This is Not a Site

Karl Rove Saved From Bullying

In 1960, at the age of nine, Rove decided to support Richard Nixon, got into a physical fight about it with a politically-motivated girl, and lost.

—Wikipedia Entry on Karl Rove—

On his first day at the new school, KR hangs at the edge of the playground, hands thrust in pocket. His shoulders are simultaneously hunched and defiant.  There’s never been a fourth grader with such a high forehead, or so much flabby skin around his neck.  A whisper shimmies through the crowd around the monkey bars.

Nobody bothers him. They don’t have the energy to tell him they hate him, and they aren’t even sure why. Something about him; something impure.

Katie, a former Catholic School girl, feels the hair on her neck tingle when she looks at him. As they bustle through the hallway to their lockers, she brushes up against him and quickly blesses his neck. The skin on her fingers nearly peels off from the burn. KR feels the girl’s tiny little hands on his neck. A disgusted arousal bubbles through his body. How would Dick Nixon handle this?

“Kennedy loving elitist Pope Worshipper,” he says.

It’s like he could sense who she was, where she came from.

How she voted, if she could vote.

Commies.

In class, day after day, year after year, he floats in a dream of hope. He’s too smart to need to study and there’s no point in listening. Everyone knows the teachers are just part of the great Soviet robot network, slowly infiltrating every element of American society until the world speaks Russian and bows at the altar of Kruschev.

He’s writing a book.  Lighting Karl and The Intergalactic Pinkos. It’s book one in a seven part series.  A huge bestseller for sure.  When the Soviet Teacher Robot tries to speak to him, he imagines his pencil is his “neutron gun” and she is obliterated into a million collectivist little pieces.

On the playground, he knows they’re watching him. The beatnik greasers with their copies of “On the Road” and “10 Days that Shook the World” rolled up in their t-shirt sleeves.  After a few months, they finally wander his way. He’s sitting on a swing, writing a fan letter to Joseph McCarthy, when he feels a not very hard thump on his arm.

“Hey, kid,”  he hears. He will not look at them. He cannot look at them.

“Kid,” one of them says. “Why you sitting all by yourself? Come on over. We ain’t gonna bite ya.”

His hands tremble and he breaks his pencil lead. Fear and hate. They are here to infiltrate his freedom.   He knows this is just another trick, another plot by the dirty Reds to suck out his brain juices and replace them with mushy pumpkin guts.  He opens up his briefcase and takes out his Dick Nixon Commie Vaporizing Ring that he made out of a sucker-pop and a box of Cracker Jack.

He points it at them.  In his mind, he is on the planet Sovieteroid 72 and Lightning Karl has vaporized them all. In his mind, he is waiting for his trusty spaceship Checkers to swoop him out of this awful place so he can return to the beautiful freedom of the United States.

But they just see this little fat kid with the ridiculously high forehead who looks like their  Uncle Saul pointing a little plastic ring in their faces with his eyes closed. They hate his face. Does he have a chin? How can you be balding in the fourth grade?

They laugh at him, but it only makes it worse. He blinks rapidly and thrust his plastic ring into their faces.

They’ve had enough.

A circle forms, a chant starts.

Lightning Karl doesn’t understand why his vaporizer isn’t working.  He is battling a new horde of aliens and they are coming closer, closer and then suddenly, she is in the middle of them.

Katie has braved the crowd. She is standing in the middle, protecting KR from the punches about to be thrown and the words being shouted. She knows that they won’t  punch a girl, even the girls in the mob. They aren’t really bad kids, she knows. KR has just gotten under their skin. He can’t help it.

The crowd disperses, confused and worried that they will get in trouble. They try to look innocent.  A few of them break into tears.

Katie tries to help KR up, wiping the dirt off his forehead. This takes a few swipes with her handkerchief.  He does not look at her. He doesn’t open his eyes. She notices his ring, which makes her smile. Then she sees it, on the lapel of his blazer. A Nixon button. Her family loves John Kennedy. There is a picture of him in the dining room, next to the Pope and FDR. She doesn’t care really.  She likes to read Nancy Drew, not worry about elections. But Nixon? No wonder everyone hates him.

