Anyway, we just got back from watchin' Saving Silverman. It stars Jason Biggs, Jack Black, Steve Zahn and Amanda Peet. There's also a special appearance by music legend, Neil Diamond. Billed as a comedy, the trailers (previews of coming attractions) in the preceding weeks certainly whetted my appetite to see this one.

As you know, Jason Biggs hit it big (oops! a pun?) with American Pie, a surprise comedy hit from about a year ago. I readily confess to having thoroughly enjoyed American Pie, but he followed it up with a loser named Loser (oops! am I becoming a serial punster?). I think Black (High Fidelity) and Zahn (Happy, Texas), however, are two really rising comedy talents with strong potential staying power. As for Peet--hell, she's just damn good fer the ol' eyes.

Trailers present a mixed bag for the movie junkie. They are, without question, a marketing tool designed to, as I mentioned previously, whet the appetite of the viewer to go see the movie when it comes out. Time and again, however, after watching a movie I have had to conclude that the good parts had already been revealed in the trailer. Hence, having already seen the trailer, the movie offered little to no additional entertainment.

For the most part, this turned out to be the case with Saving Silverman, i.e., most of the best gags and scenes were presented in the trailer.

The story is about three friends who grow up together. Zahn and Black get Biggs hooked up with Judith (Peet), who turns out to be a control freak. In short order, she orders Biggs to completely disassociate himself from his two best pals. Essentially, the rest of the movie is built around Black and Zahn's efforts to undo the match and get their buddy back into the fold.

There are some good scenes involving R. Lee Ermey, one of my personal favorites. Most of you will remember him as the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket. In Silverman, Ermey plays the three pals' high school football coach.

Oh. What about Neil Diamond? Well, I'll tell you this much--Neil Diamond plays Neil Diamond in the movie. If you wanna know more, go watch it. Seriously, though Neil Diamond is a part of one of the running gags in the movie, I also think it was something of a non-pompous tribute to him. In his day, no one was bigger in the music business.

I truly wish the movie had been funnier. There were some chuckles and snickers off and on throughout, but nothing really broke the funny-bone. Further, a good deal of the laughs were because Black and Zahn are simply funny to watch, regardless of what they're doing.

This flick was directed by Dennis Dugan. More about it can been seen at http://savingsilverman.com. Dugan's previous credits include Happy Gilmore and Big Daddy, a couple of Adam Sandler biggies.

In sum, do yourself a favor and wait until it comes out on tape (DVD stills costs too damn much, although they're going down). We give it two Fred Heads.

Amen.

Welcome our newest column:

Different flavor, different style, different content, different column. Tune in weekly for this, you'll enjoy it. And be sure to post and comment in the Suppository. I'm sure people will have a lot to say on this one.

Welcome Nutrimentia.

I am going to digress from my ex-girlfriend story for a moment to explain why those were the good old days.

Good Old Days: I think back to them and consider them the good old days because I was a lot nicer then. I was nice to more people that is, I was still quite a jerk. I’m going to spread out these good old days over seventh and eighth grade, because I am thinking that’s when it was the best.

As hard as it is to believe, I am quite a good talker and very entertaining in real life. This trait would prove to be an extremely useful one. In seventh grade I started hanging out with the 3 druggies. I am not going to go into the druggies or this thing would drudge on forever. Anyway, in seventh grade I started and had my first gang. The Beat Down Crew, pretty lousy name I guess, but it would prove to be fun. It started out with just the 3 druggies and myself. Within a week it was just about every guy in my grade. We didn’t do much yet but then this real big kid, tallest in the grade, decided to cause some problems. I was probably the biggest kid in the grade, shorter than him but he was skinny as a rail. He had a problem with one of the original 3 druggies and they decided to attack him for it. One of the three druggies was very short and very skinny by the way. So this biggest kid in the grade takes a soft pretzel, covered in mustard and hits my friend’s brand new shirt with it. My friend couldn’t do anything because he was so small. To cut this short, the big kid caused some more problems and I ended up throwing him down a flight of stairs and into a wall. I was suspended from school for a while for that. That gang died because of that.

