|
Salami World Tour 2006
|
8/29/2006
|
In case you haven’t seen my Myspace page due to the tens of hits it gets per week, here is a screenshot of it:
If you hit "refresh", you go to the best page of all-
By the way, please eat my ass if you think I am always on Myspace. I haven't figured out how to turn off the little orange guy, and I usually forget to log out. I really don't spend all day looking for people who are worse off than I am in an attempt to feel better about myself, nor do I find people who were cooler than I in high school and scream "WHY DID YOU HAVE TO DO THIS TO ME?" at their profile until my throat bleeds. Seriously.
Also, if you are under 18, you will be denied no matter how many times you ask. Lie about your age if you want to- that's your problem. I'm not putting my dumb ass on the molester watch list just because you sent me an email. If that guy from Dateline shows up at my house to "ask me a few questions," I'm going to be pissed. I wonder if anyone ever says "Dude, her profile said she was 99. I swear to god."
Okay, no more talk of the space.
It's here again for the first time- World Tour 2006. A two month whirlwind of intense boredom punctuated with moments of abject terror. What follows is my schedule for the next lil' while, as well as a big part of the reason that I couldn't think of anything better to write about. Sure, some of it is for fun, but any kind of traveling requires planning, some degree of stress, and that period at work where you jam a bunch of extra stuff out so you don't get fired while you are gone. Three jobs? Thrice the asspain. For me, at least, this translates roughly to "Not much time or desire to sit down and ponder the hilarity of the week, for I'd rather be sleeping."
This weekend - Michigan State University (go Lemurs), to partake in what I think is big eleven football tailgating with The Skirt and her friends. I would call them "our" friends, but I don't know that they would claim me after all they have seen, heard, and read. I didn't do much tailgating when I was in college and see even less need for it now, but I have heard there will be beer there.
Sept 8-15 – Los Angeles, California for a tradeshow for Job #2. I was cruelly tricked into coordinating events in addition to my creative/graphic duties, and now I understand exactly why event management is very low on my list of dream jobs. The only ones lower are Assistant Laxative Tester and Suicide Bomber.
Sept 15-17 – Going somewhere in the mountains with my dad, my brother, and a fly rod. Fish may not be slain, but they will be startled and possibly called "bitches."
Sept 25-Oct 6 – O'ahu, Hawai'i for a vaycay with The Skirt. Primarily because the cities and states I visit do not have nearly enough apostrophes in their names, but also because if I don't take some time off from this and everything else, I am going to kill every single one of you. I have started running for exercise (more on that in a few days in an upcoming *gasp* Pork Tornado blog), and The Skirt has talked me into running a 5k in Waikiki while we are there. Running a race while I am on vacation is proof that running makes you insane.
October 11 – My birthday. Only one more year and I'll be legal to run for President, so pack your bags now if you don't believe in personal responsibility, because there won't be room for you in my America. As for travel, I don't know where I am going, but I am sure my friends have plans to take me Kudu hunting on the Serengeti or fly fishing in New Zealand or something.
Oct 14-19 – London, England to "manage" another tradeshow. Dear sweet tender baby Jesus in a carry on, I will be glad when tradeshow season is over. Oh, Wait. Spring is tradeshow season again. I'm so excited I could just staple my nuts to a passing bus. I honestly can't understand why someone would choose this profession.
After that, it looks like I am home for a while to get down to the order of the day, which would be writing and drawing. In the meantime, thank god for Myspace, huh?! LOFMAL! ROL! P*$))
 Dusty
RELATED LINK:
|
|
posted by Dusty at 5:01 PM |
|
|
|
Tom is not My Friend
|
8/22/2006
|
Hey, Dusty, are you on Myspace? What's your Myspace? Come see my Myspace page- it's awesome. I found my best friend from junior high school on Myspace. It's the best thing ever. Join Myspace. It's becoming an employment imperative at Atlanta Illustrated. We have a Myspace account now and all of the billions of wretched subscribers can now officially be our friend. Not you. You're not wretched- I'm talking about the other ones.
ALRIGHT. I joined Myspace a while back and quit when it became irritating. Now it has somehow become necessary for me to rejoin. And while I will stop short of calling half of the world's population losers for having a subscription, I will say I fail to see the charm. Probably because I am not much of a social animal, not in high school, and not presently interested in molesting children. Don't get all defensive- I'm not saying you suck if you are a Spacer. I'm just saying it came across as sort of untertaining to me. Here's why-
Tom thinks he's everybody's friend. I find that slightly presumptuous, but maybe he's just doing it so you don't have to see the screen that says "Dusty has 0 friends". It was about three weeks before I figured out how to remove Tom from my list of friends. It was sort of unimportant anyway, because I didn't know half of the people who were on my friends list, nor had I a clue how they got there. I think they sent me an email and then POW! they're my friends. Or maybe I clicked something.
