Sexually Ambigous Shopper logic

     Ok, This Didn’t Happen. Glad I got that off my chest.
Yes, when pushed into a corner I write fictional accounts of my supposed life. For your amusement, and making sure everything is at least plausible.

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Sooo, I was in one of them-there big stores that’s got everything. Waiting forever at the counter behind a pair of Thai workers. We have maybe a half a million of them in our country of 7 million. They’d only bought 6 bags of rice and a pair of headphones…to listen to while enjoying the nightly meal of rice and native song-bird stew. Or threatened sea-turtle goulash. We’ve lost 90% of our native fauna since they were ‘invited’ to work here.
Anyway, the Thai language is somewhat familiar by now. Not that I understand more than a word or two, I mean, the sound of it. Almost didn’t pay attention when one said to the other “Kun chun, khun chum, khun cham.” At least that’s what I heard. My buddy just gave me a discreet off-camera hand-motion, running his finger in a circle as if to say ‘Repetitious, ain’t it?’ I quietly agreed.
     Meanwhile, here come, in the next aisle, a pair of gender-neutral(?) fellow humans, Russians, I presume.
I drew a major blank. I mean, they both reminded me of that ancient SCTV routine where the joke was “Is it Pat or Patty. Or Patsy?” A thoroughly impossible-to-pin-down actor/actress goes on and everybody is trying with exaggerated manners to somehow ascertain his/her gender.
    Anyway, the ‘mystery’ pair had been busily acquiring a half a cart of stuff: work boots fit for Paul Bunion (sp?, unless they don’t fit well), two ‘V’s Secret’ knock-off bras, an inexpensive but powerful-looking cordless impact driver, after-shave and feminine-hygiene products (I typically averted my eyes).. and a pin-up poster of whas-his-name, Bieber?
     But it was while they did the sorting, for separate billing, that the plot thickened.
Absolutely equal amounts of stereotypically male/female items were laid out on two moving belts. My buddy, again with the hand-sign language, gave me that motion so familiar here in a land of surprises: hand alternately palm-up/palm down, and an eye-roll/head-move skyward. Translation: ‘Still haven’t a clue. You?’

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Punch Line:
And I thought a second…. about how Thai sounds so redundant to the foreigner, which we’d both just minutes earlier noticed, and then carefully told him, perhaps with a louder than normal volume:
“They’re ‘BI’, thereby their ‘buy’ makes perfect sense.”
The Thais only glanced uncomprehending; the Russian ‘whatever’s’ were not moved or offended, and I’d made my point.
OK, a small one.  Coulda been better if those Ruskies woulda bought, each of ’em, the Parfum Valu-Pak. Yeah, ‘Brut+ Princess of the Nile’ The display says: ‘Sensible scents for just cents!’
Or even one or the other ‘Pat’ holding up the ballet-suit he/she just bought, asking “Is this impromptu tu-tu too ‘Teutonic’ for my bone structure?”

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ADD: Anyone guess? I’ll be here till the lights go off. My stoopid WP site is Jxsolberg, But don’t go there until you, G-d forbid, have no other choice/ JS

Positively Juarez Revisited: Bob Dylan & Me

     OK, this will be my first try at a ‘cross-post’. Yes, it’ll take me ten(10) minutes to perfect on Xanga, and then, if the creeks don’t rise and the poppies bloom, 19 hours on ‘Sword-press-ure’, or whatever they call that demon-site.

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Basically, Mr Dylan seems to have had a less than perfect time on a trip South of the Border in the mid-sixties. I figure it’s never too late to revise the lyrics a bit.
For anyone too young to know the original words like the back of his/her hand, I’ll include his pessimistic version verse-by-verse.
Next Challenge, probably after I’m safe in a rest home, is to record my own  version and upload it. I’ve sung my  words and they work just fine, for meter, rhyme, and rhythm. Something to look forward to, huh?
JS/Lost in tel Aviv

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‘Just Like Tom Thumb Blues’

When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez And it’s Easter time too
 And your gravity fails And negativity don’t pull you through
Don’t put on any airs when you’re down on Rue Morgue Avenue
They got some hungry women there And they really make a mess outta you/

GPS on the train to Jaurez, and still on Eastern time too…
Four bars on the lap-top. Positivity, through and through
I’ll be putting on airs by tonight, down on Rue Morgue Avenue…
They got some Hungarian women, who say they’ll ‘Really make a man outa you..’

