster, engineered to humanely – with elegance and euphoria – take the life of a human being. Riding the coaster’s track, the rider is subjected to a series of intensive motion elements that induce various unique experiences: from euphoria to thrill, and from tunnel vision to loss of consciousness, and, eventually, death. Thanks to the marriage of the advanced cross-disciplinary research in space medicine, mechanical engineering, material technologies and, of course, gravity, the fatal journey is made pleasing, elegant and meaningful. Celebrating the limits of the human body but also the liberation from the horizontal life, this ‘kinetic sculpture’ is in fact the ultimate roller coaster: John Allen, former president of the famed Philadelphia Toboggan Company, once sad that “the ultimate roller coaster is built when you send out twenty-four people and they all come back dead. This could be done, you know.”

DJ Seduction - Here It Comes (Hardcore Heaven mix)

Dune - Hand In Hand

God fucking damn if I know. Readers, you want to give a try? Askhole is open.

P.S. the answer is maybe that it flatters who I was in 1999 more?

(and how is that different from anything right now oh fuck us we’re fucked)

(alternately we won maybe?)

Ravers Choice - Techno Wonderland

There should be a bike company named Velociraptor Velocipedes. Unfortunately I think of this as a company that applies last generation’s cutting edge prosumer technology towards the mid-market. What it would in fact be is a Bellevue-based shop that focuses on handcrafted high-wheeled bikes for the steampunk community.

G.E.O.S. & Coyote - Morning Rain Clouds (Stan remix)

They can’t all be good.

this is a dream crossed with a nightmare crossed with a fever dream

this is a fever dream

Yeah it’s cool that U.S. Army photos are public domain. Still, when it comes to grappling diagrams where I’m trying to figure out where to put my limbs, black and white photos of two entangled shaved white guys wearing the same camouflage are so unhelpful!

pussy

cunt

box

cumsocket

quim

Here’s a question: when the European proleterrys were all revolting in the interwar period, was one of the devils in their rearview us? Was industrializing America their China, the thing waiting on the horizon that would wipe them out if they didn’t strike now? Like we’re told it did in the end? How did that line up? I imagine with more of a frontier/farm option that our labor costs would’ve already been higher, even if our small farms were already stagnating and attriting from foreclosure I mean god, at least it wasn’t an enclosure movement. But still boy did we have mass, amirite?

Luna-C - Piano Obsession

The bar was playing Taxi Driver quietly on the wall, admittedly it was my first firsthand and maybe 40th overall exposure.

Despite those 39 I hadn’t fully realized how much of Jodie Foster’s professional identity had been, at one point, “fuckable twelve year old”.

Of course then Brooke Shields too, more explicitly and unavoidably!

1972-1982!

The apex of American civilization!

100% willingness to cause pain

0% willingness to feel pain

Okay I’ve tried to listen to the rest of that Taylor Swift album, but in spite of myself I really don’t like it. And it’s weird, because all my objections to it come down to “oh god, it is so post-Tim McGraw country pop” and “oh god, it is so VH1core secretary rock” but those are two genres I grew up with and love.

What I say to myself is like okay but in either case you’re judging off singles, and okay the thing about albums is they’re the things that aren’t the singles. Like, the comparison is not Ironic, or even You Learn, the comparison is Not The Doctor, right?

But I dunno it’s like these songs I don’t like are so well done I have to count them for something.

In contrast: ohmigawd Rumours is such a good album