dear madonna,

i believe youve justified your love. thank you. i look forward to downloading your next album.

we’ve been through a lot together. you and i. me and you.

i believe the year was nineteen eighty four. i was dating a punk rock girl super into the cure. and poetry.

the first time we made out she said is that bruce springsteen

and i said why yes it is.

oh madonna, i was 97 years old but i was so young.

a literal virgin.

back in those days we had to pay for our music so i didnt have any of yours.

sorry.

but you didnt need to own any madonna records back then, it was everywhere.

when i got to santa barbara, true blue era, i couldnt believe that people were like seriously into you. like, no shes good tony. and when people ask me why i stopped taking acid its because people would play madonna records for me and itd freak me out and bad trip me.

my only solace, and i know you wont believe me but its true, and i write about it tonight, halloween night, because they were perfect for a night like tonight.

in college there was a band called pms. an all girl band.

carla was the singer but ramona the bassist, a melding between bettie page and henry rollins

with the greatest tattos… and everything, was the star.

she was the anti madonna.

and hotter.

once i was having a horrible bad trip on acid and i wrote a little poem to my mother

and waited to die.

and something snapped inside me and i got up and i skatedboarded to the pms show

it stood for premarital sex.

they were playing in the backyard of an isla vista home.

or maybe it was a field.

you dont really know on acid, and for some reason i liked that.

and i listened to pms play and even though they were a very nice punk rock thrash situation, that particular night they sounded like angels

in their blood stained wedding dresses

bright red right at the crotch.

and the thing is, madonna, i wanna know about the bands that youve seen.

the nights youve had.

cuz youre madonna.

im glad youre into kabalah and yoga and living in england and all that fucked up shit, if you were living down the street coming back from the blockbuster in your sweats you wouldnt be a rock star to me. youd be pavement.

you and me had very little in common in the first place, and thats probably why i liked you.

and the fact that you were always getting naked for me and talking dirty.

and the fact that erotica, bedtime stories, and ray of light were somehow brilliant.

wtf woman.

i dont know what youre doing nowadays, but maybe ive just been distracted.

maybe i havent justified my love.

you should let tsar open for you.

xoxoxo

tony

jennifer + raspberry sundae + gorilla mask + city rag

i think my new girlfriend is famous

which is a no-no. i promised myself that after anna k i wasnt gonna do celebs anymore and we were having lunch at the ivy today and these fucking ‘ratzis started speaking some fucked up language and commenced to take like a gazillion pics of she and i and instead of saying wtf she just blushed.

i was all, youre famous!

she said, me?

she knows my rule. she knows all my rules. a while back i got in a fight with this one girl who complained that my rules were obnoxious and contradictory so i went through them and sure enough the lil ho was right. so i edited out the ones that were incredibly unfair, as well as the ones that were contradictory. and last night she hinted that she wanted to go steady with me and i gave her the book and she read it and i know she read it all cuz she had lots of questions today before the cameras started blowing up.

so we had planned on going to west hollywood tonight to walk around with the freaks but now im a little mad at her because rule number two is no lying and i specifically asked her when we were at midnight tacos, just meeting, what she did for a living and she didnt say im a celebrity. she said she was a student.

maybe in norway things are different, or maybe theres another word for celeb there, but her english was pretty good.

although her yah yah yahs were mighty sexy this morn.

hmmmm.

i may have to spend this evening re-evaluating things because i didnt mind that anna was super famous, it was just a lot to have to deal with because she was always worried about her looks or her career or her weight or her clothes and i was all, why dont you worry about which tree we’re gonna do it up against, or worry about which fingernail polish youre going to apply, or worry about if youre going to buy thousands of shares of Sirius or tens of thousands. worry about normal things – jeeze!

the thing about anna though was she is a gemini and geminis are like having a hundred girlfriends. one day they want to squeeze out a few kids, the next day they dont ever want to be touched again, then the next day theyre dancing on your coffee table in a short skirt.

