My favorite four things in this world are 1) bargains, 2) rich people's houses, 3) celebrities who have been famous for so long they're losing their grip on reality, and 4) snooping through other people's shit.

So I was overjoyed when I found out there was going to be an estate sale featuring the entire contents of one of the houses Nicolas Cage lost because of his financial troubles. Can you imagine a better celebrity house to snoop through? His whole financial mess was caused by him blowing money on stuff like dinosaur skulls and albino king cobras.

So I headed down to take a look around. 

Prior to my arrival, I'd been picturing madness. Not, like, Hoarders level madness, but that kind of controlled, polished madness that the sort of person who buys dinosaur skulls surrounds themselves with. I was expecting like, secret corridors, a trapeze room, and a desk that used to belong to the Unabomber or something.

But, disappointingly, every room of the house looked like this. 

A totally bland mix of Mediterranean and oriental stuff, like every other Beverly Hills Mansion decorated by an interior designer circa early-noughties (see also: The Osbournes house, The Bachelor house, all filming locations for reality TV shows between the years of 2000 and 2009).

Ditto all of his possessions. Just standard gaudy rich people stuff. Like the kinda stuff poor people have in their houses, but purchased in shops without price tags where they give you complimentary champagne. 

There were some personal items scattered around, though. Like a couple hundred copies of a comic book that Nic wrote with his son about a reincarnated union soldier working as a detective in post-Katrina New Orleans (or something) that I never knew existed. 

Then I got to the closet of the master bedroom. This is just the hallway of the closet BTW, it was made up of several rooms. Its total size was, depressingly, larger than my entire apartment. 

Which is where I found a pair of Nicolas Cage's old long johns. I grabbed them to give to someone as a novelty birthday gift. 

The closet was also where I found this. Not sure if you can make it out from the picture, but it's a fireman's helmet and two whips (like, the kind of whips old people buy after reading 50 Shades of Grey, not like the kind you use for horse riding or tomb raiding).

Which, on the one hand, is exactly what I wanted to see in Nicolas Cage's house. It's weird and funny and indicative of something you would totally expect him to be doing in his spare time. But it also made me feel gross and voyeuristic. I couldn't shake the feeling that I was looking at stuff that he wouldn't want me to be looking at. 

Like, this is WEIRD, right? That Nicolas Cage's ex-wife's underwear was all just laying out for people to rifle through and buy for a dollar?

Which was kind of how I felt for the rest of my visit. 

Like, when I went to look around the library and found this. Which, obviously, is hilarious. 

But then looked into the box next to it and saw this. A parenting book about dealing with "children who are out of control," which was on top of a bunch of other self-help books about stuff like learning to live with Tourette's, communicating better with loved ones, and how to stop yourself from getting wrinkles.

Which was kind of a bummer. 

:(

Also, "God Wants You to be Rich"...

This was a house where Nic had gone through a divorce. Where he'd dealt with someone's mental illness. Where he'd worried about normal people stuff like wrinkles and money. And which was now being repossessed by the bank because he fucked up his finances. 

I felt like a parasite, hunting for hilarious things to buy from a ruined man's life while people sneaked peeks behind doors marked "do not enter" around me. 

This was the breaking point. One of those cushioned toilet seats that are, without question, the absolute grossest thing in the entire world. Why did a man like Nicolas Cage have this in his house? Why did he let it get all cracked and nasty? I felt like I was looking at a physical manifestation of his depression. 

The thought of Nicolas Cage sitting on this thing, with years of farts and pee seeping out into his thighs through the cracks while his marriage crumbled around him and his uncontrollable child succumbed to Tourette's and OCD was too much for me. I felt like the biggest bottom-feeding shitbag in the entire world, and had to bail. 

I guess what I'm trying to say is: If you're given the opportunity to take a glimpse into the private world of a walking joke, DON'T. It will ruin them for you. Nobody wants their LOLs to be humanized. I just tried watching the "NOT THE BEES!" clip, and I didn't even crack a smile. All I could think about was Nic's miserable old mansion full of failure. 

