Koanuea Reeves

• If you achieve enlightenment and no one is around to witness it [including you, as you've recently transcended your ego and thus shed attachment to the illusion of separate subjectivity (the "I") in plugging into the unifying quantum field connecting all matter] did it really happen?


• What is the sound of one hand slow clapping?


• I think you're an asshole; therefore, I am.

Pop Quiz

a) What is your Make-A-Wish? Imagine you've a terminal illness and only months to live. Make-A-Wish is in the business of making dreams come true. What are you going to ask for and why? Explain.

b) When you do pass on, in what position would you like a taxidermist to stuff you and where would you like to be put? What outfit would you like to wear? Any accessories or accouterment? Describe your final interment. Support your answer with specific details.

c) What is something you hold dear? A belief, a value, a truth or ideal. Something that defines you. Cup it gently in your mind's eye like a baby dove, letting its sonorous cooing fill you with the salve of wisdom. Bask in this life-affirming, sun-kissed moment of knowing. You still with me? Now. Crush that baby bird between your palms. Strangle it with your bare hands, explaining through your tears that you no longer accept the cawing lies of a mendacious fucking bird. Tell it that meaning is neither inherent nor absolute but rather situated within a time and a place (a history and a culture). Meaning is arbitrary: What you make something mean is the meaning it carries. Discuss.

Jump, a net will appear.

Recent Headline in Markistan

Legendary sports announcer Al Michaels honors passing of Pat Summerall with DUI

Educational Toast

Lest we forget, the education system made the people of this great country what we are today: obese, illiterate and unable to function on our own.

Yes, lads, we're Lenny from Of Mice and Men. A Confederacy of Dunces. We slash education to pay for prisons, which in the end is a good thing, because if you don't educate your population, you BEST be building prisons for them. Either way, we are assured the recommended daily allowance of the Institution.

Education is not benevolent, much less a panacea [in fact, I think it's lazy and mastubatory at best, if not dishonest, even manipulative (see: Hussein, Saddam, but also Dream, American). Personally, I advocate for autodidacticism. The best thing a teacher can do (certainly, the best thing any teacher ever did for me) is reach out and push that autodidact button, help facilitate natural learning instincts. Give a kid a library card and a sense of intellectual curiosity (fuck it, I'll even toss in a $20 for overdue fees) and s/he will be fine.] Formal education is a more subtle, passive means of manipulating a population, a narrowing of acceptable points of viewing, of creativity, of what one thinks is possible (for which I am a huge advocate; let's all keep this place dumb and fat and reactionary).

Personally, I believe in literacy and the self-determinism it allows.

This might be a page. This might be a chapter. But this ain't the book.

Lucky Uncle

If you’ll allow me a moment of familial indulgence, I am darn sure that I’m the luckiest uncle in the whole world:  My niece, Dahlia, is blossoming into such a special little girl—just a really good kid who has been through a whole lot and yet remains so grounded and kind and with such a loving, joyous, open heart. She is that child who makes you dream of having children of your own one day. A true sweetheart. It turns out she also has a real flair for comedy, even as a nine-year-old.

In the middle of our weekly telephone conversation last Wednesday, usually about sleepovers and hair braiding and beaded necklaces she made for me in her art class, she asked about my fledging writing career, quickly breaking the tension of my equivocating with a joke of her own:

“Uncle Marky,” she said.
“Yeah, honey.”
“Why does SpongeBob Squarepants live in a pineapple at the bottom of the sea?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart. Why.”
“Because he’s a CUNT”

Pussy is Pussy: Healing our connection to the wound that does not heal

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Safe Sex

I'm all for safe sex. But, let me be frank: Condoms suck. Find me one guy who would prefer to wear a condom at any point in his life, much less when invited to insert his most sensitive, erogenous body part into another's moist, silken bloom. "Hold it right there, hon. Let me just unroll this car cover over my Ferrari, and then we can speed around the racetrack?" Okay. My KIA. A car cover on my KIA and then race the kids off to cello practice?

Of course you hate condoms. Everyone hates them. But that's because we've been thinking about them all wrong. You don't wear condoms for sex. You wear them for the DAY AFTER you have sex. Feel the difference as you're going through the Rolodex of offenses: Did I pull out in time? What about overly ambitious precum? Is that a burning sensation? What's that crusty stalamite growing on my shaft?

But wear that condom, and go ahead and kick your feet up. You don't have a care in the world. Sure, you couldn't cum and you kept losing your hard on. You went skin diving in a spacesuit. But, otherwise, you don't have a care in the world. But you don't have AIDS. That's pretty special, too.

No Regrets!