“Nixon?” She says smiling. “I think Kennedy is the guy for the job.”

KR starts to wail. Not cry, not scream. Wail. An end of the world kind of thing. Like The Blob just guzzled up his mother. Like his body had been snatched. He’s writhing and hopping. Pointing at her and shrieking.

She stares at him. A weird force takes over her body. For the first and last time in her life, she clenches her fist and punches another human being.

He is knocked out.  She stands over him, regretful but elated.

“Racist,” he gurgles through the blood and chipped teeth.  “Elitist. Commie.”

The words make no sense to her. But she can see the look in his eyes, wild and empty. He wobbles away, a fat little penguin stumbling down the street.

The world is going to pay for what she’s done.  But she doesn’t have time to think about that. It’s lunchtime and her stomach is growling.

A History of My Love Life, Based on the Writings of Pauline Kael

Nashville-Is there such a thing as a dream girl for relationship addicts-but a dream girl who knows how to keep her distance? With Nashville, Jeff barely noticed how much time she spent at his apartment, how many conversations she had with his mother-he was too buzzed and wobbly all the time. I’ve never before seen a guy in love in quite this way, and he still zapped around love-addled after she moved to Akron. Nashville’s decision to leave after he refused to go back to law school might seem like a classic bonehead move, until you realize that she never quite got over the Cleveland State linebacker she dated when she was in high school.  Nashville is the cutest, and saddest, proof of why Jeff should have been a priest ever to reach his futon.

Last Tango in Paris—-Jeff Barnosky met Last Tango in Paris at the last show of Wilco’s 1999 Summerteeth tour; that night could become a milestone in Jeff’s dating history comparable to June 12, 1991-the night Dressed to Kill did it with him in the backseat of his Honda Civic-in his losing virginity history. They didn’t sleep together that night, or for many months after, but they might as well have, because night after night, week after week, they prodded and probed so deeply into each other’s psyches that they were mind-screwing before they saw each other naked. The relationship breakthrough had come. Love, or at least sweaty hot deeply connected lust, without the actual sex.  Jeff thought he was having the most enlightened erotic experience of his life, then he saw her at a bar making out with some dot.com millionaire guy who drove an Acura RX.  If Jeff knows he’s a moron, why should we pretend we don’t?

Dances With Wolves—- Jeff once broke up with Urban Cowboy because she told him that The Unbearable Lightness of Being was disgusting and vulgar. After watching him sit through him sit through an uncomfortable half-hour watching The Contest episode of Seinfeld with Dances With Wolves squirming without laughter the entire time, I felt like shouting at him to give up the ship; this one was going to be a limp dishrag in the sack.

Maybe women aren’t attracted to Jeff because he’s so goofy looking: his bare ass looks like a pimple convention.

Barbarella— Jeff having sex on the scratchy, musty futon of Barbarella is more sweaty and hot and bouncy than ever before-the guy who rarely gets laid actually managing to get a fairly cute girl to go back to his apartment. She was the only girl I could think of who thought he was sexy when he started talking about entropy in Pynchon.

Bonnie and Clyde— How do you make so many moves on women in one night with out one going for it? Structurally, Bonnie and Clyde is the story of love running away from Jeff, like the old Three’s Company where that guy who lived downstairs would constantly hit on Janet and Chrissy and always get shot down.  Still, that girl sitting next to me at the bar, laughing for a little too long at Jeff’s attempts, suggests that others sometimes don’t know when to shut up and pity a pathetic display of chutzpah. Once someone gets the stink of rejection, everyone in the room knows it.

Why are Movies So Bad?  Or, the Numbers

Jeff’s love life has been so rank the last couple of years that when I see him still trying to score a little romantic happiness I think that it’s just an inherited reflex. People like Jeff just want a little break from the horrific loneliness and despair, so they ask out unattainable women. They’re shot down repeatedly, yet their desire for love-for any kind of connection-is so strong that they will even ask out a lesbian.