I didn't even feel comfortable buying his old thermal underwear as a hilarious present, and had to go put them back in the closet.

I did snag this extension cord, though. I needed a new one, and at $4 it would've been irresponsible not to. 

The following is an excerpt from the liner notes of Rat Tail’s one and only album, The Motorola Pimp. His whereabouts are unknown. We do know that he seemed to be on the rise when his album was first released; however, shortly after getting in an altercation with rapper Ice T, Rat Tail vanished. Ice T denies any knowledge of or involvement in his disappearance.

1. INTRODUCING RAT TAIL: 
(A. Goldstein, D. Goldenberg, L. Nachman) Produced by Janet for Cyrk Records. Recorded at Cyrk Studios in Hollywood by Doo Doo Dune Dune. Mixed by Conch Shell at Cyrk Studios in Hollywood.

Introducing Rat Tail / Rat Tail got a fat tail
Eight ball in the thermos of my Muppet Movie lunch pail
Want dick? Got it / Want nuts? Got those
I like to hang with strippers ’cause they take off their clothes
New Air Jordans, so you know that I’m rockin’
Rolex on my wrist tick tockin’ like my dick
Diamonds in my ears / Rhinestones on my shirts
Make them teen panties wet, give ’em ring-around-the-skirt

And you know I am a flirt, biggest flirt on earth
I drink champagne that’s yellow like Bert 
And Ernie’s rubber ducky, girlies whisper “sucky fucky”
Got ’em feeling real lucky ’cause they got the chance to fuck me
I’m soooo handsome / My looks will pay ya daughter’s ransom
No fear of the five-0, I run up on ’em and pants ’em!
Breath stank like milk / Hands smooth like silk
Sending ’nuff love to my man Harvey Milk
Introducing Rat Tail!
THAT’S ME!
Introducing Rat Tail!
THAT’S ME!
Introducing Rat Tail!
THAT’S ME!
We want to fuck you Rat Tail!
THAT’S FREE!

I like my butts round plus hanging to the ground
I like my tits round and my eyes doo-doo brown
I like it like this and like it like that
I like to chill in Hollywood ’cause that’s where I live at
One compound / Five mansions / One fence
I speak a little broken, but that don’t mean that I’m dense
Talking on my cell phone, that’s when I speak my mind
I’m always on that hustle and forever on that grind
Speaking of that grind, I love to grind behind
I get behind that behind, and I grind that behind

Blast this song in my boom box / Then after I rewind 
Then after I rewind I get behind behind and grind 
My shotgun spray and my 45—BLAM!
I’m fly, dope, fresh, def with a splash of glam
My real name’s Aaron, and my middle name’s Sam
Rat Tail is the man / And you know that’s who I am
Rat Tail is the man / And you know that’s who I am
My name’s Rat Tail / That’s the name of the man
You know who I am / Rat Tail is the man 
Introducing Rat Tail!
THAT’S ME!
Introducing Rat Tail!
THAT’S ME!
Introducing Rat Tail!
THAT’S ME!
We wanna fuck you Rat Tail!
THAT’S FREE!

Listen to Rat Tail’s long-lost debut track, "Introducing Rat Tail" here.

Read all 13 installments of Combover, Brett Gelman’s novel about Hollywood, baldness, and the beauty of the Jewish tradition here.

Here at the VICE HQ we have a gigantic hourglass that we reset each week to count down the days until the next week's HBO show. It takes ten interns all heaving at once to flip it, and the chances of one of them getting pinned underneath or losing a limb is real high. It adds a good deal of suspense to the buildup, though, and according to our in-house risk-assessment team, it's totally worth it. That is all to say that the hourglass is nearing its final grain of sand, meaning a new episode of VICE on HBO is nigh. Here is what to expect from tonight's episode, airing at 11:00 PM.

