EXTREME!!!

So a funny thing happened on the Green Line today. I’m getting on the train from the Prudential Center, and while it’s not stuffed, there are no empty seats. Since I’m going to be getting off in two stops anyway, I don’t venture far down the train. In fact, I stand right next to the door I came in, right above the stairs. Here’s a diagram.

The one on the left is the situation. If you haven’t been on a green line train recently, let me remind you quickly what it’s like. The top little cornered-off area is the cockpit of the train. If there’s a driver in there (assuming it’s not a rear car), then the door is open. Otherwise, it’s closed. To the left of that cockpit and above the squares on the right representing seats, there are three steps exiting the train. Now, to the left of those seats on the right, there is just open space. No seats. Presumably for wheelchairs. Also, it should be noted there is only one pole in my vicinity, at the corner of the seats on the right, as represented by the red dot.
Now, before getting in the station and on the train, I had stopped at 7-Eleven to grab a Dark Chocolate brownie and a drink. The drink I got was new Berries and Cream Dr. Pepper (it’s alright… nothing special). So I was sipping it on the bus, with one arm wrapped around the pole, securing myself, and the other arm drinking the soda. My feet were positioned diagonally, so I could lean against whatever direction the train was pushing me (the green line has many tight curves, so this is necessary), either left or right, or toward the front or back of the train. However, while the position is good against every turn in every direction, any sharp, heavy turns or stops or starts are too powerful for the position, particularly stops at the stations. When this happens, you switch your feet to the position in the diagram on the left, spreading your legs but leaning towards the front of the train, so you can once again balance during a heavy stop.
So, as we’re pulling into Kenmore square, one stop before mine, the PA on the train says “Kenmore Square”, leading me to believe that we were entering the station. I figured I’d need to to move to accomodate new passengers, but i had an open drink in my hands. And since it’s a bottle, I need both hands to close it. So, thinking that all that’s coming next is a stop at Kenmore, I switch to the position as diagrammed on the right, although I’m not holding on to any railings since I need both hands. Now, unless there’s an extremely quick stop, like from 30 MPH to 0, postion #2 is strong enough, even without holding onto a railing, to brace yourself during a straight stop. Unfortunately, because your legs are spread out so much, you have very little chance of balancing during a left and right turn without the help of a pole.
Needless to say, I didn’t anticipate a sharp right turn before stopping.
The force of the turn knocked me off my feet and sent me flying, backside-first, towards the left side of the train. If this was an Orange, Blue or Red Line train, there would’ve been seats there, and at worst, I’d fall on someone’s lap or bang my head into a pole. Even NY and DC trains have seats on almost the entire side of the train. But not this train. I tried to shuffle my feet in a last-ditch effort to regain my balance under myself, but the lady sitting in the front left seats, the ones with the ton of legroom, apparently, had just finished a night of shopping of her own and had filled the empty area with her bags from Express, Lane Bryant or wherever she had overpaid for clothes that night. So I trip backwards on the bags, and hit my back against the left wall of the train and slide down so that I’m now crushing the lady’s bags with my excellent physique, since once again, any other train would have seats that would’ve stopped me. To add insult to injury, I hadn’t finished closing the cap on my Dr. Pepper, so the sudden force caused that to fizz uncontrollably and pour all over my luscious body and sculpted forearms.
So now I was on my back on the ground in a train, covered in soda, on top of some poor middle-aged woman’s brand new clothes. Everyone rushes around me, except the clothes lady, and asks if I’m okay. It didn’t hurt at all, and I felt fine, but , my brain still was processing everything that just happened.
A quick side story here; when I was at Suffolk, I was walking around the city one day and on two seperate occasions in the same day, a homeless man fell down or off something. One guy was going down an escalator and somehow faceplanted at the bottom and created a minor traffic jam. Later, a guy Flair-flopped out of a bar’s door, right on the streets, not unlike Chris Farley in his first scene in Tommy Boy. Both times, because I’m an asshole, I just stared for a second and kept walking on by.
Anyway, I must’ve seemed like one of those homeless people. I hadn’t shaved in a few days, nor have I had a haircut since January, and now I was covered in soda. And since I was trying to grasp the situation (obviously I knew I had lost my balance, but when nothing stopped me from falling, my brain shut down for 2.5 seconds as it seemingly began questioning reality as it had once knew it), I wasn’t responding immediately. Finally, someone asked me again if I was okay, and I said, yeah, I’m fine. I tried to pop back up, but the spilled soda at my feet made me slip and my spry recoupin’ (which I had learned in Be Somebody or Be Somebody’s Fool) was unsuccessful too. I got back up anyway, and with half the train crowded around me and staring at me, I knew I looked like a fool, so I started laughing and saying how funny it was. Of course, the lady who’s clothes I fell on wasn’t very happy. She didn’t say anything, but she wasn’t expressing any concern for my well-being either. I acted concerned and asked if I had ruined anything, and she checked over everything and noticed some soda had gotten in the bag.
I had recieved my tax refund that day, but it’s not as if I was suddenly rich. So while the honorable thing to do would be to give her my phone number and/or e-mail so I could compensate her for damages, I didn’t have that much money, so I kinda just said “Aw man, I’m sorry” a few times. By this time, a few seats were empty, so even though I had one stop to go, I sat down to avoid further crashes, and then I saw the window.
Now, there are broken windows all the time in subway cars. But then I realized my hit against the wall felt a little more cushioned than it should’ve. And sure enough, the window that I hit was shattered. All the glass was still in there, it had just spiderwebbed into really small pieces. “Did I do that?” I asked the guy next to me. “Yeah” he said, although I could tell he thought I was a crazy person, and didn’t want any part of me. “Wow, man. Crazy…” I said, and stared into the front window as we approached my stop. I gathered my shit and got off.
As I was walking back to school, I noticed there was a few shiny things on my arm. I thought it was the soda, perhaps transparent in such a small volume. But it wasn’t. It was tiny pieces of glass. So I kept my arms in a neutral position all the way to my room, making sure not to rub anything. I removed the clothes from my nubile young body and took a shower.
Now my left arm aches a little, but it’s ached for years now. Still, perhaps the glass got under my skin in a place I don’t know about and has entered my bloodstream. Perhaps it will get lodged in my heart like in Trauma Center. I hope not. That would suck. But if I die tonight, at least there’s no mystery tommorow.

