Almost everything I experience sticks in my mind. I have so much information in my brain that serves no practical purpose, it’s patently absurd. My propensity to recall music lyrics or dialogue from movies is a useful party trick. I can even recall mundane details from other people’s lives, told to me in passing, that the people to whom it happened eventually cease to recall.

Having a long memory is so much more of a curse than a blessing.

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Page views are down because output is down. Not as though I’ve monetized this thing, so tracking how many times it’s been viewed is little more than an exercise in gauging the little niche of interest I’ve staked out.

It’s a good sign that a handful of people still will tune in despite nothing new to see, but if I alienate that readership by not providing new content, I’ll be back to utter obscurity instead of nearly utter obscurity.

The dearth of writing is the result of a dearth of inspiration. Sure, there have been things to write about, but as angry and vitriolic as this place can be, I’d much rather it not be used as an outlet for woe. Woe has been in large supply of late and using it for inspiration is like trying to fashion a skyscraper from literal horseshit.

On the train last night, a bum was making his rounds. But this bum wasn’t like the bulk of his cohorts. He wasn’t asking for money or selling a sob story for years on end about how his house burned down the week before … he was belligerent, abusive and confrontational.

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It is possible to be simultaneously repulsed and enticed. I speak from experience.

Do to the dearth of things worth watching on my TV (which will be canceled in less than a week) and a lack of motivation to do anything else, I tuned into Attack of the Show. On it was porn “actress” Sasha Grey, a 21-year-old girl. Or maybe she’s a woman; I really am not certain of the criteria. I suppose being able to take a huge dick in the ass would turn a girl into a woman.

See, and that’s where the ambivalence comes in. It’s easy enough to watch porn and derive some specific entertainment from it, but part of that ease comes from the absolutely anonymous nature of its participants. It’s voyeurism at its most distant, where the people fucking have a distinct lack of humanity that, in my opinion, is essential to maintaining the illusion.

The instant I wonder something personal about a woman getting drilled in both holes below the waist while getting her throat fucked, what is alluring in the very base and animal — unconscious — way is trumped by consciousness and thought and reason and intellect.

“Does she want to be doing this? Does she enjoy it? What was her childhood like? Was she ever raped? Has she always been mistreated by men and this is a manifestation of that? Did her father abuse her?”

I know, right? Who the hell thinks of this shit? Let’s pile on the hyperbole: Just watch that whore get drilled like a piece of meat and fuck the stupid fucking cunt because she’s not worth anything except a means to a masturbatory end.

It requires an adult making a conscious decision to put their self in these seamy situations by which other people derive vicarious pleasure, so who gives a shit if a bad state of mind is culpable for motivating that decision? Who cares if this woman could have been thwarted from fucking on camera, from sucking on a dick that just came out of her ass. Because, hey, it’s not debasing if she wants to do it. I’m sure I’ve heard the “no one’s holding a gun to her head” argument in this context.

But then, if these women were aided in a constructive way to work through whatever emotional issues I am perhaps erroneously assuming they must have … what would we watch while our wives are sleeping or our girlfriends are out of town? Or, for the sad sack that can’t get laid, what are they going to do to try and fill the void of real human contact in their lives?

There will always be demand for sex and so there will always be supply. Whether that supply is the willing, monogamous interaction many of us have been conditioned to believe is the “right way” to do things, or whether it’s girls abducted off the street and pressed into prostitution, or it’s chicks like Sasha Grey willingly proffering their assholes to get reamed on camera … a supply of some sort will be provided. It is simple economics.

What is less simple are the formulas that create the demand and the supply.

I’ve been to museums and seen exhibits on porn. Porn that dates back as far as one could assume. At the Brooklyn Museum there is a particular sculpture from ancient Egypt depicting a woman engaged in sex with, my recollection is foggy but, at least four men (and — GASP — get this, some of the men’s genitalia is only touching the other men’s, so the Eygptians were gay, y’all! But that little digression aside…)

So we have some significantly old proof that there has long been a demand for erotica, and to all the gay haters out there, we’ve got plenty of proof that gays have been around for a long time, too, and that the behavior was mainstream at certain points in time. Suck on that.