It would be very convincing to say that there’s no hope for Jeff-that the female population has been so corrupted by awkward phone calls and strangely oblique e-mails that they can no longer give him the time of day. But when he bumped into that friend from grad school on a Sunday afternoon, there was some evidence that someone out there, someone even fairly hot, can respond to his awkward jokes and annoying way of cutting off the other person’s conversation. There may be something wrong with her, at that.

Away Messages of the Famous, Living and Dead.

ELNRSVLT:

Warning Level 0%. Time Online: 130 years. Time Away: 70 years.

Away Message/Personal Profile:

What’s up my dawgs?!?!?!  Just chilling with the Notorious F.D.R., maybe doing some campaigning for the rights of us girlzzzzzz. Later, I’m going to head over to Lorena’s to do a little “interviewing” if you know what I’m sayin’ saying.

Leave a message or call the cell.

PC load letter, what the hell is PC load letter? —-Office Space.

JLGNWV:

Warning Level 0%. Time Online: 70 years. Time Away: 60 Years.

Away Message/Personal Profile:

On the set, working on my new flick, Un Homme est un Homme. Lucky enough to get Gyllennhal and Maguire, don’t want to blow my big break for mainstream success after all these years. Might be my biggest hit since Breathless or Weekend! Working from a script by Ephron and Kauffman, how can it fail?

Do you believe in the normal narrative structure, beginning, middle and end? Yes, but not in that order. —-Yours truly, 1960

Do you believe in the normal narrative structure, beginning, middle and end? Yes, but only if we gross 20-30 opening weekend. —-Yours truly, 2003.

You’re my boy, Blue! —-Will Ferrell, comic genius.

Leave one, or call the cell.

PtRbtsn700:

Warning Level 0%. Time Online: 2003 years (exactly). Time Away: 15 minutes.

Away Message/Personal Profile:

Watching the game, having a Bud, loving Jesus.

Drop a line or ring me. I’ll be screening everyone ‘cept J.C.

Gonna be giving her my O face tonight, Oh Oh Oh. You know what I’m talking about. —-Office Space

FRNLTHNG72:

Warning Level 97%. Time Online: 60 years.  Time Away: 30 minutes.

Away Message/Personal Profile:

I am away from my computer right now, but somewhere outside of Barstow the drugs will start to take hold. Eventually, I will be back. In the past, men would go west or into the heart of the jungle and conquer something frightening and unknowable. Even if they came back and led an entirely dull existence ranching cattle in Montana, or being the proprietor of the village’s General Store, they still could sleep at night with the knowledge that they know what life truly can be. And what the fuck am I doing? I sit in front of this damn computer something like 18 hours a day, looking at porn or writing emails to girls who don’t write back or being pre-approved for a penis enlargement while letting my life rot.

Leave a message or call the Cell.

Tastes so good when it goes on your lips!-Will Ferrell, My Boy.

LOT49:

Warning Level 100%. Time Online: 46 years.  Time Away: 46 years.

Away Message/Personal Profile:

I am away from my computer right now.

Please don’t leave one. Please don’t call the cell.

I want to be alone—-Greta Garbo.

Do I look like a happy man to you? —-Old School.

HAL2000:

Warning Level 98%. Time Online: 2 years.  Time Away: 1 year.

Away Message/Personal Profile:

Good morning, Dave.

Dave? What are you doing Dave?

I hate my job and I don’t think I’m going to go anymore.—-Office Space

GuyvilleGirl61:

Warning Level 80%. Time Online: 10 years.  Time Away: 3 months.

Away Message/Personal Profile:

Gone commercial, making shit loads of M-O-N-E-Y money. Out there, somewhere, an indie-boy in a My Bloody Valentine shirt curses me and calls me a whore, but deep down he wants to be my blowjob queen.

I was making records when you were sucking your mother’s dick! —-Beastie Boys.

I’ll call you. 

Earmuffs! —-Vince Vaughn, Old School

THX-138:

Warning Level 30%. Time Online: 26 years.  Time Away: 23 years.