Now if you see Saint Annie Please tell her thanks a lot
I cannot move My fingers are all in a knot
I don’t have the strength To get up and take another shot
And my best friend, my doctor Won’t even say what it is I’ve got

If you see Saint Annie, please tell her ‘Thanks a lot!’
We both felt the Earth move; I’m thinking maybe tying the knot
Yeah  I may have the strength, might even give it another shot.
And as Best man, my Doctor; he’ll surely tell me what a whiz I got

Sweet Melinda The peasants call her the Goddess of gloom
She speaks good English And she invites you up into her room
And you’re so kind And careful not to go to her too soon
And she takes your voice And leaves you howling at the moon

Sweet Melinda, the Pheasants call her the ‘Goddess of Plume’
She speaks good Pidgin, and invites ’em up into her room
And the hens are so kind, and careful not to lay their eggs too soon
just this one stupid rooster, who insists on crowing at the Moon

Up on housing project hill It’s either fortune or fame
You must pick up one or the other Though neither of them are to be what they claim
If you’re lookin’ to get silly You better go back to from where you came
Because the cops don’t need you And man they expect the same

Look up ‘Housing Project Hill dot com…. check out ‘Fortune’ or ‘Fame’
You can choose one or the other, or click-on both; yeah they’re everything they claim
Get as silly as you want to, you can always click ‘Back’ to from where you came
Just say ‘Adios’ to the nice policemen, (they probably already said the same.

Now all the authorities They just stand around and boast
How they blackmailed the sergeant-at-arms Into leaving his post
And picking up angel who Just arrived here from the coast
Who looked so fine at first But left looking just like a ghost

Now all of the authorities, they just stand around and boast
How you can e-mail the Sargent of Arms, a perfect man for the post
He’s the Gaurdian Angel of every newbie coming in from the coast
Who arrive looking so scared, and leave gushing ‘Man Ur da most!’

I started out on Burgundy But soon hit the harder stuff
Everybody said they’d stand behind me When the game got rough
 But the joke was on me There was nobody even there to bluff
I’m going back to New York City I do believe I’ve had enough

Well we started out at Burger-King, soon got their ‘harder stuff’
My friends said they’d watch me try to chew a meal that tough.
But the joke was on them; the Salad Bar was nothing more than fluff.
Still, why go back to new York City, when Mexico is …quite enough?

JFK Tower- We’re going down!”

       I believe there’s something about knowing you’re gonna die within days, minutes, or seconds that is a Particularly Shitty Life experience. I mean, like Rosenberg, sitting in the chair,like  un-numbered handcuffed souls on the gallows, rope around their necks, or… like Caryl Goddamn Chessman, on the cover of f*cking Time magazine when I was only, like twelve, sitting in the octagonal sealed room at San Quentin waiting for the end. Jezuz, if that don’t scar a guy, what does? I often have horrible nightmares to this day of a guy on a slowly-sinking ship, waking from a peaceful night’s sleep during which he dreamed of ‘life as usual’. He awakens to re-realize that he is, in fact,  gonna die, which makes the dream even more sad, among other adjectives.
“Airplane drivers“, as all my pro pilot friends love to call themselves, are less rattled by the End. They realize that every minute aloft is a little gift from Bernoulli & Boeing, perhaps in that order. Thus the last words of a 737 going down are remarkably ..calm?

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     OK, I’ve had nothing going on in my brain except Death and Doom ever since I read, like millions of others, that Xanga was in trouble. It all started from, I presume, a single e-mail from Server-Svc-NJ-Inc. which said, in brief, ‘Dear Xanga.com, we would love to continue our relationship with your concern, however the $60K arrears you have sadly accumulated, makes this problematic./ Sincerely

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ASIDE: A DEEP AND HEARTFELT THANK-YOU TO ALL WHO COMMENTED ON MY PREVIOUS POST CONCERNING WORD-PRESS. I am just too busy dealing with my personal life/ bankruptcy, to reply to each and every lovely commenter individually, which is my style here.
Not to mention the incessant helicopter traffic overhead. Who really knows what kinds of cameras they have mounted thereupon.

Bottom Line: I do hope and pray that there will be something recognizable surviving from XANGA after this weekend.
None of us deserve to watch yet another beloved entity die. I think of my final seconds aboard US Air Flight XXX, heading nose-down for the slum-houses of Bayonne, New Jersey, and screaming: “OMG, my Xanga Pulses: I forgot to Archive my Pulses.”

 

Word press Sucks!: A Xanga Public Service Announcement

Or course your mileage may vary, but the experience of this reasonably tech-savvy Xangan bears stating:
IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR AN EXCRUCIATING WAY TO DIE, CURSING YOUR BITTER FATE AND WISHING YOU HAD EBOLA, THEN GO TRY TO MAKE A WORD-PRESS SITE.

