All About David: Blasts From the Past

Give a man a fish, and you’ve fed him for a day. Teach him how to fish, and you’ve fed him for life.

But give him a sixty-inch color smart HDTV, and he’ll probably lose his job after he calls in sick three days in a row so he can jerk off to lesbian porn.

—David Roddis, sometime after three am on any given day.


From 2017:


Hey, gentle reader.  Pssst.  Yeah, over here.

It’s me, David.  I’m so glad you dropped by, and if you’re wondering about the mess—well, I just cleaned the apartment with Dove For Men shampoo (couldn’t find the Pine-Sol) and I can’t do a thing with it.

To tell you the truth, I wasn’t expecting visitors. I admit this is a strange sort of mindset for someone posting his random thoughts online—thoughts which make up with their lurid sensationalism and tasteless humor for their lack of pretense to originality—for the potential benefit of billions of strangers.

I blame the Virgo in me for these contradictory impulses.  Don’t look so surprised. For you see, though I kiss with reverence the wizened cheek of Science and genuflect before the flower-strewn altar of Logic, I have a soft spot, an unclosed fontanel, even, for the totally preposterous yet strangely prescient fakery that is astrology.

Like, this kind of stuff:   Virgo is ruled by Mercury, the planet named after the quicksilver Roman god who is himself an earthy, decadent revision of the Greek god Hermes, the messenger—no, not like that rash you gave your boyfriend that needed the special cream, Hermes, and stop interrupting—ruled, that is, until such time as Vulcan, an entirely made-up planet whose name references a mythological character with a clubfoot, is discovered.

With me so far?   Let’s move along to character traits!

Virgos are thin, waspish accountants and sexually-repressed librarians who are incapable of sustaining relationships for more than a day or two and who practise acrobatic perversions in their basements on their second-hand (frugal!) jungle gyms.

Alone.

Virgos love hemp clothing in myriad shades of beige, make chewy vegan treats in a dehydrator and read books about shopping mall theory so our conversation can “sparkle”.

We torment our friends with our persnickety perfectionism, and most of all, we must must MUST stand up for what’s right—even though our obsession with out-mothering Mother Teresa causes our palms to sweat, our minds to seize up and our bowels (we rule the intestines!) to rumble as alarmingly as the digestive tract of a bulimic after a second helping of Christmas dinner.

Which is fine, because our favorite way to relax is with a big glass of lukewarm prune juice and an enema bag.

But I digress. Which, come to think of it, is actually, like, so totally!?? Virgo??!!

What else is happening, comes your exasperated cry.  Well, it’s high summer in the city, and this is a godsend to the people who complained bitterly that winter was too cold and who have been screwy with impatience waiting to complain bitterly that summer is too hot.

And they have a point: The mere act of walking down the street mid-July in Toronto, a terminally-damp metropolis built on the bed of a lake that evaporated ten thousand years ago, finds me simultaneously braising in my Mormon-like undergarments and pouring salt water from my steaming red face.

Tomorrow I’ll switch to my summer wardrobe, which is also my preferred Pride get-up: Silver chain mail jock-strap and army boots.  You gotta admit, it’s a statement!  And passersby can then amuse themselves by indulging in everyone’s fave bitch-fest, “When was the last year he looked good in THAT?”

smoothie

Ah, summer!  It looked so promising on paper when you were nine, but in reality you were grateful to survive, for summer was more fraught with dangers than a mediaeval crusade: Bee stings, skinned knees, Aunt Mildred’s stewed tomatoes that gagged you with pulp, Cracker Jack toys inadvertently ingested and soft ice-cream roiling with salmonella, broken arms from cycling mishaps, split lips from falling out of trees, tetanus from rusty tin cans at the beach: our doughy young bodies impaled, abraded, beaten, bruised—an Inquisitor’s entire, merciless playbook of summertime martyrdom.