The whole friends thing is troublesome for me as well. There are only about six people on this earth who I consider friends. I keep in touch with these people outside of the internet by actually going places and doing things with them. So let's loosen the definition of "friend" to include random internet people who claim to have met you before. Now that I am back on the Myspace (which I have done in the interest of fulfilling a request made by the head AI ninja), I plan to have a set of criteria that folks must meet to be considered for friend status. This is also posted on my profile- I just wanted to throw it out there so anyone with aspirations of friendliness could make the proper adjustments.
1. Do not use internet shorthand. If you have time to dick around on Myspace, you have time to spell out "Laugh Out Loud," even if it looks dumber spelled out than abbreviated. I will be periodically checking profiles and blogs and promptly taking steps to figure out how to de-friend you.
2. Take the goddamn music off of your page. I don't care if "You're Beautifuuuuul" and that's the song that inspires you and makes you want to be with your boyfriend forever. That stupid song starts over every time your page loads and it reminds me why I destroyed every FM radio I own.
3. No Animated gifs on your page. If your gay friends send you that hilarious dancing frog animation and it shows up with all of the notes people write to you, fine. I'm not choosing your friends. Just don't make it a permanent part of your page, for the love of god. This applies to those dumb trails of butterflies and hearts that follow my cursor around, too.
4. You don't have to be a designer to know if your page is readable. White text on a background of a thousand chickens doing the Macarena makes for a wholly unhappy reading experience.
5. DO NOT ask why you are not in my top eight. If you need friends that badly, Myspace is a good place to start learning lessons like "why you don't ask acquaintances to like you more than they already do."
6. This used to be the no bulletins rule, but I gave up. I think there are simply too many people out there who think everyone who casually knows them on line actually cares that they just broke up with their girlfriend. So sending out bulletins is sort of okay, as long as you don't
a. Send me a survey. Which of the people on my friends list would I make out with? Are you serious? Surveys are for teenage girls and the devil.
b. Tell me to check out your favorite band. I'm sure they rock hardcore. Don't make me check them out.
c. Send anything like the following- "So I'm sure most of you know by now, Brandon is out and doing well. Everything is going great, so I just wanted to than you all for your support during such a difficult time. LOL." You used shorthand and thanked me for support that I didn't provide. Who the hell is Brandon?
So I basically dislike everything that makes Myspace what it is. I'm probably not the best candidate for a page, but I did invent the term "spacer" a few paragraphs back, and that's as awesome as a thousand suns.
Now that I have alienated everyone, here is the link to my magical page. Oh, the friends requests shall flow like pus.
www.myspace.com/salamitsunami
Dusty
RELATED LINK:
|
|
posted by Dusty at 3:47 PM |
|
|
|
Can you make it through Airport Security if you have Diarrhea?
|
8/15/2006
|
The lifestyle I have fallen into is atrophying my funny gland. All I think about anymore is work, money, and avoiding proper hygiene. I am completely out of the state of mind required to write humor. For that I apologize. I'm pretty sure that once I get fired from and/or quit a few of my jobs and return to a manageable stress level I will get back to normal. I also want to ditch the scheduled weekly updates in favor of going back to the Pork Tornado site writing what and when I want. Screw this place.
I probably should have told the folks at Atlanta Illustrated before I told everyone else, but my backspace key is broken and what's done is done.
In the meantime, I'm something of a one-liner trick pony.
"Hey Dusty, is the traffic jam on I-85 because of the gay pride festival?"
"Yeah, someone got rear-ended."
- Phone call with my dad
Then there was the conversation I had with three friends, outdoing one another with stories from our childhood.
"Yeah, I've been arrested. Drunk and disorderly in highschool. My dad threatened to shoot me in the dick if it happened again, so it didn't."
"Mine was curfew violation when I was 17. I happened to be smoking pot at the time, too, so that was interesting."
"I got arrested on a traffic ticket for an unpaid parking violation."
I hang out with some pretty hardened criminals.
Now it's my turn. I have never been arrested- I don't even think I've ever been grounded. I wasn't an obsessively good kid; I just didn't have any friends so I never had the chance to get into trouble. Nevertheless, dude code says I must have a story.