American society, though, is one of deep, sexual repression and shame and guilt. The Puritan fundamentalism on which this country was founded still very much pervades the fabric of our communities, some far more so than others, but the reach of Christian “values” is inescapable in the United States. As a result, any free and cavalier sexual expression is anathema and so, by that Puritanical standard, porn is by far the most egregious of all shameful sexual activities.

The culture of repression and the demonization of sex is particularly unkind to women because they are the ones very readily branded as whores for even the slightest whiff of impropriety — whether real or imagined — so little American girls are taught early what it is like to be shamed and scorned, branded as whores and how it feels to have one’s worth measured by a far higher standard than that of a boy’s, and to be given very little leeway to deviate from the society’s unrealistic expectation of what a girl or a woman should be.

In a way, I can almost admire Sasha Grey and any other female porn star who is in that business seemingly for the express purpose of saying “fuck you” to Puritan America. I appreciate when people fight back against injustice and unfairness. Truly, when it all comes down to it, what the hell does it matter what is done by someone who has no connection to you and does not factor into your life in any way, unless you choose that they do?

Whether Sasha Grey takes one or a thousand dicks in her ass and then proceeds to deep-throat them, it isn’t going to pay my rent, cook my food or make my train come in the morning. I have the choice to either watch it or not and, if it offends me, the smart choice would be to ignore it. There’s no reason to be indignant.

Yet any admiration I might feel for her or any of her contemporaries, and I assure you I don’t, is totally obliterated by the influence of my own upbringing in this Puritanical stunting ground called America. I would never admire or respect a woman who has been that used up by countless men, especially because she has done it in ready view of anyone who cares to look, documented and likely to be preserved for some time.

Maybe her porn will be on display in the museums of 2,000 years from now, if humanity has by then managed to put Jesus away somewhere and move onto a new fad, perhaps one of logic and reason, where intelligence and thought will prevail over closed-mindedness and superstition. I truly hope that the next generation of kids will be a little more open and a little less repressed so that, someday, humanity might be able to stop being hung up about in which orifice someone was screwed, and how often.

My friend over at Twunch wrote a rather lengthy and, as always, entertaining post in which, with the fourth point, he touches upon interracial relationships. To synopsize, a St. Louis publication ran an image of a black man and a white woman kissing and a deluge of racist tirades ensued in the online comments.

I work for a publication with readership like this. Any time there is the remotest whiff of race in an article all the anti-social racist creeps who, unfortunately for us, have computers come online to spew their vile hate from behind the cowardly veil of anonymity.

I make no attempt to hide my dislike of people but I pretty universally dislike according to one principle: if you’re stupid, I dislike you.

Now, stupidity can come in many guises.

If you can’t take care of yourself or manage what you eat and you are subsequently corpulent and repulsive looking and you take up so much space as to infringe upon the space of others, I will dislike you. Importantly, if you are a corpulent person and I am forced to interact with you and I discover that you are a nice, engaging, otherwise thoughtful (aside from taking up other people’s space) person, I will cease to regard you as a corpulent abhorrence and instead see you as that wonderful person you’ve proven yourself to be.

I also find it quite fair for you to tell me to go fuck myself for not trying to see the beautiful person inside you from the onset. But that’s not going to happen, I assure you.

I don’t like smokers for the specific reason that anyone who willfully pollutes their self must hate their self and anyone who willfully pollutes others must also have the utmost contempt for others and I abhor and despise inconsiderate people more than all the fatties in all the world. I do have friends who smoke but, considerately, they do it when not in my presence.

