Seeing as how “Brain Droppings” is a collection of George Carlin’s greatest hits, it’s only fitting that instead of a full-scale review, I give a few samples of his work. Starting with…
Which is more immoral? Killing two 100-pound people or killing 300-pound person?
Which is taller? A short-order cook or a small-engine mechanic?
If JFK Jr. got into a taxi in New York to go to the airport, do you think he would say, “Take me to JFK?” How would he feel about that? And how does Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother feel when she walks through JFK, knowing that if she had stayed single it would probably be Martin Luther King Jr. Airport?
How can “crash course” and “collision course” have two different meanings?
Kids are now being born with syphilis and cocaine habits. There’s nothing like waking up your second day on Earth and realizing that once you kick cocaine you’re still going to have the syph. And hey, kids! If you didn’t get VD in the womb, don’t worry, you still have a shot. Some toddlers recently picked up gonorrhea at a day care center.
When a lion escapes from a circus in Africa, how do they know when they’ve caught the right one?
They said on the news that tests on monkeys showed HIV can be transmitted through oral sex. What I want to know is, who had to blow the monkeys?
Shopping and buying and getting and having comprise the Great American Addiction. No one is immune: When the underclass riots in this country, they don’t kill policemen and politicians, they steal merchandise. How embarrassing.
Since childhood is a time when kids prepare to be grownups, I think it makes a lot of sense to completely traumatize your children. Gets them ready for the real world.
I always order the International Breakfast: French toast, English muffin, Belgian waffle, Spanish omelet, Danish pastry, Swedish pancakes, Canadian bacon, and Irish coffee.
Something is dreadfully wrong in this country. There is actually an organization called Wrestlers Against Drugs, and on TV there is now a Christian weightlifting tour.
Want more? Buy “Brain Droppings”. It’s what Carlin would have wanted…whether he was dead or alive.
***COMEDIC QUOTE OF THE DAY***
“We’ve heard about battered wives and a lot of work has been done in that area. But then we started hearing about battered husbands too. There are battered husbands. This happens when the woman is really big, the man is really small, and they each drink a quart of whiskey a day.”
-George Carlin (who else?)-
There are times when you can never fully decipher what a dream means and then there are times when they’re painfully obvious. One night, I had a dream that was the latter of those two extremes. Before going to bed, I had a tremendous pain in my lower back. It was so bad that the next day I had to call in sick to my weekly volunteer job at the Kitsap Historical Society. Somehow my subconscious took all this pain as a cue to create of the most depressing dreams I’ve ever had. I dreamed I was watching a cartoon where a clown was riding around in a small car bumping into police cars. He’s happy and fine one minute, but with no real transition into the next moment, he’s suddenly crying because his back hurts. This isn’t just any kind of crying. It’s not the kind of crying that a child does when he hits his head. It’s not even a minor euphemism for complaining. This was an actual tearjerker of a scene. There were tears raining down his face all because he suddenly had back problems that prevented him from taking a shower. The clown is a symbol of happiness and joy (despite what you see in “The Brave Little Toaster” and “It“). To see a prominent symbol of laughter crying in a depressive state over having dull back pain is the ultimate slap in the face to someone in the real world who actually has back pain. When I woke up, after I made the call to the museum that I was taking the day off, I went downstairs to have a heat wrap pasted to my lower back. Ever since then, my pain became a non-issue. I might have to go to the chiropractor, but I like going there anyways, so it’s not a big deal. Knowing that a positive outcome was on the horizon, why exactly did my subconscious need to send me a clinically depressed clown? It’s not like the clown had a malignant tumor in his back, nor did he have any slash marks. It’s just minor back pain and he’s crying like his grandma just died. If it’s bothering him that bad, he should shell out some dough for a massage or a chiropractic adjustment. Minor back pain doesn’t necessarily constitute high drama. But in my imagination, it just might. If I make a story out of this, it will have to be done with a clear head and intensive planning. I can make this work. In fact, I can make it work or my name isn’t Garrison Kelly. Actually, Kelly isn’t my last name, it’s a pseudonym. The Garrison part of my penname is right, so maybe I can split the difference 50/50 when it comes to my success with a story about a sad clown with back pain.
