i lost a bet and had to be karisas friend in the spring of 1998

i coulda won a lowered chevy citation, but you wont hear me complaining. born on a pontoon boat off frisco, i first met karisa at the dairy queen in mundelion. she worked the drive thru. she kicked ass at dipping your cone into the chocolate sauce and getting it hard real fast.

certified genius and future farmer of america karisa is the oldest of nine girls each born two years apart from the next.

her youngest sister is ten.

when i first saw her i have to admit, i thought, i could make a ton of money off that shit. but i was lazy and illprepared. she has a photogentic memory, the liver of a bear, the nerve of a backyard possum, and the strength of a nasty fart. but shes quick on her feet and knows eight languages so i keep her around in case i need verification that someone called me an asshole in mandarin.

people ask all the time and since im now married i can tell the truth and admit that yes ive kissed karisa three times.

the first time was the night that the patriots were handed that snowy playoff game at foxburough. i had 50 bucks on the raiders and i was forced to pay up but i didnt have the money so they made me kiss karisa who had been eating philly cheesesteaks with extra onions throughout the fourth quarter. this was during the time that she was smoking a pack of marlboro reds a day. more when she was drinking. right before she puckered up someone handed her a toasty warm slice of garlic bread. truth is more pungent than fiction.

after the count reached ten she removed her tounge from my mouth and a tear rolled down my face and they said dont cry the raiders will come back next year but it was the onions. onions always make me cry. i spit a tiny one at the tv and dabbed at my face with a viva.

you know that shit was a fumble.

afterward she kissed my cheek and whispered that the raiders just sucked and i needed to deal with it. and then she threw me into pool.

the final time we kissed was in a cab ride coming home from marc browns house after the zwan show on four twenty of last year. we were drunk off our ass cuz the mc had just tossed a rager and she and i drained every bottle of champagne in the house and i had done some damage on the captain morgans singlehandedly.

we were sliding around the backseat of the cab as he screeched around the corners of hollywood driving as fast as humanly possible and on the long stretch up vermont into the griffth park hills of her hideaway we realized that we’d known each other all these years and we hadnt really kissed. ever. not real ones at least.

neither of us wanted to do it. what if it ruined our perfect friendship. what if it came to the surface during an xbi mindreading. what if she, like all the others, fell in love with me and could no longer be trusted or counted on as a peer.

and before we could talk ourselves out of it our dude took a quick turn and we slid into each others arms and went for it.

and if i wasnt so fucked up that night perhaps i could tell you if it was any good.

which is maybe why i dont drink any more.

and maybe why karisa is always trying to get me wasted.

happy birthday rock idol home improver beastie girler do it yourselfer off road driver ms pacman loser.

maybe one day you’ll shed your shyness learn how to hold your booze and let your hair down.

until then i promise to keep photoshopping your pics so you look halfway hot.

happy birthday karisa, thanks for hanging in there with me

Ed. – rarely do i do this

but sometimes i will cut and paste an article in its entirety.

today the paper of record got off its ass and called out the fcc for censoring howard stern and fla fla flowey.

EDITORIAL OBSERVER

Fighting for Free Speech Means Fighting for . . . Howard Stern

By ADAM COHEN

New York Times

May 3, 2004

Legal rulings about indecency have a way of quickly slipping into ridiculousness, and so it is with the Federal Communications Commission’s recent decision imposing $495,000 in fines on Clear Channel for broadcasting an episode of the Howard Stern show. The F.C.C.’s opinion focuses on a program in which the self-proclaimed “King of All Media” interviewed the inventor of “Sphincterine,” which the commission huffily calls a “purported personal hygiene product.” A key factor in its analysis, duly noted in its “Notice of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture,” was that the segment contained “repeated flatulence sound effects.”

Call it the whoopee cushion doctrine. It is hard to believe that the government now regards flatulence jokes, the lamest staple of gag gift stores, as grounds for taking away a broadcast license. But since Janet Jackson’s unfortunate wardrobe malfunction, the F.C.C. has been furiously rewriting the rules. Another edict holds that broadcasters can lose their licenses even for “isolated or fleeting” swear words, a doctrine arising from a single gerund uttered at the 2003 Golden Globes.

Don’t bother calling the commissioners philistines � they do it themselves. In the Golden Globe ruling, they admit their definition could put D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce off limits. Not surprisingly, though, the F.C.C. has started with Mr. Stern. He has long been a favorite target; more than half of the $4.5 million in fines the F.C.C. has imposed since 1990 has been on him. The payments were once just overhead for his highly profitable show, but with the fines soaring, and broadcast licenses at far greater risk, the economics are dramatically changed. After the $495,000 fine, Clear Channel dropped Mr. Stern from its six stations. He remains on 35 other stations, but no one can say for how long.

It would be hard to quarrel with a broadcaster that dropped Mr. Stern on grounds of taste. Turn on his show or pick up his biography, “Private Parts,” and choose your reason, from his peculiar fascination with the sex lives of dwarves to his on-air interrogation of his mother about her sex life. But government fines, not high standards, spurred Clear Channel.

It is Mr. Stern’s offensiveness that makes his cause so important. The F.C.C. is using his unpopularity as cover for a whole new approach that throws out decades of free-speech law. The talk right now is over the colorful battles between Mr. Stern and Michael Powell, the head of the F.C.C. But when the headlines fade, the censorious new regime will apply to everyone. The danger it poses to the culture is real.