"What about you, D-Block? (My rap name used only by my rap friends) You ever been arrested?'
"Yeah. Once."
"And...?"
"And what? I said I got arrested once."
"For what?"
"Abuse of a corpse."
"Shut up."
"No, really. I was in a gang and that was the last of our initiation rites. Don't laugh. It was pretty metal, although I'm not sure that oral sex on a dead body really constitutes abuse- that's just a justice system trying to legislate morality, which is bullshit."
"Dude. Shut up. I am going to puke."
"A gang that fellates corpses? What did you call yourselves?"
"The Aristocrats."
"Nice. I hate you. Seriously, what's the worst thing you have ever done?"
"Well, one time I asked a chemotherapy patient if the carpet matched the curtains."
"That is the most disturbing thing I have ever heard. You are going to hell."
"Come ON. She was way too young and sick to know what I was talking about. It's no big deal."
"No. Dude, stop talking before I punch you."
"I didn't really do it, man. I was just kidding."
"It doesn't matter...you thought of it, and the mere fact that you ever even considered that...you're a violently disturbed person."
He's probably right. And if you laughed, you're sick too.
In other news, I have gotten about sixty trillion (a hundred or so) emails asking for Salami Tsunami archives. At long last, you can now go back and read the old stuff if you are depraved enough to desire to do so. The links are all the way at the bottom of the page. Note- Just like every other aspect of Blogger(tm) Software, the archives are confusing, inefficient, and sometimes completely unusable. Enjoy.
Dusty
RELATED LINK:
|
|
posted by Dusty at 10:51 AM |
|
|
|
At Least he's not an Eskimo
|
8/8/2006
|
I have a few gay friends (if you live in Atlanta and have more than three friends, you have at least one gay friend) I'm not saying that to try and give myself credibility (because it lends none), nor am I saying it to insulate me against the backlash I might receive for any non-homofriendly remarks I might make (because it's a little late for me to start apologizing now). I am saying it because all of my friends who are gay have been gay as long as I have known them. They're just like any of the rest of my friends, except funnier and with a penchant for penis. They also know stuff about window treatments and shoes. And they like to dance. And chicks aren't threatened by them.
But aside from that, the same.
I always wondered how I would react if one of my friends whom I had always known to be straight told me that he was gay. I guess if we were on a camping trip and I woke up to find him sharing my sleeping bag and he chose that time to tell me he was gay, I'd probably freak out considerably, but I always speculated that there would be some degree of shock involved even if it just came up in penetration-free conversation.
Side note: I feel sorry for Lance Bass's friends. It's really hard to pretend to be shocked. Probably harder than pretending not to be shocked. He's all, "Okay you guys, Guess what?! I'm Gaaaay!" *grand jete, grand jete, fouette en tournant...jazzhands* and they're like, "Really? Whoa. This is...so...(un)expected. I really had no...are you serious? Even after all those years of choreographed dancing in a boy band? Are you sure? Wow. I mean, wowie wow wow."
Last week I met a few friends for dinner and I was talking to a friend of mine I haven't seen in a couple of months. I'm going to call him Julian since that's way gayer than his real name. We're telling stories and catching up, and the following exchange takes place:
Julian: "I have this funny story from the weekend. Oh yeah, there's this one thing I have to tell you first so you'll understand."
Dusty: "You're gay?"
Julian: "Right... so anyway..."
*cue screeching of record needle*
I don't know who said it or where I was, but someone told me about this a few months ago and then told me to forget they said anything when they realized I didn't know. I have spent most of my life saying stuff I wasn't supposed to say and being called a dick for having done so, and therefore have trained myself to actually forget things when people tell me to- just to avoid getting myself in trouble. This was one of those things.
Maybe I had subconsciously prepared myself for this, but I was wholly unimpressed with my reaction- or lack thereof. I pretty much just nodded, took an unusually large sip of beer, and asked him about work or something.
Julian is still the same Julian. I'll admit I would have had a slightly less tolerant response had he walked up in a sequined evening gown and a purple feather boa with dildos coming out of his ears, but he's the same guy I've known for years. I didn't sleep with him when he was dating women, and I'm not sleeping with him now, so who cares?
I called him the next day to see if he was cool with me writing a blog about my totally underreacting, and said, "You know, I didn't know you were gay until last night when you mentioned it."
"Really? I figured you knew. You did a good job taking it in stride. You didn't even look surprised."
"Well, I was...kind of. I didn't ever think you were...well...fruity McFaggypants, to be politically correct, so I guess I should have been shocked or something. You should have come in all flaming and weird."