***TELEVISION QUOTE OF THE DAY***
“Ever heard of Obama Care? Well, this is We Don’t Care.”
-Marty Deeks from “NCIS: Los Angeles”-
Okay, so maybe I already have a character named Karlos Ludwig. He’s the guitarist in the title band Death Blade. He’s got dreadlocks, a fluffy beard, and badass shredding abilities. Even so, his role was very small, because there were other characters who easily outshined him and his name was only mentioned a few times within that short story. Before the guitarist version of this character was created, Karlos Ludwig was an entirely different person in a Good Reads fantasy RPG called Medieval Magic. In that storyline, he was an introverted knight who didn’t like taking crap from authority figures. Being introverted works for a lot of people in real life, but unfortunately, aggressively seeking privacy from the other players doesn’t work so well in an RPG setting. Nobody can say he didn’t try, though. He ordered a big ass pizza at a bar known for brawls. He took a swim in a fairy lake. He trained in an open field known for being hunting grounds. How could this guy not be obvious to everyone after all these things? It’s probably because everyone was so scared of Karlos that they were afraid to approach him. Due to a lack of human interaction, I had to permanently disable him from game play and when I tried to make a more extroverted character, that didn’t work either. Eventually, I parted ways with Medieval Magic and went on to bigger and better things. Despite having already used Karlos as a character in Death Blade, I feel like he didn’t get enough of the spotlight and that he needs more. I’m more than willing to recycle his name into a more prominent character. What kind of character will that be? Karlos Ludwig is a very intimidating name no matter what occupation he undertakes. Hey, he could be an undertaker! Nothing strikes fear in the hearts of others quite like burying dead bodies. But what if he was actively seeking “clients”? What if he was cruising the neighborhood looking for young girls to put in these graves? Alive, no less! Karlos Ludwig is already sounding like a creepy psychopath. But he doesn’t necessarily have to be. In Medieval Magic, he was a dark knight similar to Cecil Harvey’s first incarnation in the videogame Final Fantasy IV. What if Karlos was Cecil Harvey on steroids? Maybe instead of dark blue armor, it could be all black with poisonous spikes. Instead of a long sword, Karlos could carry a glowing green battleaxe to signify even more poison running through his veins. Whether he’s an antihero or an ant villain, the one requirement I would have for Karlos Ludwig is that he’s the scariest motherfucker in the entire prose. He’d have to have a face only a mother could love, provided that mother also gave birth to either Jeffrey Dahmer or Charles Manson. I think we can make this work, people. I’m not ruling it out just yet!
***TELEVISION DIALOGUE OF THE DAY***
VIC MACKEY: You want us to catch this killer or not?
DAVID ACEVEDA: Going undercover as dirty cops. You think you can pull that off?
VIC MACKEY: We can try.
-The Shield-
As a writer, I draw inspiration from pretty much everything around me. Drawing inspiration from the movie Pulp Fiction as a teenager was probably not the best idea. Don’t get me wrong, Pulp Fiction is a badass movie and Quentin Tarantino will always be remembered for it. It’s just that Quentin Tarantino is really the only person qualified to write anything in his own style. I tried copying his style and it was a fucking disaster. That’s where we get the character Daniel McBride. The reason he’s called that is because I didn’t know at the time of creation there were already people named Danny McBride. I thought I was being original, but it turns out I’m not. You want to know what made Daniel so special? He used racial slurs despite not being a racist. He was first introduced in a Play By Web college RPG as a freshman art major. He got in a rivalry with another kid named Shawn Rawlins because Shawn’s player controlled Daniel’s actions and used him to trip Shawn accidentally. Folks, if you’re ever in an RPG, don’t control anybody’s character but your own. That’s a huge pet peeve of mine. But instead of complaining to the admin of the game, I tried to make lemonade out of lemons. Daniel tried apologizing to Shawn, but Shawn pulled a gun on him and shot him in the leg. Daniel then shouted a whole bunch of KKK jokes at him (Shawn was black) and got beaten up even further for it. That and the wannabe thug stole Daniel’s girlfriend away from him in the process. I can safely say I’ve never been traumatized by an RPG before that moment, so I left for greener pastures. Years later, Daniel McBride became a character in a movie I wrote called Pumping Filter, where his old rivalry with Shawn Rawlins was relived. Pumping Filter had a whole bunch of racial tension with no real reason for it. The way I justified it back then was the whole idea behind insulting someone was to get them angry and nothing made an opponent angry like an attack on their culture. As I got older, I realized that simply using those attacks is enough to be deemed racist and rightfully so. These days, my works don’t resemble Pulp Fiction on steroids. Quentin Tarantino was a staple of the criminal underworld, so he has all the tools he needs to write these kinds of movies. Me? I’m just a suburban white kid who had a generally easy life. But as it stands, Daniel McBride needs a new home, either as a college or high school kid. Maybe this time his martial arts skills will come in handy and he’ll actually win fights. His martial arts skills didn’t work too well in Pumping Filter and that college RPG. Can I really make chicken salad out of chicken shit and turn Daniel McBride into a respectable human being? I hope so, because my imagination is getting to be too lonely for him.