The next gang (excluding my fight club/amateur professional wrestling federation) was School Police. School Police, like The Beat Down Crew was started by me, and then the three druggies. My great uncle was a cop, and before that he had been a school cop so he had a bunch of shirts he gave me that said School Police. To sum up this one even quicker, this one was much bigger than The Beat Down Crew, including girls, who felt the need to show me their breasts on more than one occasion so they could join. This one had some other problems and was a lot of fun. It died out because of summer though. Finally came The Family, this one was just the three druggies and I. To cut it short again, a kid was threatening to kill one of the three druggie's moms. He threatened to beat up my friend and pulled a knife on him, so this kid and my friend were going to fight. The three druggies and I came and met him in some back woods. The kid punches my friend in the face; my friend puts him in a headlock and drops to the ground. I stomped the shit out of him. I didn’t hit him in the spine or anything that I thought would cause bad damage, just the thighs and in the ass a few times. I didn’t want to cause any serious problems for him, just teach him to stop being such a dumbass. Anyway, that’s why those were pretty much the good old days, when I hung out with the druggies, had a big voice, did that sort of thing. I have always been a bit of a Mafia leader type guy I guess, just part of my personality.

Back onto topic, this ex-girlfriend of mine had a big crush on one of the druggies (The same small skinny one involved in the 2 previous incidents, isn’t that weird) and so I saw her a lot as she was trying to follow him and I around, more or less him. I became better and better friends with her though, as he would be high most of the time and not wanting to do much talking. So back to her.

Ex Girlfriend: I had felt her up (in the palming, for one second, through shirt and bra manner described above) and seen her tits quite a few times. I figured I ought to ask her out. I was sitting in my friend’s basement with her, her friend and my friend. My friend was very stoned, he was that small druggie mentioned earlier. Like I said, he didn’t do much talking when stoned so he sat there staring at the wall. Her friend didn’t talk much either so she sat quietly. I say, "Say, will you go out with me?" For the next 5-10 minutes, silence. Remember how much I hate silence. I say, "well?" Trying to react calmly to this goddamn silence that angers me so. No answer for another 5-10 minutes. I was having a bad day anyway, so that’s why I had asked, hopefully to brighten up my day by giving me a first girlfriend. I got tired of the silence and sort of brought my fist down pretty hard on a table sitting in front of me. The table broke. She thought I was going to hit her or something so she said, "yes!" and left his house right then. I was pretty oblivious to the fact that she was afraid and didn’t really want to go out with me. I was feeling pretty happy, that I had a girlfriend.

Over the next week or two she didn’t talk to me much. She wasn’t allowed to talk on the phone. I figured if I wasn’t getting a relationship I’d probably at least be getting more play than just palming tits like before. I hung out with her both weekends in the 2 weeks I just mentioned. Both times, she didn’t do anything with me. I finally realized she didn’t want to go out with me and all so we "broke up". So that’s my first girlfriend, not much of a story I guess. She is still the closest thing to a girlfriend that I have ever had.

Now, to the reason I am writing this is what happened last night. The wheel chair and my fear of girls has to be explained real quick first.

Fear of girls touching me: I have some bad fear of girls touching me, I have no idea what causes it but its there. I can sit here and dream and fantasize about them touching me all I want but in real life it just doesn’t work. Girls that are my friends seem to find it very funny that I blush a whole lot and get very nervous when they are physically touching me at all. I will jokingly beckon them over to sit on my lap, knowing that they won’t. I would do that a lot because it bothers them and makes everybody laugh. After a while they somehow figure out to say yes. Then they come over and when they are on my lap they have to get off right away and I normally would stand up or squirm out or whatever.