Racism is Schizm on a Serious Tilt

(Editors Note : I don’t want to go back and retroactively comment on each post, but I’m noticing this column is getting a few hits for some reason. Anyway, it turns out John K is a racist ass. Maybe. So that’s that. 8/24/06 DD)

After Gabe linked to it on PA, I’ve stopped by John K’s blog (the dude who did Ren and Stimpy) a few times, and there’s been some funny stuff on there, like his George Liquor ideas. But the one thing that stands out about him is that he really loves the history and progression of animation. He’s a relatively young guy, about 40 or so, so he wasn’t around during the golden ages of the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s. But he has a genuine appreciation for the medium, and he’s well versed in the artists and styles. But he linked to something today, and he’d done it before, which was a cartoon from back in the day featuring essentially minstrel cats; jet black cats with giant pink lips. One person on the comments said it wasn’t that offensive, because the subject matter of the cartoon itself was “accurately capturing the culture of the time”. It might be true, but I don’t buy it.
And I don’t blame John K for anything — I’m not calling him racist or anything — but he sees the cartoon purely for it’s animation; how the characters have emotion and feeling and a sense of being alive in the way they’re drawn. He doesn’t mention once the subject matter. And I suppose the reason I’m writing about this is because I’m not sure if I could do that. Maybe it’s because I’m a giga-liberal, PC patrol, not-trying-to-offend-anyone kind of person. But I can only compare it to an art form that I’m familiar with. And even then, it’s a hard comparison.
Suppose Shigeru Miyamoto made a bunch of games before or alongside Mario and Zelda. And they were your basic NES platformers. But the character you controlled was this blackfaced guy. I mean, a 10 pixel NES sprite, with specific attention made to make his body black and his lips and eyes white. And you collect watermelons, and the guy does softshoe dances whenever you beat a stage. And there’s this whole subtle (or not-so-subtle) feeling of inferiority with the guy. He’s always running away from things, the white characters appear normal and regular, the whole thing is just kind of condescending.
Now, once again, it’s a hard comparison, because the NES was in the 80’s, not the 30’s, and Miyamoto at the time was a Japanese graphic designer just trying to make a buck, not a bigshot white Hollywood animator/director/artist. But even though Miyamoto would go on to make the greatest goddamn games ever, Ocarina and Mario 64 and Yoshi’s Island and all that, without a tinge of racism in his later years only because it started to become “socially unacceptable”, could you still look at the guy with supreme admiration like most of us (me, at least) do now? Even if the minstrel game had amazing play control, and it was legitimately fun at the time and paved the way for even better games, could you look at the game and say, wow, what a great game?
It’s hard, because working at the Playhouse last summer, I saw two plays, Ambassador Satch, a recap of Louis Armstrong’s life, and Ain’t Misbehavin’, a collection of Fats Waller songs. And, except for the band, they had all-black casts. No blackface. Which isn’t to say the shows were devoid of any racial stereotypes. Satchmo flashed his poily whites numerous times, and the lyrics to many of the Waller songs featured actions just like the ones seen in the Minstrel Cats cartoon (I can’t recall the title at the moment). Hell, the most entertaining song is called the Viper’s Drag, which is just about hanging out in alleys and smoking weed. But it goes back to the age-old argument of the N-word. If Dr. Dre says Nigga, no one flinches. If Mark Fuhrman says Nigger, and he’s not quoting anything, he’s racist. And I agree wholeheartedly with all of that. And you can’t say “Well, then I have a right to be offended if a black guy calls me a cracker”, because, really, cracker’s not offensive at all. It’s not like black people called us crackers when we were slaves, and then again when they had their unfair laws that sent us to inferior schools. And there’s a reason for that; it never happened.
When Ice Cube says Nigga, when Dave Chappelle dances a softshoe in a sketch, when Andre De Shields flashes his teeth while playing Louie Armstrong, it’s all okay. When white people do those things (although Nigga with an “a” at the end is becoming slightly more acceptable… just as long as you don’t finish it with an “er”), it’s not okay. Because when white people do it, it’s a subtle reminder to black people that, yeah, we used to own you motherfuckers. We used to rule everything you did, and if we had our choice, we’d still be doing that shit. When black people say it, it’s their own subtle reminder. Remember this? Remember when you guys were allowed to be assholes to us in public? Even though a lot of you still hate us inside, doesn’t it just burn your ass that you can’t say Nigger to my face, and when you do say it, you have to make sure none of us are in the room? I can say it, though. And I’ll say it a lot, just to piss you off. And I’ll make fun of the way you treated us, because you know you were colossal dicks for doing it, and you can’t apologize for it.
So, yeah, it’s complicated. And that’s why I thank God every day that Miyamoto’s hands are free of blood. I never have to defend him. Same with Miyazaki. Because they never fucked up, and they just concentrated on making good games, good movies, good experiences. Because I worry about that kind of stuff. If Miyamoto made Super Negro Bros in 1984, I wouldn’t be a Nintendo fan. I probably wouldn’t even like video games that much. Any time someone says “GTA teaches children how to kill!!!” I can say “Yoshi’s Island was a better game” and then show them the most violent part of the game; when Yoshi eats a Shy Guy and shits him out as an egg.