Tobaccoland

Indonesians like tobacco a whole lot. So much, in fact, that 67 million of them smoke it. There are no restrictions on advertising in the country, meaning ads targeted at young people abound, and kids often start smoking when they are as young as six years old. To top it off, some Indonesians actually think smoking is good for you and believe it cures all sorts of bad diseases, including cancer. We sent Thomas Morton over there to cut through the smoke and find out what's really happening. Months later, he's still coughing up weird yellow stuff.

Underground Heroin Clinic

It's something of a universally acknowledged truth that a heroin addiction is one of the hardest habits to kick. In the US, we offer replacement drugs like methadone, but unfortunately those drugs are also highly addictive. There are other schools of thought that believe in a different approach, but the drugs they use are often illegal in America, meaning users who want to get clean with their methods have to leave the country. Ibogaine is a drug used to treat addiction in many parts of the world but is labeled a Schedule I narcotic in the US. It is rumored to cure physical dependency on opiates without the terrible side effects of withdrawal and is often used in tandem with a voodoo-like ritual. VICE co-founder Shane Smith traveled to Mexico with an underground heroin clinic based in Harlem to see how well this unconventional addiction cure really works.

Of all the gifts that God supposedly bestowed upon gay men—a dandy fashion sense, preternatural design abilities, a predilection for the word "fabulous"—the gaydar is both the handiest, and the most elusive. To an outsider (read: straight person), the ability to instantly catalog and assess a litany of small signs and signals and determine whether any old person on the street is gay or straight might seem innate in all who enjoy homosexual romps in bed, but it is actually a learned skill, like algebra or injaculation.

And you can learn it too! These days with more and more social circles becoming sexually diverse, how can you tell if the guy swinging a glow stick next to you at some Bushwick "rave" is looking to put his pole in a hole or looking for another pole to pole all over his face? [Wait, what?—Ed.]I enlisted the help of Jeffery Self, the author of Straight People: A Spotter's Guide to the Fascinating World of Heterosexuals. He turned his sociological skills around and instead of telling us gays how to detect breeders, he's teaching everyone the best practices for finding queers and dykes out in the wild.

VICE: At what types of places or events is it easiest to spot a gay guy?
Self: Oh! I'm so glad you asked, Brian! The easiest places to spot a gay are: Broadway open calls, boutique gyms, one man shows, any major city with a bar named The Eagle, SoulCycle classes, and Kevin Spacey's Annual Memorial Day BBQ, which, as an FYI, is being moved from Ojai to Brentwood this year. Please read the invitation VERY carefully as no one is allowed to bring more than ONE guest. Last year simply got out of control and Taylor Lautner is literally just NOW able to ride a bike again.

What's one sure giveaway that the guy you are looking at is gay?
Nowadays it's very hard to tell the difference between straight and gay men, probably because gay people control the media and ultimately the world. If the guy you're speaking to refers to screenwriter Dustin Lance Black as simply "Lance," he is without a doubt homosexual. Another rule of thumb is that if you look at a gay man VERY closely you will see the off kilter glare of a guy who has genuinely wondered why Monique hasn't made a movie since Precious.

OK, let’s flip the coin. What's one sure sign that the gentleman in question is straight?
Do what I always do... surprise him by slapping your penis against his side and see if he shouts "Jesus Christ!" or "Eva Longoria!"

How do you tell the difference between a gay man and the fabled "metrosexual," or, just, you know, your garden variety European?
Metrosexuals have made everything A LOT more difficult. With the exception of Ryan Gosling, who has, as a rule, made most things A LOT easier. However, a metrosexual tends to try a bit harder than a gay man. Coco Chanel had that famous quote about taking off one piece of jewelry before you leave the house. Gay people are WAY more likely to know this quote/follow its suggestion. On a related note, few metrosexuals have heard of Coco, the Broadway musical starring Katharine Hepburn in the title role and cowritten by one of the guys who wrote My Fair Lady.