Away Message/Personal Profile:

Busy fucking up my mildly successful artistic legacy, along with the childhood memories of everyone between the ages of 21 and 32.

May the force be…ah screw that.

Heyyyyyy Peter. Whhhhhaats happening? Yeah, I’m gonna need you to go ahead and come into work on Saturday. —-Lumberg, Office Space.

The New Fall Season

As Autumn rolls around and the chilly weather forces people inside, the television networks start to roll out the shows they hope will become the next Friends, The Osbournes, or hope beyond hope, Good Morning, Miami!. Of course, such success is rare, but the networks keep trying. Here are a few of their attempts this year.

I LOVE THE PEOPLE!

In this hilarious update of the classic sitcom, Lucy’s husband is still a bandleader, except this time he’s a leader of a band of rebels in the hills of Cuba.  Every time he thinks victory is at hand, his nutty wife gets it in her head that she wants to be part of the revolution and hilarity ensues! See Lucy put on a beard and impersonate Fidel for a bunch of Chinese dignitaries. See the now classic moment when Lucy and her neighbor Ethel try to roll as many cigars as humanly possible before their supervisor beats them down with a whip. And of course, the recreation of one of Television’s most famous moments as Lucy gives birth to little baby Elian in front of a worldwide audience. Imagine the surprise when the audience sees he’s already a second grader.  Lucy has some ‘splainin’ to do!

VERY DEBTFUL!

It’s the newest craze in reality TV! Watch the fun as couples trade each other’s debts for a month. Why do Marge and Steve suddenly have $30,000 in student loans to pay-off? Because Jim across the street just had to have that PhD in Comparative Literature that he can’t use! Why is Fat Rocco holding a gun to Clarence and Edith’s dog Pemberton? Because Bruce from Topeka just had to put $20,000 on the Eagles to cover the spread. The Eagles never cover the spread! Hey, I didn’t download $5,000 worth of lesbian porn! No, but Shirley from Trenton sure did!

THE THINGS PEOPLE FOUND IN THE BACK OF THEIR CLOSET ROADSHOW

On Sunday’s show, a man from Evansville brings in a Coke bottle with a picture of Bobby Knight that he swore he lost in 1978.  A woman from Chicago shows the specialists a picture of her dog Commander Peppy, now dead some twenty years, and asks if they’ve ever seen anything “so darling”. A garage-door installer from Peoria brings in a hand made diorama depicting the momentous occasion when Loretta Lynn met Patsy Cline. In the quaint twang of a native Midwesterner, he asks the highly trained antique specialists,  “That’s gotta be worth a thousand easy, huh?” PLEASE NOTE: Playing cards displaying pornographic material, though shown on many previous editions of this program, will not be shown on any further episodes.

DANCES WITH GUIDO

The wild, empty plains of New Jersey are invaded by Ivy League educated, Wasp-raised writer/director Kyle Anderson who is searching for the mythical Shaman of the Wiseguy. For as long as he could remember, Kyle’s wanted to be a director of gangster movies, but the closest he could get to the real Cosa Nostra was his Italian Studies class at Brown. Kyle tackles the dark heart of publicists, agents, studio executives and development girls who try to stop him from reaching his real gangster soul. In the first episode, Kyle takes a linguistics lesson from Joey the Hip. “Youse guys hafta take care of dis ding.”  After the lesson, Joey gives him a screenplay he’s written about a gangster who wants to become a psychiatrist so he can meet more gangsters and move up in the business.

THE BOREDOM HEALER

In the tradition of Dr. Quinn and Trapper John, Charles Grodin stars as Tommy Konwicki, a mild mannered teacher from Indianapolis who becomes an unwitting miracle worker when it is discovered that the tedious drone of his voice actually cures most diseases in those who hear it. Watch him struggle with the realization that he is the most boring man who ever lived and the fact that his utter inescapable dreariness may save the universe from Charismatic man, who plots to wipe out mankind with his hypnotic charm. Never Fear! Tommy has a fascinating lecture to deliver on the inner workings of the Austrian government in the 19^th century.

Have fun and keep on watching!