The "New Bruise" Was The Name Of A Dance Craze By Jesus Cross And His Cruel Nails
Happy Easter Monday! The Lord is Risen and so am I!

There are people out there for whom the word "vacation" is anathema. I don't worry about offending those people with the word "anathema" because they are too busy working 80 hour weeks and not reading to know what "anathema" means.

For those of you who don't know and are curious, "anathema" is a kind of lisping hot-chocolate enema. There, you learned something.

I know what "anathema" means because I am not one of those people. I think vacation is a grand idea and I have always resented the people and/or institutions that dragged me back into active participation in productive society. This used to mean various Riverside County public school districts, a couple of University of California campuses and the California State Department of Corrections. Today, it means you people. Congratulations, you're all on my shit-list for making me come back and have to think about stuff to write again.

But I can't stay mad at you, my beloved Bucketeers. Part of the reason is because you're all so damned attractive. Secondly, the whole "active participation in productive society" problem doesn't really translate to this medium. I recognize that this is ostensibly a voluntary endeavor and I don't have to do it if I don't want to. So you're all off the hook. My OCD, however, I may never forgive.

Taking Friday and Sunday off were, for the most part, good. I did find myself prodding my kids into doing something blogworthy (teaching them to smoke, pushing them out onto the roof just to see what happens, etc.) but then the vague threat of deadline faded away and I remembered I could--at least for those two days--relax into my non-blog self and get back to the normal things we did together as a family (smoking, hanging out on the roof) without the pressure of having to eventually write it up.

The break also gave me some space to reflect on what the Bucket is, what it means and what, ultimately, I want it to mean. It was good because I remembered what it was I was after when I started this thing: total global domination. Failing that, I'd happily accept someone writing me large checks for doing this. That's why I write six days a week; retroactively, this is going to be worth some big money.

I was also able to think about the evoution of the Bucket from its primordial existence as a series of now-embarrassing lectures on the state of the world in general to what it is now, an always embarrassing haphazard collection of poorly conceived dick jokes of thematically (or even intelligibly) questionable value.

I realized that this blog has begun to drift somewhat. That's OK, drift is what blogs do. You start out knitting for Jesus and by Month 14, it's about NASCAR and coming out of the closet. And you're not even gay, you just need the blog material.

While drift is natural, the fight against blog drift is also natural. The tension between the two is where creativity happens, where the stresses exerted by each tendency occasionally breaks off pieces that come out in the shape of long considerations of peaches or an exigesis on the lasting impact of Save By The Bell. Yes, that's where the magic happens.

Today I'm going to fight the drift a little bit by getting back to two things that this blog was once world famous for and has neglected in the recent past: 1) News about blogging and 2) Stories about murdered children.

Yes, the good ole days when the Bucket went out of its way to alienate its readers by talking about things that were (respectively) 1) not even interesting to other bloggers and 2) so inherently offensive to common decency that only 24-hour-news channels would touch them.

What made me think about these things was the eerily timely story out of Oklahoma about a guy who killed and planned to eat a 10 year old girl. We know of his plans because he talked about it on his blog.

Several versions of the article say the guy "joked" about cannibalism on his blog. Cannibalism is a rough subject, but there are certainly proper ways to joke about it. I've done it myself here several times and man, was it ever funny.

For those of you who may be thinking about making cannibalism jokes on your blog in the future, here's a tip that clearly delineates what makes it funny or not: if you make a "joke" about cannibalism and then go out and kill someone with the intention of eating them... not so funny. Cannibalism, I find, is only funny in the abstract.

Well. Now that I've gotten back a little bit to some of the things I used to feature more prominently only this blog, I feel... well, mostly I feel like "what the fuck was I thinking writing about stories like this?" Also it challenges my opposition to the death penalty and makes me (more) irrationally fearful of strangers, especially where my own kids are concerned.

The only thing it doesn't make me? Hungry.

I would point out that that joke was "in poor taste," but that would just be piling on.

Welcome back, me.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 9.7



Pops
- posted by Pops @ 10:52 AM