One night, when I used to bowl, I won’t go into bowling either, even though I have lots of great stories about that. Anyway, so we were bowling, and I had just finished my turn so I sat down and had my hand, palm up, on the chair next to me. The girl comes over and almost sat on it, I pulled my hand away right before she did. She was like, "What’s wrong Hughie, don’t want to touch my ass?" and I would be like, "I will touch it right now, get up and see!" She would then stand up, and I’d put my hand back down. She’d sit down for a sec and I’d have to pull my hand out, I don’t know why. Her sitting on my hand rocked, I am wondering now as I write this why the hell I pulled it out at all. She did this a few more times, and then later when we would hang out taunt me about it and tell me to grab her ass and stuff.

So, now back to that ex girlfriend of mine, she found out two weeks ago about the fact that I was afraid of her touching me. Ex Girlfriend: I was sitting on a bench at the mall, and my ex-girlfriend complained of not having somewhere to sit. I called her over to sit on my lap and she didn’t. I did it a few more times jokingly and finely she came over and was about to and I quickly got up. I was like, "Your not supposed to do it for real!" and she said something along the lines of, "Ha ha, your afraid of me touching you?" and then she would reach her hand towards me or something. Then later that night when I was in the wheel chair, oh, let me digress quickly to explain the wheel chair.

Wheel Chairs: I have always wanted a wheel chair and always loved riding in them. I’ve noticed every time I go to the mall that they have wheel chairs behind the customer service desk. I decided to go ask and found out all you need to do is give them a license or permit and you can get one. My friend gave the girl behind the desk his permit and I snagged a wheel chair. My friends and I had one hell of a time playing with that goddamn wheel chair. I don’t know how many of you have played with wheel chairs in extremely large public malls that have ramps and lots of people, but it is extremely fun. So anyway, back to that night.

Ex Girlfriend: I was wheel chairing around and I asked her if she wanted a ride in my lap, she declined. I asked again maybe an hour later and she said sure, and again, like some pussy, I jumped up. That’s pretty much all that happened then. Last night, my friends and me went to the mall again. My ex girlfriend was there again of course. I had the wheel chair and I invited her to sit in my lap, I was determined to stay there. She came and sat on my lap. I told her she had to sit forward as to not crush my dick. As I was wheeling around with her in my lap I got aroused. She started sliding back towards my dick and I told her that I had a hard on and if she slid back she’d be getting poked so she better not. She, for some reason, slides back on purpose and starts rubbing her ass against my dick. Sorry if this is starting to seem like a porn story, it’s not really…. So she was rubbing against it and it was really cool. I told her to get up right away but instead she kept doing it, after a while she finally stopped and got off the wheel chair and the night continued, it was fun.

My friends and I were all outside and some white trash kids started yelling lots of stuff to us. I was standing out there, in the rain because everybody else was under the outcropping that was over the door. I stood there wearing all black, and my trench coat while listening to these white trash pieces of shit bitch at my friends. One of my friends called them white trash, the lead girl said, "Ya’ll don’t know me!" and started bitching more, now at me for some reason. A few seconds after she stopped bitching, all eyes turned to me to hear my response. I said, "I’m going to eat your skin." All my friends laughed uproariously, the white trash kids were creeped out and left us alone for a bit. They started bothering us again later though. Oh, real quick, we were outside because my friend smokes and you can’t smoke in the mall, the white trash kids were outside for some reason we didn’t know. I told my ex-girlfriend I would pay her 40 dollars to go grab the guys (there was one guy and three girls) balls and squeeze them really hard. She went over and tried but he pulled away, she didn’t try very hard either. She came back and I didn’t pay her. She said that she needed the money and asked what else she could do. I asked her if I could feel her up like before, but for longer and stuff. Somehow I ended up offering her 20 dollars to let me. She agreed. I put my hand near her chest and told her she’d have to put my hand there, she did. She pressed my hand against her breast hard, not like the palming I had done before. After about 5 or 6 seconds she started to pull my hand away and I gave her breast a good squeeze. It was really cool, but I wasn’t satisfied. I told her as much. She let me do it again for 3 seconds, with squeezing again this time. I told her one more time and I was happy. She let me, a third and final time for about 5 seconds again, 5 long seconds though. This time I was squeezing it for several seconds, it was really cool. I told her I wasn’t going to pay her. She got really pissed at me and went inside and threw a hissy fit. I went in and gave her the 20$ so she wouldn’t be pissed at me. I am planning on getting her to be my girlfriend again, but for real this time. She knows now I wouldn’t ever hit her or anything mean like that. I think she may like me but want me to be dominant and like grab her tits and be sort of forceful and stuff… which I am trying to find out.