Are there different skills for picking out lesbians?
NOT MY DEPARTMENT. I'm sorry. Shall I transfer you downstairs to Ellen and Portia's Vegan Dungeon?

How can you tell if two girls making out are just drunk straight people or actual lesbians?
Drunk straight girls tend to be WAY messier than actual lesbians. Unless we're talking about k.d. lang, in which case I have reason to believe she is QUITE messy as well.

Aside from “Do you like penises?”, what sort of questions should you ask to figure out if your target is gay or not?
"Have you ever heard of The Wiz?"
"Have you ever seen The Wiz?"
"Have you ever been in a production of The Wiz?"
"What role did you play?" (This last question is more about my own curiosity, because you seem like somebody who could totally pull off Addaperle.)

Does the company someone keeps make it easier to spot their sexual orientation? What does someone's group say about who they want to bone?
Unless it's Stockard Channing, it's hard to say.

How can you tell the difference between a really butch gay and a straight guy, or a really femme lesbian and a straight lady?
First and foremost, let me say that butch gay guys are the hottest men on Earth. Period. They also make it hard to tell whether they're gay or straight. As a rule, most butch gay guys will dress the same as butch straight guys with one exception—the underwear. A butch gay guy can look as gruff and tough as you can get but underneath those distressed Levi's is a pair of blue trunk cut Andrew Christian briefs.

Femme lesbians vs. straight ladies are tricky for me. Mainly because the straight woman I've spent the most time looking at is Dixie Carter, and she's closer to a butch gay than anything else.

If you see a man who is dating Renee Zellweger, how should he register on your gaydar?
DAUNTING.

Previously - Guys, It's Time to Stop Shaving Your Junk

@BrianJMoylan

As you’ve probably heard by now, Rob Ford, mayor of Toronto and the hearts of young people everywhere, smokes crack, or at least there is a video that multiple reporters have seen of a guy who looks an awful like Rob Ford smoking something out of the pipe. Although mayors have been caught sucking the glass dick before (most notably Marion Barry in 1990), it is still big news, because, wow, it seems like if you were running a major city you shouldn’t be hanging out with shady dudes and having a puff of the old crack.

Rob Ford is somewhat of an erratic dude for someone with so much power—he’s sort of a cross between Homer Simpson and a Canadian version of Caligula—so the notion that he enjoys hard drugs recreationally isn’t the craziest idea. But what would it be like if a more respected authority figure, like New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, was found in similar cracked-out circumstances? We wandered around Brooklyn asking people to find out what their reactions would be.  

VICE: How would you react if Mayor Bloomberg got caught smoking crack?
Kristina, attorney: I would be surprised. He seems to be a very conservative kind of guy. He keeps to himself, he’s very private. If he got caught doing it in public, that would be a huge problem for the city of New York. I think our politicians need to be role models for the people of the city.

Can a crack user be a good role model?
I think a crack user who’s in recovery and has done something positive with his life and has chosen to take a different path can certainly be a role model for other people. But if they’re going through those problems and issues, that’s what they should be focusing on, not leading a group of people.

How would crack affect the choices a leader—like a mayor—makes?
It affects the mental and psychological well-being of a person, and that’s fact. Whether or not people choose to use it is their business. But if you’re going to use something that alters your physical and mental stability, then certainly it would not be in your best interests to be leading a city.

How would you feel if Mayor Bloomberg were caught smoking crack?
Carlos, ironworker: So-so.

Why so-so?
Sometimes I like him, but sometimes... y’know...

Do you think it’s OK for politicians to do drugs?
Yeah. I like doing them sometimes. I like a couple of them.

How would you feel if Bloomberg were caught smoking crack?
Anna, dancer: I’d go “hmm, mmm.” I’d probably need more information before I got really mad or anything.

You wouldn’t be surprised? Offended?
I guess I’d be surprised. I don’t think I’d be offended, though.