But no one irks me more than the patently stupid and, in my experience, no one is dumber than a xenophobe … anyone who hates that which is different simply because it is different — be it because of skin color, religion, sexual predilection, etc. — is dangerously stupid and deserves to be shunned, ridiculed and ostracized.

I’m white (that’s for those of you who don’t know me). I’m in a relationship with a black woman. My last relationship was also with a black woman. I love black women. I don’t discriminate, but I have my preferences and let’s just say that me and black women seem to have a mutual-admiration-society-thing going that simply does not exist between me and white girls. White girls are the last ethnicity I would choose to date. Does that make me racist against my own people? I don’t think so. I would never eschew a white girl unless I were faced with a better girl of a different ethnicity.

White girls, in my experience, think they’re special by default. They’ve been touted by our society as the ideal of beauty and I think it’s gone to their collective heads. I believe even perfectly ordinary white women, with their thin lips, flat asses and everything else I could do without, actually think they’re more beautiful than a gorgeous black woman with a nice, big, round ass, a tight little waist and beautiful, full lips.

I guess that’s the white woman’s perogative; she’s totally entitled to think of herself as beautiful … but I’m not required to agree and I don’t need to bend over backwards to try and win the affection of an unspectacular, plain white woman with a distorted sense of personal pulchritude that would force me to take those great lengths … just to obtain something that I don’t find valuable.

As for the coupling of black men and white women? I love it. Please, black men, take them … be my guest; I don’t want them. And, while you’re busy with the white women, I’ll be more than happy to entertain the black ladies you’ve divested of your attention and affection.

I have found recently that I do regard with disdain homogeneous couples. I admit it and it’s probably irrational and wrong, but it’s motivated by my belief that people who breed with people who look just like them are effectively inbreeding. I think it makes evolutionary sense to combine one’s DNA with the most diverse DNA available to therefore create the strongest offspring. Has anyone noticed, by the way, that the vast majority of bi-racial people are fucking beautiful? But I digress..

When I see an all-white family and their blonde, white kids I often think “Yeah, like we needed more of them…” and I think the same thing when I see black women with kids I can deduce with a fair amount of certitude to have been fathered by a black man. Oh, and when I talk about racists, I’m not just talking about white people who hate brown people … I’m talking about all those brown people who hate white people too, and who hate each other if they’re not the right shade or type of brown. It’s ridiculous.

I’m not about to take up a crusade to force people to breed inter-racially, but I do think the subsequent generation of humanity would greatly benefit from not having some contrived reason to hate each other. And there’s that gorgeousness factor, lest you forget.

I realized today that I like footballer John Carew because I imagine that’s what my kid would look like, and I would hope he wound up being a world class footballer (though my first choice would be that he play hockey like one of my favorite players Jarome Iginla — and what prospective dad wouldn’t dream of having boys as beautiful and talented as those two?).

The likelihood right now of me having kids is pretty slim; I’m not ready to be a dad. I’m nowhere close to considering marriage. But I’ve got a very strong inkling that if I decide to get married and have kids, it won’t be to and with a white woman. I’m not saying I couldn’t magically fall in love with some white lady because I know to never say never, but I can safely say the likelihood of that is incredibly slim because the desire just isn’t there.

And all the racist motherfuckers of the world can suck it.

I have thoughts that have no place in polite society. Tact and the social contract demand that certain things not be done and not be said. I despise the social contract because it flies in the face of such childhood lessons like “honesty is the best policy” and that there is virtue in looking for answers and asking questions that have yet gone unasked.

The other day I was thinking about public restrooms. They’re segregated by gender. I assume this is because to allow men and women to use the same facilities could result in consensual or forced intercourse. The former of which is objectionable because a Puritanical society such as ours despises sex and treats it as something dirty and only begrudgingly and unenjoyably done for the mere purpose of perpetuating the human race. The latter is a social more adopted to stigmatize as bad a method of procreation that was in the past very typical and one of the earliest forms of combining diverse DNA.