I think I will hang out with her again next Friday, at the mall again. I haven’t talked to her online yet since the events at the mall last night. But as she left I had been feeling REALLY trashy and shitty for having paid her to let me grab her boob. So I was avoiding her and stuff and she was making faces at me, not like stupid faces but like wondering why I wasn’t talking to her, sad faces. Her ride came and she yelled to me that she’d email me tomorrow. I am guessing she will email me sometime today. I think she feels bad about the whole thing. I know I sure do, I feel really trashy about that paying to touch her boobs thing. The wheelchair bit was super cool though. I am wondering now what to do about it, about trying to pursue a relationship as more than friends with her.

End: I wrote this just to give a little insight to my life, to share with everybody my first experience with a girl purposely touching my dick, the first boob I touched and the first boob I squeezed. A few firsts for me that I felt like sharing, looking for some advice about what to do so that I could hit a few more firsts. Those few more firsts being first Real girlfriend and then lots of girlfriendy type stuff, if you catch my drift.

As infuriating as it is to deal with the steady reductionism of the toddler’s inquires, imagine what it would be like to live like that, stuck inside a head with a brain that refuses to accept answers on an arbitrary basis, instead pushing on with "Why, why, why?!?!??!?!" until it feels pathological. Do you know what it feels like to be blessed with the power to deconstruct and examine, yet cursed with a lack of synthesis, the ability to solve (or even resolve!) the conundrums and queries that bubble up without invitation?

Welcome to my world.

I am not sure when I became so hopelessly inquisitive, and I sure as hell don’t know why. I don’t remember being overly intrigued by the ways, whys, and how’s of stuff as a kid. I never took the TV apart to see how it worked or tried to dissect the dog, though I do remember cutting open a dears head once to look at its brain. And as much time as I spend asking questions of myself, critically analyzing thoughts and ideas, I am hopelessly gullible in conversation with people. But give me time on my own to think about the world and the people in it, and I just get sucked in.

If I had to try to pin it down, I would say that my splendid American collegiate education contributed the most to my state. Whether it was the classes or the psychedelics I took, well, that’s something that still needs sorting out.

With the exception of maybe history, most collegiate programs train you to deconstruct, take it apart, find out what makes it up, makes it happen. Scientific method, hermeneutic circle, etc., etc. etc., ad nauseum. Mix this in with a low sense of self confidence, and I spend all my time trying to figure out what the hell I know. Every time I come up with an answer, my deconstruction mechanism kicks and says, "Well, yeah okay, but then how come THAT?, " always staking me a level deeper. I suppose I am learning all the way, but it would be nice to be able to just accept stuff.

I can’t just accept things though, because I know that fundamentally, there is no meaning in anything that we say, do, or think. that’s what psychedelics taught me. If a tree falls in the forest, it still makes noise, but if there are no people around to think about it, all the stuff in the universe doesn’t have any a whit of meaning. Meaning only has as much meaning as we are willing to give it.