which is why i had to establish rule number one

any time tony wants you to dance on his coffee table in a short skirt, you have to.

this girl is a scorpio. trouble. evil. hotness, but trouble.

i kept thinking, this is scandinavian trouble, which is like a lion cub. trouble in another lifetime but not this one.

but as always i was wrong and there she is lying and im sure shes gonna dress up as the sexiest witch of all time and slithered under the crack in my front door before i even get home from work, but ive dealt with that before and i resisted it.

for a few minutes.

and yes it is nice getting laid again.

kitty bukkake + snuggles + uncle doo + twenty-nothing

the rave reviews for Stiff keep coming in

I remember the first time I read Tony Pierce’s blog because I’d only been working on Blogger for a short time, and the fact that I hadn’t heard of him was pretty bad from a first impressions standpoint.

But my fellow Pyrate (Sutter) tipped me off, and the first post I read was about how the newspaper in Hell is so bad. When I realized that for several weeks Tony had been writing his whole blog from Hell after having been escorted there by the spectre of Kurt Cobain, I was floored. From a “getting what this whole blogging thing can really be” perspective, it was a big moment for me.

Tony’s got a new book out called Stiff which collects all of his infernal posts into a choice of awesome covers. I just finished re-reading them this weekend and I couldn’t recommend it more highly.

– Jason Goldman from today’s Blogger Buzz

happy halloween everyone

for halloween im going to be on time for work.

ive worked at buzznet for like two weeks now and i dont think ive ever been on time.

maybe the first day i was, but that was so long ago im not sure, i was probably a few minutes late.

the problem is i stay late so i always rationalize things, but as i age i would like to be known as a reliable man, and being on time is part of that.

this was a nice weekend. i was able to kiss a pretty girl, i was able to hang out with my best friend, i was able to watch both the raiders and the bears win. i got to see my buddy jeff and his lovely family. i got to eat chicken burgers in the park. i even went to bed early last night so i could wake up early and do my little thing (that would be this) before i headed off to work.

there are many benefits to the buzznet loft, but today im going to try my hand at the Laundry Room. nothing ruins a weekend more than having to do laundry on a sunday night. so since the loft has laundry facilities i was thinking about killing two birds and omg even folding my shit afterwards.

anyone see 60 Minutes last night? totally awesome.

how this administration gets away with what it does is amazing. and being an avid reader of the blogosphere gives me the twisted idea that the american public actually supports it, but its obvious that no, thats just the righty bloggers who are just o’reilly jrs who either do it because they get paid to, or because they like the attention.

if you cant be batman, may as well be the joker.

that sorta thing.

or in this case the contrarian.

but today is halloween so lets reminice a tad. back in the day, growing up outside Chicago, one had to pick his halloween costume based on the weather.

you had to figure out how to dress up and stay warm, so one day i was Jake Blues of the blues brothers cuz i could put some long johns on under my suit, one day i was a hobo cuz i could wear lots of clothes at one time,

and then one halloween was really warm so my mom dressed me up as a woman.

it was that halloween that i understood the skill it takes to walk in heels.

amazing.

in isla vista i dressed up as a mexican which was weird because some of the real mexican adults waved and cheered at me, i dont know why. maybe i looked like someone historic.

and the last time i dressed up was, ironically enough, at the buzznet loft when mc brown threw a halloween party way back in 2002, pictured, with the lovely moxie.

i was jack white of the white stripes.

this year i will be a blogger doing his laundry.

some of you are not Buzznet members, and thats cool, but that doesnt mean that you cant have your pics on Buzznet. what i would like to do is have a little busblog Halloween gallery

so heres how you can participate: email your Halloween 2005 pics to tony.tony.halloween@buzznet.com and bam they will end up in my dealie.

just attatch your halloween pic(s) and in the subject header put in the caption.

the gallery is here.

happy halloween!