And let’s not forget burned. I’m recalling those tanning rituals during which, back in the innocent sixties, we would slather oil on our virgin blue-white bodies and lie in the blazing June, July and August sun until we sizzled; and when it came time to open the bottle of Coppertone suntan lotion—the advert for which, depicting a tiny tot, female, having her swimsuit bottom pulled down by a little black scallywag of a puppy to reveal her little tot cheeks, would nowadays surely see its art director sequestered for his own safety in a solitary confinement cell at Kingston Penitentiary—we would boast, “I got the base for my tan, now once it peels I’m all set!”

And do not doubt for a moment that we would sit watching The Ed Sullivan Show in the darkened living rooms of our bungalows, our bodies like dying supernovae emitting heat from the absorbed solar rays as we ate “Nuts and Bolts” and tore translucent strips of epidermis off our pre-cancerous shoulders.  Pass the pink lemonade!

Enjoy the site.  I mean it.  Think of it as my un-heated backyard swimming pool for dipping a shy toe, floating with the dead wasps, or belly-flopping with enthusiasm, albeit followed by acute testicular pain. Indignant huffings and puffings?  Go for it, baby!  Cause once you’ve relaxed and started to drift, you’re bound to remember that there’s a good chance the guy before you took a pee.

And frankly – now that we know each other a tiny bit better – and don’t take this the wrong way, but – You want taste? Then drive your fucking  Escalade to the nearest Baskin-Robbins.

Petro-Canada needs the profits.


From 2017:

You may be wondering.

A Slow, Painful Death Would Be Too Good For You (and other observations)

is my satirical, humorous, sarcastic, political, existential, disgruntled, hilarious, unplugged, deadly and generally dyspeptic scribblings all gathered into one handy blog so you can ignore everything at once.

Check out this tribute from a typical, as in, former, reader:

Dear So-called Humorist-

Thank you for gathering all this crap into one handy blog. It used to take me hours to tab back and forth between your lame articles, unfunny jokes and generally dyspeptic scribblings, you can just imagine the frustration.

Now I can completely ignore them all at once, for example, during breakfast—cause I tell ya, once those kids are all sugared up on frosted flakes, it’s like, hoo boy! ADHD-ville!—leaving me feeling thoroughly discounted and ready to kiss some corporate ass!

Keep up the good work, sucker!

P.S.  Oh yeah, and crude Photoshop composites.

I can tell you, an honest testimonial like that sure beats a shoe box full of—well. “Disgusted, Topeka”, you know who you are.

This blog exists to drive you to drink, to think, and maybe to distraction. I like to poke fun, or just poke, Americans, modern life, Americans, politicians, Trump, Hillary, Americans, myself, millennials and Americans.

Did I say that already? And do I come across as shallow?

My life-long and dare I say most quixotic dream is identifying who first floated the concept of canned pineapple rings and maraschino cherries stuck onto a roast ham with whole cloves—and when I find him, trust me when I say there is going to be a “conversation”.

Think Donald’s chat with Melania after her speech, but with tropical fruit:

Donald (dressed like Carmen Miranda):
Hey, Monkey-nipples, meet me in the Oval Office at noon.
Melania (dressed like Carmen Miranda):
Hey, Monkey-nipples, meet me in the Oval Office at noon.

Not pretty, is it?

Regarding “Retrospective of work I’ve yet to do, with canned pineapple rings”, my “artistic project”on Kickstarter:

My target for funding of $10,000,000 USD needs to be fulfilled or the bastards will pull the plug. I mean, the whole point of crowdfunding is that it’s hard work to find one person to donate ten mill, and equally hard to find ten million friends and relatives to donate even a dollar each, at least until you finish rehab.  So basically I’m screwed.

Gee, great business model, Kickstarter!  Way to waste my empty days!

Look, just please make me famous so I can sit around doing nothing and get paid for it, ’cause I don’t qualify for lifetime disability.

Unless being Canadian counts!

Hey, my first “joke”!

ROT-friggin’-FL!!

But you know, one guy’s humor…  being “funny”, whatever that means, requires that we transgress.  Trangress in a BIG way, so it’s almost certain I’ll overstep the line marked “good taste” once or twice.  Good taste is death to humor.  So try to take the pickle out, Murgatroyd, and don’t take it personally.