No one can even repay me for the two nights I just spent exploring digital Hell. You will quickly re-discover how lovely Xanga is as a platform. And find the couple bucks it might take to keep it and your sanity alive.
Basically, nothing there works. Not that you can ever find it twice. The Editor for posting is a horror-show. One Theme I tried was readable only with an electron microscope, the other one  a garish mess of out-of-position indecipherable icons. The photo I tried to post insisted on being basically a thumbnail in an ugly sea of WP-chosen background color I didn’t order and can’t return.
No way to ever know what’s where, or, where any of your posts went to die.
I was stuck in no-exit routines so many times; the only way out is to kill the program back to your desktop and start over. only to find what was supposed to have been your post printed upside-down. Seriously.
With Xanga I also, of course, remember a learning process; getting photos to the correct placement, learning the navigation. But good heavens, I never came even close to the WTF rage I feel toward WP so far.
I suppose the Bottom Line is: You never know what you had till it’s gone. Pray that won’t happen. 

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(I just posted this in four minutes… as opposed to nine WP hours last night with nothing but tears of rage to show for it.) 

Perhaps a real post, to get started

Yes, I forth-with join some of my cohorts here… where ‘There be dragons’, or at least Functions with new Funny Names.
The ‘X’ in my stoopid ‘Tagline’ *does* stand for ‘Xanga’ or ‘Exile’ or both.
I’m blindly assuming, for now, that Void-press will be a place where:
1) Both Scions and Peons, who’ve been mere Ions for Eons can form covalent/ionic/iconic bonds. (Yeah, most of ’em unstable, or toxic, or both. Ever the pessimist.)

2) I do come by my skepticism honestly. My fingers Ache from trying to Eeke out a living with my buddy Ike, him playing his hand-made Oak Uke .
3) He’s the infamous Ex-con who tried making the Pecan an Icon of the Yukon. As a Xanga might already know.

OK, you guessed it: English is not even my first language. In fact I go weeks these days without using it at all, except here, for example. The enviable point being that I do see all the odd coincidences in the english vocabulary. and gleefully bring them to the attention of my Dear Readers.

And so I suppose this is the fateful night when I begin to search for WP’s Widget-names… and the new locations of all my beloved Xanga features.
A) ‘Subscribe’ is apparently ‘Follow’, in New-speak. To my ear the connotations scream ‘Blind Obedience’, but why quibble? This is, after all, supposed to be a festive night. I just found two orphaned, forgotten beers under the car seat. An imperative omen hard to ignore, I call it. Nu, Further…

B) So, what’s with the micro-font-size here? I’ll have to see if I can legally change it. Otherwise folks will be reading me only until they need glasses… (Sorry, an inside joke: I had once an interesting girl-friend from Texas, on Xanga. We always joked that we read each other’s posts and MSGs ‘with one hand’. Sad, all of a sudden; one day I ‘turned around and she was gone’. And that’s what it’ll be, but writ large, if Xanga fails to Phoenix itself. Ok, back to the devil in the details:

C) Where’s my damn ‘Reader’. That’s the equiv of ‘Read my Subs’, I take it. Can’t find it to save my life.

D) I am somewhat enamoured by a coloured background. And am hoping I can find/finagle that feature here. In Manifesto, my Chosen Theme. (yeah, a camp-follower: I just copied it from OBL. usually a safe bet to emulate her judgement.)

E) Ok, Photo upload? Audio Upload? Both of these are on my short wish-list. If I find them you may know tonight already, before the cock croweth thrice.

F) Let’s see, what’s left? “Newly Pressed Grapes of Wrath” or something is supposed to be the WP ‘Front Page’. Wouldn’t it be a horror-show, just between us, if I clicked and there, like…oh, herpes, was someone, asking: So what does everybody think of Zimmerman?” Or more likely, “Do you masturbate in the shower?”??
Not for that I abandoned my comfy blog-home of seven years.

G) Oh, and the Import Xanga Archives Question. Tranny-bunny (not her real name) insists she’s done it. Maul me with a paint-mixer, I can’t find any trace of hers on her site. Probably just like other stuff I fail at; I simply don’t know where to look.

Ok. hope I haven’t broken any of the WP Rules OBL so deliciously itemized in a post recently. (Note to me: Learn to embed links)

And fellow Xanga exiles: do expect me to persist until I find you here, whereupon I shall ‘Follow’ you fallow fellows/ JS/ Tel Aviv

 

THIS WAS JUST A TEST

Yes, it is I/    JS