***JOKE OF THE DAY***
Q: What grades do racist skinheads get in school?
A: Not C’s.
Being a referee in any sport is a thankless job, especially in the world of mixed-martial arts. If you make one tiny mistake as a referee, a firestorm of criticism will descend upon you like the end of the world is already upon us. You’ll catch shit from Dana White, Joe Rogan, the fans, the fighters, everybody. If you don’t believe me, ask referees like Steve Mazzigatti, Kim Winslow, Yves Lavigne, and just recently, Herb Dean. I don’t have a Twitter account, so I never know if these referees are lashing out against their critics. That’s why I’ve taken the liberty of creating a character that I hope to one day use in a future combat sports prose. Meet Devon Spirit Wolf. She’s Native American, she’s smoking hot, but best of all, she’s opinionated. In fact, she has her own blog called The Bitchy Referee. In this blog, she has a take no prisoners attitude and she doesn’t let anybody get away with murder. I know referees are supposed to be impartial, but Devon can get away with it because she lives in a fictional world were neutrality is bullshit. In one of her posts, she says that she has a lot of empathy for real world referee Kim Winslow. Kim is one of the most criticized referees in the business. Not because she makes controversial calls, but because she’s a woman. Think of all the “make me a sandwich” comments she had to endure over the internet, not to mention other renditions of the kitchen genre. Devon is also a woman and also doesn’t put up with sexism. She also doesn’t put up with transphobia either. In fact, when Matt Mitrione made his bigoted comments about Fallon Fox, Devon was the first to say that Matt secretly swung both ways and that he had a dress collection in his closet. Ouch! You know what else Devon Spirit Wolf hates? Pro-life zealots. She actually had an abortion when she was a teenager. She knows it’s not the most pleasant experience a woman can go through, but she also knows that a woman should never be shamed for it. Any other topics you’d like to throw in front of Devon Spirit Wolf’s face? She may be small enough to fit in Demetrious Johnson’s pockets, but she’ll kick anybody’s ass, whether it’s verbally or physically. She has a Brazilian Jujitsu black belt, so don’t piss her off. Now if only she can find a job in one of my stories. I already had one referee who was verbally animated and her name was Cheryl Glenn. I’m sure Devon Spirit Wolf will find work as well.
***DOMESTIC QUOTE OF THE DAY***
“If men want women to buy rape insurance, men should have to buy murder insurance.”