Part of my eternal search owes itself to this understanding. If you take anything back far enough, there comes a point where it’s all arbitrary. The words we use, the categories we employ, the way we act, these are all agreed upon symbols and system for getting along, but there is no reason that it has to be done this way. Any casual glance at the cultural variation around the world makes this evident. Hell, there’s not even a reason why we should have started down that path in the first place. If we could rewind this chemistry experiment we call life and run it again, we’d get a radically different result. How can we care so much about stuff that has no inherent meaning?

As long as you don’t take it that far and remind yourself that we all live in a dream, one can get by playing with, and accepting the rules of the games we play. Its impossible to play along completely though, when the only thing you know is that everything else you know is wrong. Within each little system of meaning its all coherent, but the instant you step outside that system you can see it’s just a sham.

Or maybe it’s just that I relish pondering the imponderables. Maybe I don’t really want to know, I just like to think, to explore with my mind, constructing potentials and possibilities, trying each one on for size, stabbing at meaning in a dark room with a blindfold on. Doesn’t really accomplish much, but it’s a better way to spend your time than beating your head on the cement.

It isn’t all bad, you know. Asking questions gets you lots of relevant answers if you surround yourself with the right people (you hear me, WastedP?!?!?) But even more than this, asking questions requires that you know what you don’t know. You don’t ask people your name because you know that. You might ask someone why you have that name though. Always be pushing the limits of knowledge like that.

Sometimes I get positive feedback about it. My wife often asks me things and I often can answer them. Sometimes she complains that she can never tell me anything that’s happening in the news because I know it in advance. So I suppose that keeping my ear to the ground is paying off. But damn I wish that sometimes I could just be satisfied. But then again, I’d have stopped learning. I would rather be hopelessly lost in a sea of questions than ridiculously complacent in uncritical ignorant bliss.

Graffiti

It’s funny, you know. I can remember being a child of five and comparing an artist's rendering of the solar system with that of an atom. Of course, my mind was free and uncluttered by preconception. I just looked at the two images and couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out what was so fundamentally different between the two. What, orders of magnitude? So the Earth is a gravitically bound mega-electron, whirling around its nucleus/sun. Magnitude. I think that more than anything, our egos alone prevent us from bellying up to the fact that we’re nothing more than infinitesimal specks clinging unnoticed to a sub-atomic particle in a madly whirling dust storm on a far grander plane of scale than we can perceive or even understand.

So, I ask you this: How do you define physical boundary? I mean, here we are, all towering monuments of complexity built up from organs made of tissues made of cells made of organelles made of molecules made of atoms, on and on ad infinitum. All the while, energy is spilling off of us on crosscurrents like vast oceans of wind flowing through hollow nothing. Energy. We consume it, trade in it, refine and redirect it. Measured in any manner that you choose, energy is necessary to the condition of life. It is carried, processed, and conveyed through avenues as intangible as thought, emotion, or even the weight of a casual glance. How can one establish boundary or individuality in a condition as malleable and indefinable as that? In my own opinion, arguments toward establishing boundary based solely upon measures of organization fall inadequately short of the mark.

In the details, all things are constantly flowing into one another. If you think about it, we’re all in a perpetual state of physical contact with each other. We are that which surrounds us. It seems to me that any argument to the contrary would hold as much water as, say…the cells of your liver trying to argue that they aren’t actually a part of your body, but instead individual organisms unto themselves. The interconnectedness doesn’t simply peter out at the epidermis. It continues on with all things around it. We live, I think, in a condition very similar to the cells within our bodies. I think it should behoove us to avoid metastasizing and consuming the rest of the organism, even if we’ve failed thusfar to recognize its existence.

Energy is constantly winding down. All things grow slower, colder. Somewhere between the birthing and cessation come the processes of filtration (for lack of a better phrase). Filtering energy, that’s what we do. It’s no different than any other living thing on any scale. As conscious entities, however, we have the ability to focus and direct that energy in ways that operate outside of instinct or programming. By God, that’s a profound gift. It’s a shame that we cannot seem to bring ourselves to use it nobly.