"I would have if I had known you didn't know. Actually, I've been sort of unimpressed with the reaction this has been getting from everyone. I'm thinking I'm dropping a bombshell on them, and they're all, 'Oh...okay. So anyway, as I was saying...' I mean, it's like they barely notice."
"I dunno...I guess pretty much everyone is gay around here, so no one cares. If you really want a reaction, you could go down to south Georgia and find a fundamentalist church..."
"No thanks."
"You sure? They could cure you of your condition and everything. They have this camp you can go to- I'll send you a brochure."
"I'll be fine."
So at least now I know that my friends are safe from my wrath if they tell me they switched teams. Just don't tell me you're an Eskimo, because my tolerance has limits, and it ends with Eskimos.
Dusty
RELATED LINK:
|
|
posted by Dusty at 5:07 PM |
|
|
|
Condoscension
|
8/1/2006
|
Is it just me, or are there actually more high-rise condos for sale in Atlanta than there are people in the state of Georgia? I don't know what started the epidemic, but every couple of hours there's a trendy new mixed-use community skyscraper to dot the skyline.
When it started a few years ago, there were a handful of these glass and steel tributes to out-of-control metrosexuality, and for a fleeting moment I even considered buying one. Everyone said it would be a super great investment until I talked to a real-estate agent friend of mine who nearly punched me in the face.
"So you want to pay $400 per square foot to live in a hotel and pay an additional $400 per month so you can have a plasma television in an elevator that doubles as a spray tan booth? Do you want your friends to abandon you when they can't visit you because you only have one parking space and they have to enter the building through seven coded gates, a swim-through purification chamber, and a snotty $13 an hour concierge?"
"Um...since you put it that way...no...but exposed ductwork...and...coffee shop. I guess having marble doorknobs and a bidet in every closet would be a conversation starter, and who hasn't needed a canine yoga instructor on call 24 hours?"
Funny how the exact same building can be repeatedly marketed as "exclusive". They use the same logic that the freaks in Little Five Points do- Oh, I'm an individual. So I'm going to show my individuality by dressing in my grandparents' clothes and tattooing my large intestine. Maybe even ride a scooter with a sticker that shows my dislike for authority JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE. The condo buildings are similarly trying to out-douche each other by saying "Ours is the most exclusive in the history of exclusivity. So exclusive that we had to invent a new word for our exclusivity so none of the imitators could steal it. Come and experience Distilled Nonassimilationism (tm)."
Sadly, the developers suffer from an affliction that is common around Atlanta- not understanding that we are not in New York. Neat trendy condos in Buckhead and midtown are fine, but you have 40-50 units for sale that start at $2.5 million, and three other 50 story buildings within four blocks offering the exact same thing, how exactly are you going to unload that? There's a lot of money in this town, but I have a feeling that you'll be able to move in for a cool $500,000 after the stupid wears off in a few years.*
For the time being, however, they are going full-steam with whatever it takes to appeal to the snob in all of us, and making no apologies for blatantly doing so. The following are real, honest to god names and tag lines used by buildings currently in Atlanta-
Sovereign- Above all (I have $100 that says their toilets flush directly onto the streets)
Aqua- Midtown's only boutique high-rise condominium (Probably the only boutique high-rise in the world, since no one knows what the hell that even means.)
Symphony- A concert composed to the rhythms of the City (Huh?)
Gallery- Live in a masterpiece (Jesus. How about "live inside the architect's ego?")
A couple of friends and I brainstormed over lunch and decided to build and market the following structures-
Vapor- It's like water, but way more expensive
Flattus- They call them flats in Europe, and that's the kind of European sophistication you'll see here...but the chicks all shave, so that's cool
DeNile- Because you can only stack douchebags 50 stories high
The Rectory- Your friends already think you're gay, so why not?
Phallic- It's not a condominium, it's a condomaximum- Now suck it
The Overcompensatorium at Midtowne- Once she sees your bitchin' kitchen, she'll completely forget how tiny your penis is
I was driving down Peachtree Street in midtown a few nights ago and noticed that most of these newly-constructed and overpriced high rise condo buildings had lights on in about 5% of the windows and thought, "Maybe that is what they mean by exclusivity. I'd buy one if I knew I'd have the whole building to myself."**
* I am always wrong about this kind of thing. If you're going to invest, do so immediately after I tell you not to.
**If I go through with it, I'll need 430 roommates to split the mortgage. Submit applications below.
Dusty
RELATED LINK:
|
|
posted by Dusty at 4:43 PM |
|
|
|