evil china girl + raymi + alecia

a wise man once said:

if you have a good blog, you probably have a bad job. if you have a good web site, you probably have a dull life; if you have a good job you probably have a bad blog, and if you have a bad site you’re normal.

and i dont know about all that but i do know that this weekend has been terrific and if im asked about the weekend i start back with thursday and tsar and fall out boy and picture taking and sleeping late and friday and getting to work from home but working hard and meeting a nice girl at midnight tacos and driving her around tonight and just letting her go home just now.

so if youre ever worried that you might blog something full of shit and you think about it and you talk yourself out of blogging my advice is to look at those stellar righties on the technorati one hundred who arent the least bit nervous about being full of shit.

they just type and type and type as if nobody will ever notice that they were the biggest critics of clinton, not of his policies or his achievements but because of monica lewinski.

and not because he played cigar games with her or had target practice with her dress

but because he lied gasp under oath to the american people.

and so here they have a man named scooter lying gasp under oath to the american people and not about how big his dick is or who he banged but about matters of national security revolving around the outting of a cia agent.

and these people are all wake us when we give a shit.

propagandists in our midsts.

i get interviewed all the time, i get emails every day, i get into conversations any time im at a party or introduced as someone who blogs, or recognized, and they always ask me about the power of the blogs, and lately ive been saying that if bloggers at the top dont stop being partisan echochambers and hypocrites then the blogosphere will never be known for being much more than and electric teleprompter from which the bullshit gets read.

so my friends when you are afraid that what you say isnt blogworthy just ask yourself, “will i be intentionally bullshitting the world?” and if the answer is no, then you know that what what you’ll be posting will be 100times better than the big boys and girls who get the majority of the hits.

so write.

picked her up just as the sun was setting and she showed me her condo and we went to this new italian place on hollywood blvd which was pretty much as youd expect it, not nearly as good as the old italian staple across the street

and we drove and drove and talked and stopped off for ice cream and we didnt know where to go or what to do because there werent any good movies playing or anything happening and king tut had left or we would have eaten shrooms and been dumb and she has the softest hair and i kept saying i know this sounds like a line but i have better lines than this but i really have to touch your hair again

which is the assumptive close fellas its a question but not really. youre closing the deal youre touching a sensitive part of her. in the 70s there was this book called the erogenous zones. and pretty much any part of her head is a good place to be touching and you should see how she reacts when you touch her there cuz people dont usually run around touching each others head or hair.

this girl nearly fell over.

she blamed it on the drinking but someone had shown their hand which made everything that much more easier on yours truly which is good because sometimes everyone needs a little reassurance when youre out with a girl well out of your league and youre driving a ten year old car with a license plate holder that says my other car is the busblog.

got her back to the crib and we were sitting there on the couch as mazzy star spoke her little songs and i hadnt heard that music in a long time and i was working the angles but she wouldnt let me kisser.

you know you want to kiss i told her.

i dont know any such thing she said and looked around at everything other than me smiling.

pearl necklace freshly cut rocker hair everything pretty much together, except her eyeballs and her heartbeat.

i said may i get you a beer or some ice water or a stethescope

she said some water please and i gave her the latest us weekly to read and i came back with a water for her a shot of rum for me and a stethescope

on an old style beer tin tray.

she said whats all this. i said we’re going to play a little game. she said ive heard of doctor and im not interested. and i said this isnt doctor, i barely got a poetry degree, youd probably kick my ass at doctor.

she said i doubt that.

i said this is a little game called water rum or fun, and sometimes these things just come to me.

i said what you can do is pick one of the items on the tray but i get to pick one of the remaining ones. for example if you pick the rum i will probably pick the stethescope.

and she said what will you do with the stethescope?

and i said i will do with the stethescope exactly what the stethescope is for, i will listen to your heart.

she laughed and said what will you do if i pick the water, and i said i will pick the stethescope.

at that moment i had noticed that it was 1:15am.

and she said what will you do if i pick the stethescope and i said i will drink the rum and i will bet you that your heart is beating faster than mine and if im right i get to kiss you.