Angels. I have held them in my very arms and wept outright with the joy of simply knowing. I am a part of you. You cannot change that. Circles within circles within circles, still.

Again, goodnight.

redguard@blackvault.com

Also, aminal has put up a QIII stats page that just proves Anti-Stile owns Quake 3.

...Nine o'clock rolls around and we're picked up by a large black truck that was blasting Tom Petty...The driver was an obviously older man, but he seemed nice enough, so I got in the truck with Sarah and him. We drove around to pick up some alcohol, which was no big deal to me by then; I've been drinking for a long time now. I was having a great time so I forgot about the clock as most naive teens do, and we all headed back to his apartment, where we met up with another one of Sarah's older guy friends. The rest of the night was a blur.

I only had a couple of beers, but I managed to pass out.

I awake feeling numb yet cold at the same time, and I wonder where I am. I'm aware of foreign hands on my skin and I freeze in shock. I realize where I am and what's going on. I'm naked and there's a man touching me. I try to say "stop" but it comes out as a squeak. I try again and it comes out more like a "*Stop*" but he ignores me and continues in his exploration/violation. By that time, I have stories I've read in the newspaper and watched in the evening news over TV dinners running through my head of brutal rapes, how the girls struggle in vain and how they end up buried in a ditch. So I choose to lay there in hopes that I can pass this off later as miscommunication. That I won't have to deal with the reality that I'm being fucked by a 27 year old man with a blonde wife and a blonde child I met earlier that day. I try not to concentrate on how much he's hurting me and how weak I feel, though I'm desperately trying to do something to dissuade him. I try not to feel his arms pinning me down. I try not to feel tears come to my face and spill down my cheeks.

In the background of all this chaos I realize that I hear something. Sarah and the other man are watching and laughing....This is a game to them. A movie. A circus. Whatever. I feel him grunt and finish. I remember his friend asking "to have a go at me" as well, but thankfully I'm spared from further humiliation. I just turned off inside at that point.... I get up mechanically and ask in a voice that sounds detached from me if they can take me home now. Sarah pulls me off into the bathroom and proceeds to tell me a long winded sob story that she's getting paid for this and she really needs the money to bail her boyfriend out of jail and that I can't tell anyone about it because... blah blah blah...basically it all comes down to the old cliche...If you tell anyone, I have connections to fuck you harder than you already have been fucked, so don't even try it...Just accept that you have unwittingly become a whore. Slut. Slave.

Merchandise.

By that time it's two in the morning and they finally drop me off. Sarah has the nerve to yell cheerily, "Call me!" as I walk to my house (they dropped me off a block before my home). I come home to angry shouts and threats, but I don't hear anything even when Tio is up in my face calling me the usually barrage of insults. I am finally left alone with myself and the realization how disgusting I am and I begin to sob. My sister is sitting next to me and I manage to croak out, "I think I was raped." She urges me to tell my mother even if it's only to get a pregnancy test.

Six a.m....I'm finally out of the hospital after being poked, prodded and violated, but it's supposed to be different because these men are wearing rubber gloves and they have a college degree to go along with it. When the timid Asian doctor asked me why I was there, I retorted, "Because a man stuck his dick in me, and I didn't want him to"...I then proceeded to go into some weird sort of hysterics.

I get home and go into an awkward sleep, only to be woken up by my mother who wants to tell me that I'm grounded until my 14th birthday, which is about a month away. For what? For shaming her? For lying? For scaring her? For giving her a dose of reality? For letting her know that bad things happen to people that aren't just pixels on a screen or print in a newspaper? Didn't she know that what happened to me was enough to teach me a lesson?

What can I call this incident? It doesn't matter to me anymore. It happened and I try to count myself lucky that I wasn't stripped of my trust in people in an even worse fashion. I was naive to get myself in such a stupid situation, but I refuse to beat myself over the head with it. Life is full of ups and downs, but it all shapes who I am to this day. So why should I bother regretting anything?

--Lynda--