Still, with all the hype surrounding the badness of sex, especially in public places, and that it was enough to force men and women to piss and shit separately, one would think there would be an outcry over the use of male toilets by gay men. After all, gay men find other men sexually attractive and that creates the possibility of sexual interaction in a facility shared by men. Ditto for gay women, but I don’t recall hearing of many instances of public lewdness in bathrooms on the part of lesbians.

Outrage! I can hear the LGBT groups shouting and throwing up their arms in indignation if a homosexual person were ever to read this. I doubt I’ve said anything offensive, but I’ve gotten the impression lately that to say anything that could be remotely construed as negative about gay people is immediately assailed as hate speech. I find that fairly ridiculous.

Also ridiculous is the desire in the gay community to get married. Why? I’m not a “between a man and a woman” advocate; I think marriage is a bullshit contract that’s survived past the point of being useful. In the case of men and women it benefits, in the vast majority of cases, only the woman who gets to walk away with half or a large percentage of the man’s assets … just for fucking him.

No, thank you.

Marriage is an outdated contract that was intended to allow men to give away their daughters who would inherit no property to men who wanted boys to inherit their property. Everybody won, in short. The women were taken care of, the men — if they were lucky — got boys and if they got girls they had kept the bullshit life-cycle going by having someone to give away to another man so more babies could be made.

So, where do gays fit into that scenario? Oh, right, love. The concept that love has anything to do with marriage is so brand-new it still practically sparkles. I think instead that gays desire marriage because they’ve been told they can’t have it. How does it bestow upon anyone more rights and privileges than civil unions? Maybe it does, I don’t claim to know. I’m just writing, not doing any research. This isn’t scientific it’s bloggerific. I’m just speaking my mind about something that’s been bothering me.

If gays want marriage, I say give it to them! I don’t care. It doesn’t offend me in the slightest. If they want to get married, why shouldn’t they be allowed? It falls firmly into the “it doesn’t affect my life in any way” category of things. The only thing that piques my interest is the real reason why they’d even want to marry. I wonder why anyone does, gay or straight. Also, I love it when right-wing, religious bigots get pissed off, so giving gays the right to marry is something I’d like to see happen. There’s no cogent argument against them having the right.

I do think, though, that there might be a cogent argument about the segregation of bathrooms. Just for the sake of consistency. Or, better yet, do away with it entirely and make bathrooms unisex because people are going to fuck who they fuck wherever they want to fuck them. It’s only an individual’s own moral compass (bestowed upon them by their parents and society) that would deter them.

Went out for drinks on Saturday after my hockey game with my girl and a good friend of mine (who’s also one of my teammates). On our way out of the rink, we ran into another member of our team and, absent mindedly, I invited him along to drink as well. He said he wasn’t quite sure he could; it would depend on if he could find a parking spot near the bar.

Only after he accepted the invitation did I realize I’d invited a totally xenophobic, right-wing racist out to drink with me, my black girlfriend and my friend, who’s probably the most easy-going guy I know. I decided I wasn’t going to let the night be ruined by the inevitable negativity and hateful vitriol the guy would spout and tried to devise a plan to defuse it. Still, there was a chance he might not even show considering he couldn’t find a spot.

So, the three original participants in the bar plan sat down and ordered drinks and were halfway through our round before he showed up. I do, often, try to give people the benefit of the doubt, so I thought right then that maybe he would refrain from being a conservative curmudgeon.

The first thing he did is mistake my girl for my ex. You know, because they’re both black. What’s the difference, right? The guy had even met my ex, though I concede it isn’t as though he knew her well. The two women look nothing alike, however … unless one is looking through proverbial glasses of a certain, not rose-colored, tint.