On March 18, the F.C.C. issued orders that spell out, as the commission puts it, “a new approach.” Some of the standards are objectionable on their face. The F.C.C.’s inclusion of “profanity,” which it concedes is often synonymous with “blasphemy,” means, a coalition of civil liberties groups, media organizations and artists points out, that “the most commonplace of divine imprecations, such as ‘Go to Hell’ or ‘God damn it,’ are now actionable.”

As disturbing as the new rules, however, is the F.C.C.’s warning that it does not intend to hold itself to any specific definitions of indecency. The commission states, at the end of a list of vague categories of forbidden speech, that it will “analyze other potentially profane words or phrases on a case-by-case basis.”

While making its criteria hopelessly vague, the F.C.C. is removing longstanding protections that give speakers breathing room. While the law has long said that violations must be “repeated” before a penalty can be imposed, the F.C.C. now says an isolated incident is enough. Instead of requiring that offenses be “willful,” the new rules hold that a broadcaster’s good-faith efforts to understand highly subjective standards are “irrelevant” to whether it will be punished.

This new legal landscape will stifle important artistic expression, since broadcasters will be afraid of wandering too close to an essentially undefined line. It also raises a real danger that indecency will be used to stifle political dissent. Among the comments Mr. Stern is in trouble for are a schoolyard epithet used about President Bush and another aimed at a Republican congresswoman.

The combination of unknowable rules and draconian penalties is already having a chilling effect. There are reports of radio stations banning classic songs like Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” and Elton John’s “The Bitch is Back.” The television show “ER” recently edited out a brief shot of the exposed breast of an 80-year-old hospital patient. And the satirist Sandra Tsing Loh was fired by a public radio station when an engineer failed to bleep out various words that were meant to be bleeped for comic effect.

Even Mr. Stern has been transformed by recent events. He now regularly talks about the F.C.C. on his show, and his Web site has a quotation from Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, discussions of the presidential election and voter registration information. More uplifting content than usual, but it is taking Mr. Stern’s time and energy away from sphincters, flatulence and all the other vulgarities he has a constitutional right to obsess about.

buzzmachine + no matt0 +

its a beautiful morning in hollywood.

its always beautiful when you get to wake up with a pretty girl who goes down on you, lets you flip her over, and like wise you roll off the bed and act like animals as liz phair plays and the sun shines and the ceiling fan twirls and the sheets tangle and the birds chirp.

no way do i want to go to work today. no way is that girl topless right now pulling on her jeans and buckling her trendy white belt. no way will i be working for the xbi in two to three months.

i had a great long weekend. on thursday i got to teach at the greatest classroom in america. on friday i saw the pixies and had my mind blown. on saturday a gorgeous young woman made me a madras and sprinkled some ecstasy in there and i told her that i was feeling sick and she told me what it was and i was all, you….. and i smiled and she said what can i get you and i said just give me a second to shower and right there in the shower it came on and we walked to the grocery store for eight cans of whipped cream gummy bears and popscicles. we only remembered the nitrous. on sunday she left me a worn out mess flopped on the couch barely able to nibble on the french bread from the day before and drinking warm orange juice because it was so hot in hollywood this weekend that everything ended up being warm.

and here i am waiting for her to curl her hair and drive me to work so i can get yelled at for not being the perfect xbi agent that i never was. calgon has taken me away but reality has brought me back and im stronger and happier and better prepared for my departure from this stage of my so called life.

i am seriously as in seriously as in super seriously considering quitting this job and doing that photography experiment where i have a chair on hollywood blvd and a table that has a sign in book and a sign that says no talking and another sign that says smile and a bucket where people will give me $2-$20 depending on how im doing that day.

the xbi’s base salary is $25k because they know that we shake down all of the criminals that we catch. most agents make over $100k. because i have a “technical” position of flying chopper one, my base is $30k and i give everything that i shake down to the united negro college fund.

and i live fine.

$30k a day after taxes is $100 a day. which is 30 people saying yes i will let you take my picture here on hollywood blvd in hopes that it might make it into a tony pierce photo essay coffee table book and tipping me $3. thirty people a day on hollywood blvd. i think it can be done. call me crazy but i think it will be fun and easy. call me nuts but i think a tourist family of four would give me $10. call me nuts but i think a couple would give me $5. call me insane but if i got 5 families (5×10) 4 couples (4×5) and 7 randoms (6×3), i would make as much as i do now and it would be creative and fun and interesting.

of course it would also be dangerous since hollywood blvd isnt the safest place and i would have a $1000 camera and maybe maybe maybe a $250 photo printer so that these people would have something to take back home of their trip to hollywood california. and it will be annoying trying to convince all the hobos and crackheads that i cant speak (pointing at a sign that says No talking doesnt mean much when the urchin cant read).

and maybe after 100 pictures i can get a book deal. although i doubt it.

and maybe after 50 picures of celebrities i can sell some to whoever you sell those to, but i doubt that too.

and of course there will be a website called smilenotalking.com where people can set up appointments to get to meet the barely famous blogger who seriously lost his mind when he gave up his career of 3 years and traded in sure money and medical benefits in the name of art.

but you cant always sit around waiting for the man.

sometimes you have to go get him when hes not lookin.

my beautiful wife moxie + vacant + stephanie