Yes, this started off as race discussion and ended up as a love letter to Yoshi’s Island.

Man, I love that game.

Double the Predictions! Double the Destrucity!

Yeah, so I haven’t posted in a while. What, you wanna fight about it? Anyway, since I forgot to do MLB predictions, and since my OSC2 predictions seemed to piss everyone off, here’s my NHL and NBA playoff predictions. Most people are sissies and only predict the first round, then go round by round from there. Uh-uh, not here, fags. We go all the way. We jump on this bitch’s back and hump her uterus out of her mouth. You heard me.

NBA
First Round

Pistons over Bucks in 4
Heat over Bulls in 5
Nets over Pacers in 6
Wizards over Cavs in 5

Spurs over Kings in 6
Suns over Lakers in 5
Clippers over Nuggets in 5
Mavs over Grizzlies in 4

Second Round

Pistons over Wizards in 5
Miami over Nets in 5

Mavs over Spurs in 7
Clippers over Suns in 6

Conference Finals

Miami over Pistons in 7
Clippers over Mavs in 6

Finals
Miami over Clippers in 6
MVP: Dwyane Wade

NHL
First Round

Senators over Lightning in 6
Hurricanes over Canadiens in 5
Devils over Rangers in 7
Flyers over Sabres in 6

Red Wings over Oilers in 4
Stars over Avalanche in 5
Flames over Ducks in 4
Sharks over Predators in 7

Second Round

Flyers over Senators in 6
Devils over Hurricanes in 5

Sharks over Red Wings in 7
Flames over Stars in 6

Conference Finals

Devils over Flyers in 6
Sharks over Flames in 7

Stanley Cup Finals
Sharks over Devils in 5
MVP: Joe Thornton

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A few other notes;

• Goto Consolevania.com and download episode 2.3. It’s by far the best episode they’ve done, and the ending is hilarious.
• Just read “Sex a.k.a Wieners and Boobs” by Michael Showalter, Joe Lo Truglio and David Wain, which is a short one-act play they wrote like 8 years ago. My favorite lines come from the ending, which, although nothing shocking happens, I won’t spoil for you. Here’s the lines, though.

GERARD
Not so fast!

GERARD hurls the whiskey bottle at ACE. It flies in slo-mo, as it’s carried through the air by an actor dressed in black.

TAD
Oh no! He’s throwing the thing just in time and it’s flying right at Ace and it’s just too quick and look! — It’s going to hit– oh no! (The bottle conks ACE on the head. He dies and exits) — it hit Ace and now he’s dead and I’m all alone and the damn thing is coming back to the guy like a frickin’ boomerang and who knew? — they still make those fuckin’ whiskey bottle boomerangs — oh no oh no!

• Just figured I’d share that with you so you can tell that I understand everything about pain and sadness.