I recently overheard a conversation at a bar between two young men, when one raised his pint glass in encouragement, offering, by way of insight, “Hey, man. No regrets.” The other nodded, responding with an appreciative fist to bump, echoing his consent, “No regrets.”

Hmm, I said to myself, stroking my beard between my thumb and forefinger. No regrets. Live YOUR life with no regrets. Regret ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Let's see:

To have no regrets means you've either not done anything in your life or not thought about anything you've done. Hmm. Well, now. Where did this Buddhist koan come from? Which venerable thinker contributed this little philosophical pearl to the fraternal vernacular? Essentially, "Live your life devoid of risk, meaning, and self-reflection." Thank you, fucking Socrates. Why would anyone seek solace in No Regrets? Can we just cut through the bullshit and start handing out lobotomies? Pretty please?

Me? I've endless landscapes of regrets. Verdant green valleys spotted with spruce trees and wildflowers making crisscross patterns of blue and red, yellow and white and purple, a thin ribbon of pale blue riverscape snaking through the verdure as small, burrowing rodents nestle in the berry bushes. I've wide swaths of rugged, mountainous terrain wedged between my shoulder blades, tiny sherpas scurrying up the north face of my own private Mt. RegrEverest, quietly documenting my each and every misstep, miscue, miscalculation with their Scottish lamentations and Negro Spirituals.

Post-structuralist Haiku

Nietzsche’s Breakfast Club:

What does not kill us makes us

Demented and sad 
                          (but social)

nobly BaD

For Bob, Forever Ago. 71 years young today.

  nobly BaD

     When Judy Collins first met the great Bob Dylan, she walked away from the conversation thinking he was a complete idiot—a blithering fool barely able to form a coherent thought. Joan Baez, the first time she heard him sing, was astonished, she said—stunned that something “so powerful could come out of that little toad.” So stunned in fact, she fell madly in love with him and promptly bought him a toothbrush—a welcome gift for a man when considering the times of day such a gift is normally used.
     In 2006, Dylan released his 44th album adding to his over 500 songs—an artist whose output and relevance are paralleled maybe by Lennon and McCartney. This towering musical legacy, however, remains largely unexamined and thoroughly misunderstood. Dylan, notoriously reticent with interviewers, offers very little by way of explanation and rarely indulges the "messianic-poet-of-the-generation" label heaped on him. In an interview, he once said about himself that if he weren’t Bob Dylan, he probably would think Bob Dylan had a lot of answers. Yet how could the songwriter who did so much to redefine the role of popular music have nothing to say about the very songs he wrote? How could such musicological mythology be occupied by such a dull, unimpressive man? Could a song ever just be a song…………?
     Dylan never wanted to be anything, he admitted, least of all ordinary. So when young Robert Zimmerman, the newly bar-mitzvahed boy from suburban Minnesota, met the devil, Lucifer himself, in the stacks at the Hibbing library somewhere between Welte and Wordsworth, he couldn’t keep from being seduced.
     “No please, call me Lou,” the devil said. He smiled, casually flipping his shoulder-length, well-conditioned blonde hair out of his eyes and showing his perfect, white teeth.
     “Alright, Mr. D—um, Lou,” the young man smiled back.
     “So then, Robert, how would you like to make your mark on the world? What do you want to do to make this a better place?”
     “Ummmm…I don’t know…Maybe be a doctor. I always liked medicine and the human body.”
     “Doctor? That’s what this world needs. Another Jew doctor. C’mon, Bob. I’m the friggin’ devil, damn it.”
     “Please don’t call me Bob, sir. My mother says it’s a goyim name.”
     “Please don’t call me Bob,” Lucifer mocked. “Listen kid. You’re sitting on a winning lottery ticket, a trip to the moon, and you feed me your mom’s dreams? What do you want?” He pointed a long, slender finger at young Robert’s head, barely touching the space between and just above his eyes.
Robert jerked backwards, stunned. His mind’s eyes filled with images of him dressed in regal attire and ascending stairs to a gilded throne while trumpets sounded and drums pounded, his mother and father looking on proudly; his heart began to beat quickly; beads of sweat gathered on his brow and lip. He felt a faint throb in the place Lucifer touched him and smelled burnt hair.
      When he finally gathered himself, he tried to tell Lucifer of his vision but could manage only a sluggish, garbled stutter, “I-I-I my m-m-m-muu—”
     “Musician, did you say, Robert?” Lucifer said, suddenly convivial, stroking his chin and smirking. “Musician. Hmmmmmm…I like the sound of that. Very subtle. You clever little boy.”
     Lucifer proceeded to ramble on about his plans—how a musician, if given the right tools and direction, could “so easily capture and control hearts and minds" and how "the masses will be lining up to vouch for your deft genius.”
     Of course, poor, brave thirteen-year old Robert heard none of this. He was still wandering in his kingdom reverie, walking on rose pedals and listening to odes written about his heroic and generous deeds. He could hear the music playing at the feasts called for in his honor. Every day for the first year after his coronation, he would attend lavish banquets where he would be entertained by belly dancers and fire spinners and fighting dwarves. He would dine on the finest meats, drink the sweetest wines and then retire to his harem to make love to dozens of virginal women each night.
     “And with me as your manager,” Lucifer said, “we will change the world. What do you think?”
     “Uh—oh," he stammered, "well...I’m not so sure that—“
     “Not sure about what? You do want to make your mark on the world? Don’t you?”
     “Oh, I do. But, I don’t know—“
     The devil held up his hand and looked into Robert’s eyes.
    “Clear you mind, boy. Ask questions if you must, but never question me, son. I know exactly what I am doing. This world needs us. They need to see things differently. Music is not spreading evil; we’re spreading awareness—We’re nobly BaD.”
     “Nobly bad?”
     “Uh, more like—nobly BaD. Think about it.”
     “I don’t understand.”
     “You don’t need to.” The devil pulled a vinyl record out of his briefcase and handed it to his protégé.
     “But we don’t have a player at home.”
     The devil looked at Robert and slowly shook his head, tsking the young man’s vapidness.
    “A tad slow, you are. But you’ll have to do. When you go home tonight, look in your closet. Put this on immediately.”
     Robert turned the cover sleeve in his hands.
    “Who is Woody Guthrie?”
     “It’s pronounced Guthrie, and he’s a guitar player and songwriter you should know. In fact, I’m going to put you on a steady diet of Woody. No more of that Kingston Trio bullshit.”
    “But I like the Trio. In fact—“
    “In fact—you’ll listen to Woody and only Woody every day before and after school. We have lots of ground to cover and precious little time.” The devil stroked his reddish-blonde goatee while looking at his new find. “Eventually we’re going to have to do something about your name. It’s too Jewy. We need something more in line with us—more nobly BaD.”
    “Too Jewy? Forget it, Lou. I’m not going to change my name and you cannot make it so.”
   “Oh, Bob. You have so much to learn.”