So, being diplomatic, I informed him of his error by specifying with a story in response to a racist comment he made about Mexicans, an anecdote about an apartment advert I’d seen on 4th Avenue in Brooklyn while walking with my EX (the advert said: “Two-bedroom apartment for rent. Nine Mexicans OK.”) Still, I’m not sure he even got the distinction and surely took my story as an affirmation of his own dislike of “wetbacks.” In reality, it was just an incredulous example of something shamlessly overt that lends credence to stereotypes that have arisen from the actual boarding practices of people who cram in tenants to make the exorbitant rent — with the added hope of allaying the awkwardness of his racially motivated mistaken identity moment.

The sequence of epithets is all out of order in my mind, but I recall making a joke intended to make look ridiculous his irrational dislike for gay people. My recollection was that he was making generalizations that encompassed a teammate of ours, who plays on my line and who is a good friend of mine and one of the best players on our team. I stuck up for him, and there was the usual line: “I don’t have anything against him, I just don’t want him near my kids” or something equally absurd. It was when the diatribe about abominations and the like happened that I jibed: “Conservatives should change their minds about gay marriage. If they’re so off-put by gay people having sex … everyone knows sex stops when two people get married.”

Blech. I could go on and on. The bottom line is that it was painful and awkward, albeit informative. Sometimes, in the cirlces I travel, I become less aware that there are people out there — even in this city — that hate everyone who is even remotely different. I don’t forget that these fearful hatemongers exist, but I’m always a little surprised at the magnitude of their conviction and the inexorable nature of their beliefs. I imagine it must be sad to occupy such a small world with such a narrow view of things, but I’m not that interested in delving into the intricacy of hate and fear. It seems pretty miserable and misery can be infectious.

At least I know better now than to extend invitations to toxic elements. I had a naive moment of team-building and camaraderie but I’d do well to realize that while some of us may be teammates, we’re not friends. We just wear the same jersey for an hour and a half, once a week. It would be a good idea to recognize which people are those with whom I have only some laundry in common.

The blog title’s been a misnomer for a while, now, so I haven’t had any inclination to write along the theme of being downtrodden and fighting against the endless barrage of adversity. That’s not to say I’m not still downtrodden and fighting against [...] adversity, but that’s not going to stop until I’m a rich, white man … no matter how much it may actually subside.

I’m going to cross to Mason-Dixon line for the first time in ages and add a whole new state to my list of places visited. I haven’t left the confines of the Greater City of New York in so long, I can barely remember. Aside from occasional forays out east, I’ve been stuck here. Haven’t crossed the Hudson in nearly three years excepting a couple of hockey games I saw in Newark.

It’s my own doing that I haven’t left here. I don’t have (nor do I want) a car. And I haven’t had anywhere to be with pull enough to drag me out of my Brooklyn-and-Manhattan existence. But I’ll be going to New Orleans in a couple of weeks and it will be nice as hell to get the hell out of Dodge.

There’s an election coming, if you weren’t aware … potential for big things, particularly that whole “only rich, white men can be president” thing getting the kibosh. I’m excited that someone without a Christian name who doesn’t fit the honky-bloodline criterion could be this racist-ass nation’s head of state. It’s absurd to me that misogynist places like Pakistan and Indonesia have had female heads of state and we’ve not had one, nor have we had a man of any shade darker than a fluorescent light bulb.

Still, whether it’s BHO getting elected or cracker-ass McCain, it’ll be more of the same in this country. More stagnant, bipartisan bullshit.  More historic than a black man becoming president would be someone who isn’t a Democrat or a Republican getting elected. Fuck, would I love for that to happen. Every four years it’s a Hobson’s choice. I vote on abortion rights and keeping the government out of people’s bedrooms, and since I’m not rolling in dough, Democratic tax policies tend to benefit me a little more than GOP ones. I wish there was a candidate who represented me along the gamut of issues, but that just isn’t so in a system where both sides are identical except that one openly hates anyone who isn’t an arrow-straight, church-going, xenophobic, ignorant, war-mongering misanthrope while the other side is slightly more tolerant.

Blech. On a national level, it’s still a beatdown. Locally, though, things are looking up.