-Susan Wilson, the Deep Space Cowgirl-
Dreams are always a wonderful source of creativity. When we have them, it seems as though they’re just random pictures floating through our heads. Do they have meaning? Most of the time they do. I had a dream the other night that might be the inspiration for a business venture should I ever make enough money from being an indie author. In this dream, I went to a place called The Geek Store and bought a whole bunch of graphic novels. I might have gotten some standard novels as well, but for the most part, I got comic books. When I talked about this with my sister-in-law Susan, I began to brainstorm other things I could sell if I decided to open my own version of The Geek Store. So far, I have graphic novels, regular novels, Dungeons & Dragons paraphernalia, toys, Magic: the Gathering cards, and the obligatory snacks people eat whenever they’re engaging in creative activities. I’m pretty sure there are gaming shops that sell these things already. Lord knows I’ve been to a few of them. That means when I eventually buy the rights to The Geek Store, I’ll have to sell more varieties of things. Maybe I should put on some tunes and brainstorm ideas for items at this store in my Lego journal. Journals are good for brainstorming. They really clear up the mind, and, holy shit, there’s another idea for something to sell: themed diaries. With all the things I’ve already listed, how about I just put it this way. I envision The Geek Store being a hybrid of all these other stores: Barnes & Noble, Wizards of the Coast, Lego Land, Toys R Us, and Michael’s Art Shop. All of the sudden, the umbrella term just got opened up to cover more areas. I like that! I like that a lot! Of course, with any business idea, while it may sound like a lot of fun, I do have to keep track of several financial aspects such as taxes and profits. All those numbers can really drain somebody’s creativity before it has the chance to spark in a place like The Geek Store. If I ever do open up such a place, I’ll need a business savvy partner. It doesn’t even have to be somebody I already know. It could just be a random consultant out of the Yellow Pages. I know absolutely nothing about business. I took one class on it when I was in high school and that was during my freshman year when my brain was already turning to liquid shit. Having a business-minded partner would seal the deal if I ever decided to make this store a reality. I’ll even settle for having Paul Heyman as my business associate. Then again, it’s not really settling if you enjoy the guy’s WWE promos. I’d even dare say I’m a Paul Heyman guy. But I’m losing sight of things already. The question of the day is, if I opened a Geek Store in your hometown, would you shop there? Please say yes. Hell, I know you’ll say yes, because you’d have to be a little geeky in order to read my blog in the first place.
***JOKE OF THE DAY***
Q: What does a futuristic police officer get when he has sex with a prostitute?
A: Robo Clap.
Childhood is a time when imaginations run wild and people are free to be their silly selves. I certainly was no exception when I was growing up in the early 1990’s in California. My favorite way of exercising my imagination was playing with Legos. I had one Lego piece that was a rod attached to a five-studded single block. The side studs had switches on them and the top stud had a long red laser pole. These pieces obviously came from a space adventure set I had (in case you didn’t already guess from the laser pole). What kind of thing could I imagine this Lego piece to be? How about a weapon that can blow shit up like Hiroshima? How about I call this Lego piece…a Laser Rocket Bomb. I shit you not. My creativity was wild, but my vocabulary was minimal. Then again, in the early 90’s I was only a fucking kid, give me a break. Seeing as how I was a kid, I didn’t know how serious nuclear war was. There was even a time when I thought dead people could be brought back to life by CPR. Naturally, I wanted the Laser Rocket Bomb to be a real weapon I could use on people. I often imagined it being used to blow up my school so I didn’t have to go anymore. That’s pretty sadistic, but being young and naïve has that effect on a child. Imagine if I actually tried to build this weapon out of raw materials. I would need three light switches, a small rocket engine, a light saber (from Star Wars fame), and a grenade in the middle of the whole contraption. I ran this idea by my older brother James and he had enough wisdom to tell me that I would die while making it. Pulling a pin on a grenade will set it off whether the light saber handle is stuck in the hole or not. I’ll be the first to admit that the Laser Rocket Bomb isn’t a very practical military weapon. What exactly would the point of the light saber be? Doesn’t the grenade and rocket engine do enough damage? Do we really need that extra amount of overkill? And why are grenades and rocket engines paired together in the first place? Come to think of it, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this weapon was used during the Bush administration during the Iraq War. In fact, if George W. Bush attempted to build the Laser Rocket Bomb himself, we probably wouldn’t have an Iraq War. Let this be a lesson to everyone who wants to exercise their imagination. Get it out of your system when you’re a kid and don’t know how the world works yet. When you’re older and it all makes sense, it won’t be so fun anymore.
***COMEDIC QUOTE OF THE DAY***
“Politicians are like a box of chocolates: the democrats are soft and gooey on the inside and the republican party just has a bunch of nuts in it.”
-Bill Maher-