You will never know what is enough until you know what is too much.

{Was it Barbara Hutton who said that? Jenna Jones? Queen Victoria? Idi Amin?}

Sensitive artist/Obsessive geek;
Loyal friend/Outraged foe;
Red-rose romantic/Tongue-clucking cynic—

That’s me.

The alarming contradictions never end.
You say ‘borderline’.
I say ‘exciting’.

(Potay-to, Potay-to.)

Cyclist fighting the hegemony of the car;
Raging Dawkins-level atheist,
Lapsed vegan (currently free from all eating disorders),
Failed Buddhist (just point me to Lourdes and be done with it).

And the abbreviation “LGBTQ2” fairly trips off my Canuckian tongue.  Take THAT, Orange Heads.

“Boredom” is an existential puzzle generally not experienced in my presence, not least because my current personal best for sustaining an emotion is just under an hour, which gets me through Beethoven’s “Eroica” or the Opus 130 String Quartet with the Grosse Fuge AND the alternative finale.

With actual people I level out at about four and a half minutes.

You see, I am like British weather: for though you may pack your picnic at 11 A.M., ready to take Christopher Robin by the hand and eat Marmite sandwiches under a bright blue sky, by the time you’ve folded the last fold of waxed paper and closed the hamper you’ll be sideswiped by horizontal rain from gale-force wind, attacked by jabs of blue lightning and crushed under a mountain of black clouds.

Blink twice and it will be three hours later, forty degrees colder, and snowing.  It will not even feel like the same month, the same season.

You might, similarly, ask at any given time: “What’s the forecast for David today?” I must finally admit it: I value novelty and chaos over predictability and order (though occasionally since I passed my 60th year, when the latter two poor cousins knock on my door, more often than not they get to sit in the servants’ entrance,  as long as they don’t start expecting more than a grunt and a nod from me).

Since you asked:

At time of writing, my favorite sexual fantasy involves Justin Trudeau, Barack Obama, a ruler, and a pizza delivery gone very, very wrong.

I love:

  • Cuddling with NAFTA-approved stuffed animals (consensual, except for the Mexican donkey, who doesn’t get the “No means No” thing)
  • Answering the door in the nude (see “pizza delivery gone wrong”, above)
  • Stalking George Clooney (and trust me when I say that anyone who can ignore thirty-seven phone calls at 3AM needs professional help, IMHO)
  • Downloading dozens of time-management apps which I then procrastinate about using, then uninstall. Some day.

One final confession, in case you are charmed by my old-school, gentlemanly persona: don’t be charmed.

Because crude, Photoshopped or composited: I am not “kind”.

I’m so happy you stopped by.  Seriously.



From 2016

So, what’s up?  I hear you cry.  Well, top of mind, and this will give you an idea of the empyrean levels at which I live, I just inherited a sofa with great bones, which means it might look good if only it didn’t look the way it actually does.

Like a grown-up version of “Transformers” that substitutes tedium for thrills, it turns into a bed with a mere six clacks of its metal infrastructure, and can also, if spoken to nicely, mimic according to one’s mood a chaise longue or the kind of communal seating found in airport terminals.

Here’s the rub, literally:  The transforming sofa, in addition to its futuristic-retro mid-century vibe and room-devouring measurements, is covered with cheap black pleather which is peeling off in distressing, leprous flakes that settle onto the floor like the shredded remnants of nuclear blast victims; each time I sit on it, black flakes  adhere to my sweaty back, drift ominously onto the pages of my second-hand copy of “Candide” (yes, the book, not the musical), and pepper the bedsheet, which doesn’t quite fit because the damn sofa could seat an entire family of Irish Catholics, including a work area for “Nan” and all of her altar-cloth embroidery supplies.

[…]

But enough about you. What else is crucial, essential, germane to David? (I read the dictionary as a child).

I smoke. Cigarettes!   I just took this loathsome habit up again after twenty years’ hiatus, and I feel your love smack on my wrist as I confess this, but rest assured I only indulge at times when I’m severely stressed, for example, when I’m awake…

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