1—Any serious journalism in this article should be credited to Louis Menand’s “Bob on Bob” article in the September 4, 2006 issue of The New Yorker

Choose Your Own Adventure: Cocktail Party Icebreakers

A partial list of recently overheard cocktail party icebreakers:

• I’m not your garden-variety misogynist who thinks all the world's problems could be solved if women would just regularly perform unsolicited fellacio on their partners instead of prattling on about Kegels and VBACs while holding space to process emotions and validating each other over wheels of brie and one-too-many glasses of Pinot.

• So I sprint across the train station to the kiosk and say, “Two tickets to Gouda, please.” The lady behind the counter looks up from her Us and sniffs, “It’s pronounced Howda.” (like the “H” is caught in the back of her throat). So I say, “Well, I don’t care Howda fuck you pronounce it. Give me two tickets."

• I prefer the neoclassical symmetry of midgets to the discordant, baroque aesthetic of dwarves. You?

• And I quote, "Number 47 said to Number 3: 'You're the cutest jailbird I ever did see. I sure would be delighted with your company. Come and do the jailhouse rock with me.'"Funny, I don't recall jails being coed. No, no. In fact, they're quite segregated. Hmmmm. Dare I say it? Another clandestinely homoerotic Elvis lyric.

•  In retrospect, I should have seen it. We were growing apart, living separate lives. We hardly ever communicated. She kept asking to eat my pussy.

• I am far more taken with the violent, disgorging volatility of bulimia than the quaint, simmering deprivation of anorexia. You?

• I would argue the "player" and the "game" are worthy of equal scorn. Thoughts?

• Your stuff is mainly just shit you safeguard for fear you may need it tomorrow.

• Are you more of a raper or a pillager? When sacking a township, are you more likely to be found raping or pillaging?

• No regrets? Who would want to live a life of no regrets? To have no regrets, you've either not done anything or not thought about anything you've done.

• Suffering in NOT hierarchical.

• In which ways is the world flat for us? In 500 years which of our beliefs, ideas, versions of the world are they going to laugh at?

• Never believe people who say they don't give a shit. It defies logic and conditioning-the biological imperative around assimilating. Humans are social animals. Survival depends on being part of the herd. In other words: if you're not towing the tribal company line, you better be the fucking shaman. 

• Bonus icebreaker: Wanna fuck? 