and she gave a nervous laugh for i had checkmated her and people dont like to be checkmated even if its funny

so i said quietly

almost as softly as mazzy

what ever you do these next fourty five minutes doesnt count, as at 2am the clock goes back to 1am, thus erasing everything.

and i put my hand near an erogenous zone, leaned over

and fourty five very nice minutes later

all was forgotten.

kimbalina + ben + bellared + jedi

sox win

when i posted this picture on metafilter last night the very next guy said “when you win the world series you can kiss whoever you want.”

i hate it when people are right.

a good reader emailed me a link to ESPN.com today where Scoop Jackson beautifully wrote about the sorrow on the North Side and tried to hint at racism but its not racism, its baseball.

yes dummy the Cubs are on the predominately white North Side and the Sox are in the mostly Black South Side, but i grew up in the all-white suburbs of Hanover Park Illinois and if people chose who to root for based on race then there would have been zero Sox fans in our lily white township instead of the 50-50 split that i had to suffer through.

Cubs fans hate the Sox, period.

we cant even deal with this World Series bullshit. its like a bad dream that we will never wake up from.

and i cant even imagine all the fair weather fans who are suddenly wearing white sox caps in my beloved town.

something like this happened in the early 80s when the Sox made it to the playoffs. i forget about who or when – it was success for the Sox therefore of zero importance to my memory banks. but real Cub fans wore their colors, real Sox fans rubbed our noses in it and the fakers bought into the bandwaggon.

and then in 84 when it looked like the Cubs were going all the way we all remembered who had jumped ship and who had stayed true and there were alot of beatings going around in those days in the northwest suburbs and the most delicious went to those who had worn Sox hats and tshirts in 82 who suddenly found themselves under a Cubs hat

those were the ones who found themselves in the gutter with no hat no shirt and no shoes.

the last twenty years have not been good to Cub fans and this only makes things worse.

sure its nice that the Cubs have had some good teams but thats like having the cute girls tell you that they think youre fun. who the fuck cares about what they think, its the result, its the end result. it’s the ultimate result that you care about.

id have rather the Cubs never had wood zam prior maddux and clement.

id have rather sammy sosa stayed on the southside than have them get so far and crush us like that.

id have rather that 1984 never happened, no bull durham, no steve garvey, no rick sutcliffe, no ron cey.

dont get my hopes up. dont give me a taste of the mountaintop unless youre going to go all the way. ask houston what its like to be second place. its not how you play the game, its how you win it as the beasties said so perfectly. and i dont ever want the cubs on the cover of SI unless the words world series champs is over a heaving mass of cubbie pinstripes.

therefore seeing the white sox as champs is … man. worst than anything.

say it aint so.

there is so much to hate about the new world champs that i dont even want to start the list because it will never end.

it starts with eddie gadelle and winds its way through greg luzinski wearing those shorts it goes through disco demolition and jimmy piersall calling all the sox wives sluts to every time the sox beat the cubs during interleague play.

theyre your sisters favorite team. theyre the talibans favorite team.

theyre worse than the yankees because they dont even try to emit hate, just their presence makes you despise them.

if there was an earthquake in the midwest id want the epicenter to be no on the pitchers mound of US Cellular but in the home team’s locker room.

i didnt even watch the game last night because i knew what would happen. i would see dick cheeney on top of my mother, id see cops outside of my house with a megaphone and a battering ram, id see a special report broadcasting that prohibition had just been overturned again: id see that the sox had swept the astros in the world series, and not only had they won, but they won convincingly – against good teams.

in 84 after the Cubs lost in the playoffs i cried and decided that it would be my duty to manage them to a world series because nobody, obviously, gave a shit about it other than me.

here it is 21 years later and im kicking myself for not following that dream. how could the Sox of all teams get the monkey off their back before the Cubs? how? they dont even have any good players! podsednick, fine. buhrle fine. but seriously, who else? a few pitchers? every team has a few pitchers. bubba sparks as the closer? a double A drunkard?