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To Do List: Lotto Winnings

            Recently, the Mega Millions went off for $132 million, which, when calculating the total cash value minus federal taxes (no state taxes on winnings in California), comes out to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $81 million.

            After doing the math I promptly a) bought a ticket and b) began brainstorming ways I would go about spending, sharing, saving, and plowing through this impossibly large pile of cash. Money, after all, is for spending. Enclosed is a partial list that captures the style and spirit in which I will celebrate my windfall:

1)     Upon first bloom, helicopter my sportiest associates to my small private island in the Lesser Antilles where we could bow hunt the homeless and criminally insane who’d been fattened over the winter.

2)     Acquire a merry band of midgets—Dwarves need not apply!!!!! Construct a cadre of perfectly symmetrical miniatures with midget dimensions and midget mind frames, midget hopes and midget dreams, midget tastes and midget pleasures. Train them in hand-to-hand combat and weaponry (each having a specialty: arms and armory, explosives and munitions, land, sea, and air vehicles; electronics); indigenous and dead languages (Sanskrit, Latin, Navajo, and other Meso-American dialects); and sustainable farming. Turn them loose to do my bidding.

3)     Host a real murder mystery. Send out gilded, wax-sealed invitations to an extravagant dinner party. Guests travel by horse-drawn carriage to a palatial estate with a drawbridge and moat where they would be outfitted in fine silken outfits and dine on rare, exquisite gourmet foods and wines. Once they have settled in comfortably, close the drawbridge and enjoy the thrill of killing off your closest friends one by one in the most creative ways. 3a) Re-enact the Donner Party adventures. Once the food runs out, let the games begin.

4)     A masterstroke celebration of the ephemeral! Benevolent nihilism in its truest form: Build the most extravagant amusement park in the history of childhood entertainment. Out-Disney Disneyland. More magic than Magic Mountain. Greater than Great America. Open it for a day. Burn it to the ground.  4a) Build a library, petting zoo, or play ground, a school for the deaf, dumb, or blind. A retirement home. Repeat. Add water to the smoldering ashen remains.

5)     Hire 20 hookers to play tackle football and do cocaine with. Only 20, not 22, because you’re “all-time” quarterback for both sides. After the game, line them up against the shower wall from ugliest to cutest and fuck your way from one side to the next. Smile at your good fortune. None of this really matters anyway, thank God.

6)     Sponsor a grassroots initiative to reappropriate the meaning of the word “pussy,” recasting it in a deservedly positive light while arguing for the celebration of female sexuality as well as the reclamation of the suppressed, if not discarded, sacred feminine largely missing from our society (as exemplified by the pejorative usage of the word).

7)     Tithe

8)     Open a sniper school. Train students in marksmanship and reconnaissance, including stealth, camouflage, infiltration, and observation. Graduation includes a fieldtrip to the inauguration of a current favorite politico, the studio of a talking head, or coffee shop of favorite celebrity.

9)     Fill a with farmhouse stable stall with bundles of $100 bills; each friend gets one pitchfork  full; close friends and loved ones can use a snow shovel.

10)  Open a private school for girls hidden deep inside a forest primeval whose mission statement is (like all educational facilities) to deflower the young of their unseemly innocence through liberating, maturing practices. Partial list of reading materials: Lolita, Tropic of Cancer, Are you there, God, it's me Margaret. Others?

Aspiring Model Food Pyramid

Hallmark Cards

Before this partial list of "Special Day Series" celebratory greetings can be submitted to the Hallmark R&D department, I'm currently searching for an artist to properly illustrate them. I've been told, they will be wildly popular with select audiences.

• Lamenting your XY chromosomal status on your special day.
• Drink til you'd fuck me on your special day.
• Hoarding boners and gobbling chode from a bag of dicks on your special day.
• Celebrating your tiny vagina and daddy complex on your special day.
• Wishing you writhing, rhythmic orgiastic pleasure on your special day.
• Dreaming of marking your womb with my seed while listening to race music on your special day.

Age of Aquarius Texting Acronyms

As the new world order takes root, and we transition into the dawn of a new astrological age, it is imperative that our linguistic evolution mirrors the burgeoning social, spiritual, and psychological shift currently taking place. So, I've taken it upon myself to START the ever-so-important conversation around developing chat acronyms and texting shorthand to reflect this change. Please feel free to contribute to this conversation as you see fit, while also tacitly acknowledging you are contributing to the betterment of the lone planetary species that is both defined and limited by its prodigious language capacities.