the team that just bulldozed through the best of the AL and NL would not suprise me if they only went .500 next year. but it doesnt matter, the stink of champagne and theyre being measured for rings.

they get the prettiest girl in town and i dont.

again.

its like steve bartman all over again. its like bush being reelected. its like finding out theres not only no santa claus but youre getting coal in your stocking.

and the worst part of it all: the south siders dont even wear white sox.

lying cheating fucking dumbass fucking arrrrrGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

weed isnt bad for you + flagrant + emmaunelle + abrasivist + iron mouth

todays gonna be a busy day

me and mc brown are gonna make some fliers which is funny because pretty much every company that ive worked with has handouts of some sort and the smaller you are the more fliers you make. i like that.

today we’re going to hand out fliers outside of the Fall Out Boy show at the Wiltern before we go over to Tower Sunset and take pictures of Tsar with the new Buzznet camera.

Best Buy took a nice chunk out of the Buzznet coffers and I was up all night figuring out the thing because im sick of taking shitty pictures and i always end up in the coolest situations and i want to report back to you as perfectly as possible.

since my spelling sucks it doesnt mean that my pictures have to.

so after the Tsar instore im going to get a burrito somewhere and then head over to see Tsar at the Roxy. i was funny yesterday when Steve Jones asked Jeff on the radio who was opening and Jeff said, you know.

Jonesy said, yeah, screw those wankers.

I think they hit it off.

Best Buy is a funny place. it doesnt matter if youre buying some blank cds to steal music or a fat expensive camera to change the world, the salespeople really dont give a shit.

I say bring back commissioned salespeople. When I was a lad making my way through junior college I sold tvs and stereos on commission and it not only taught me how to sell (and therefore how to get laid), but it taught me the importance of knowing the product, and how to give great customer service.

When commission isnt tied to the sale then why hustle? Why educate yourself? Why try to be better?

Life is all about commission. Life is sales. Coffees for closers, fuck. See this watch? This watch is worth more than your car!

Anyways the dude should have stepped us up to the bigger camera. He should have asked qualifying questions. He should have sold us some lenses and some lens cleaner and some lens filters. He should have asked us why we were using the camera and how fucking killer our company was. He should have said if you like this camera tell your friends where you got it. He should have said when you put the pics on your crazy web site remind them that Best Buy is everywhere and Jimmy sent you.

Instead he popped his gum and went to the back, brought out the box and said if we dont like it we have to pay a 15% restocking fee to get our money back.

I wanted to slap his bottom.

He should have said if you dont like it its because youre grown men using this thing somewhat commercially, and when you come back to trade up I will waive the restocking fee if you ask for me.

For even in non-commission sales you should try to build a customer base, a relationship, because as those jingle jangle bells of Christmas quickly approach do you want to deal with 25 customers a day who are gonna ask you ridiculous questions based out of a lack of trust, or do you want to deal with 35 customers who say Jimmy thanks for letting us know that the new blah blah blah is in, goddamn do i love that cam, what i need is a little buddy that attatches to the lens cap so i dont lose it – oh and a plasma tv for my boom boom room.

tomorrow is Fitzmas and if i dont kiss a pretty girl tonight Lord knows five of them are gonna come running to my house to kiss me tomorrow.

and one of them wont be named Harriet.

Al Franken was on Jon Stewart the other day and Jon asked him who the courageous democrats were and Al thought and thought and came up with one in North Dakota and a few more and Jon said, I’ll wait.

And only after the break did Jon tell the crowd that Al said Barrack Obama but that may have been a joke.

But whats not a joke is the original George Bush said that outting a CIA agent is treason and if you committ treason during a time of war you get executed, so I will have to agree with Al who said that he doesnt think it would be good for the country if Rove or Scooter or Cheney gets executed.

But it sure would make for some interesting television.

JMO + the pants + panama jane + wil in exile + shane nickerson