WAAO: We Are All One
WAAOCEIS: We Are All One Consciousness Experiencing Itself Subjectively
SWL: Sending White Light
SWHL: Sending White Healing Light
HSFYE: Holding Space For Your Emotions/Experience
HSAVY: Holding Space And Validating You
VYE: Validating Your Experience
FPAN: Feeling Pensive And Nostalgic
SOTI: Smiling On The Inside
NDIA: Nodding Demurely In Agreement
FTBYC: Feeling Triggered By Your Comment
AYFWL: Admiring Your Facility With Language
WPYVDII: Well Played. Your Verbal Dexterity Is Impressive
JYUTGOC: Judging You Under The Guise Of Consciousness
IDTQMPA: Inhaling Deeply To Quell My Passive Aggression
SAYLOSA: Smirking At Your Lack Of Self-Awareness
NOTRMA: None Of This Really Matters Anyway

I Wouldn’t Fuck You With Ann Coulter’s Dick

Part II in a multi-part series commenting on today’s political and cultural climate.

Recently, actor Charlie Sheen took another hit to his already tawdry reputation as a self-destructive, overindulgent Hollywood cliché, when he was forcibly removed by police after causing thousands of dollars of damage to his suite at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Sheen, who appeared to be highly intoxicated, admitted to responding officers that he had spent the evening drinking and taking cocaine. The entire episode first came to light because an unnamed woman—later identified as porn star Capri Anderson—summoned police, where they found Sheen in the process of dismantling his hotel room. Suffering from drug-induced paranoid delusions, he was taken and hospitalized overnight for psychiatric evaluation.

Yes, Capri, you had to lock yourself in the closet, fearing for your life, when you made that call. I’ll give you that. The man had clearly lost control. In fact, this is merely the latest in an endless string of embarrassing, violent, liquor- and drug-fueled episodes leading to felonious charges, arrests, and rehab stints.

So, I’ve just one question. Did you really have to call the cops on him and out him in public? You’re dating Charlie fucking Sheen. We’re you not waiting for this to happen? Guy’s a fucking time bomb, a loathsome malcontent waiting to go down in a proverbial hail of gunfire Scarface style, cocaine dust crusted around his nostrils. Why would he be different with you? Or were you going to be the one to save him? Fuuuuck.

And to make matters worse, you are now talking to the press? Going on Hollywood gossip shows? The guy has done everything in his power, save put a loaded gun in his mouth, to destroy himself, tripping over his own dick time and again despite having every advantage and resource—wealth, looks, access, support. Sure, he’s had some notable roles, but otherwise, he’s a complete and utter fuck up, bless his heart. Did you really have to go and make it worse?

Listen. We’ve all seen how this ends. It won’t be pretty. He’s a living, breathing drug-addled cesspool of cocaine-fueled one-night stands, for years the most obvious pick in everybody’s Dead Pool this side of Robert Downey Junior. I will mourn the day his bloated, syphilitic corpse washes up on the Santa Monica pier.

Perhaps, you thought you were helping Charlie in the long run when you called the cops? Dumb cooze. What kind of woman are you? Never mind that you’ve had untold quantities of cocks stuffed inside your holes—your flaccid labia dangling between your thighs like a pink, fleshy swim cap, your truncated asshole turned inside out like a dirty brown sock—and god knows how many liters of cum shot on your face. Whatever. When it comes down to it, you are a rat. You’ve reduced yourself to the least common denominator—a woman who doesn’t have her man’s back. For your lack of loyalty. And the innumerable cocks you’ve had in your holes. I wouldn’t fuck you with Ann Coulter’s dick.

Former VP Cheney champions water boarding:

“Lynn and the girls never minded it”

            In a tense, candid interview that ranged from concealed Halliburton stock to weapons-grade plutonium, a defensive former-Vice President Dick Cheney praised the usage of water boarding during his tenure, calling it “a no-brainer communication technique” when dealing with aloof terrorist suspects and criminal masterminds.           

            “This is simply the most efficient means of extracting important information from unwilling enemy combatants not protected by the Geneva Convention,” he said. “Interrogating known terrorists, like child rearing, can be very demanding and stressful.” 

            Mr. Cheney admitted having firsthand knowledge on the effectiveness of this technique—which simulates drowning and produces a severe gag reflex, making the subject believe his or her death is imminent while ideally not causing permanent physical damage—because he employed it liberally in his own home while raising two daughters, Elizabeth and Mary.

            Referring to his family as a “close-knit cadre with no secrets,” he wondered aloud if we shouldn’t be encouraging more parents to experiment with alternative child-rearing strategies in response to the “deprave and morally corrupt dystopia of reality television and internet porn” ruining American values.

            “Should any self-respecting parent sit by idly watching their children walk down the wrong path? I guarantee this—Lizzie and Mar never cut class or skipped out on their homework.”