Is there any personal choice that a mayor could make that would offend you?
If he said mean things about gay rights, or do anything violent.

Do you think we should care if mayors are totally strung out?
I think that’s kind of a personal thing. I think it depends if it affects his job or other people.

Javier and Diana, architects from Madrid.

Who’s the mayor of Madrid?
Javier: Ana Botella

How would you feel if Ana Botella was caught smoking crack?
Diana: I don’t think she would do it. She’s very right-wing religious.

Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto, is also a right-winger and  he was caught smoking crack.
Javier: Crack just makes it too hard for a mayor to perform his work competently.

What if the mayor were doing other drugs that didn’t get in the way of his job?
Javier: I wouldn’t care about that.
Diana: It depends if he does it in his free time or while he’s working.

Is there any job people can do while high on crack?
Javier: Well, not crack, but I know a lot of architects who smoke a lot of stuff.

How would you feel if you found out that your mayor was smoking crack?
Gertrude, journalist and radio host from Copenhagen: I would think that that’s just way too much.

Do you think smoking crack makes you a bad person?
No, not necessarily, but I think it means you make risky decisions. It’s a risky thing to do and I wouldn’t trust the ability of that person to make wise decisions on behalf of the entire community.

What do you think a mayor on crack would do differently from a clean mayor?
If you severely abuse any kind of substance, you just start making bad decisions. That’s not just for mayors, that goes for doctors and educators. They start making risky decisions because the more hooked you get on this drug, the more you’re going to take risks to keep your secret and get your drugs.

How would you feel about mayors and other professionals doing a little bit of crack, as long as they’re not abusing it?
I’m pretty liberal in terms of smoking joints and stuff like that, but crack is just the next level. You can have a spliff from time to time and still be a reasonable person and enjoy social events--it’s not my thing, but if other people like it, that’s fine. But crack is just the next level.

Who’s the mayor of Copenhagen?
He’s named Frank Jensen. And I don’t think he smokes crack.

How would you feel if Bloomberg were caught smoking crack?
Stephen, bookseller: I wouldn’t feel too good about the state of things.

Do you think it’s OK for mayors and other people in politics to do drugs?
I don’t think they should smoke crack.

But you’d be OK with them doing other drugs?
What other drugs?

Pot or acid, say.
I don’t know about doing acid. Smoking pot I wouldn’t have a problem with. I don’t really need to know if someone’s smoking pot. If they’re smoking crack, I want to be aware that they’re smoking crack.

Four years ago, we made a film called Inside Afghanistan with veteran war reporter Ben Anderson. Since then, we've enjoyed a harmonious, fruitful relationship that mostly involves Ben hanging out in war zones and sending us amazing stories from the front line. The latest feature Ben put together is the film This Is What Winning Looks Like (below), which documents his time embedded in the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police as they prepare to take over policing of the country when allied forces withdraw in 2014.

What Ben found was a police force riddled with corruption—openly admitting to kidnapping and sexually molesting young boys, selling their weapons, pulling down the sides of their bases to sell for scrap metal, and smoking hash and heroin while on patrol—and an army still misunderstanding the rules of engagement after all these years of combat. None of those exactly being ideal when you're in charge of making sure an entire country stays on track.             

At 11 AM today, Ben's going to be doing a Reddit AMA, where you can ask him about anything from his new film—which is currently sitting at the top of Reddit's documentary section, BTW—and the five years he spent embedded with British and American troops in Afghanistan, his hanging out with deportees and pimps in Cambodia, covering gang wars in El Salvador, and spending time with third generation Agent Orange victims in Vietnam. And a bunch of other insane/interesting/dangerous stuff he's done throughout his career.               

Here's where you want to go to do all that.

(via)

The incident: A man named Barry Swegle became upset about a fence his neighbor had installed. 

The appropriate response: Talking it out with the neighbor, if that doesn't work, maybe contacting a local council or something. If that doesn't work, smashing down the fence when your neighbor isn't home then denying all knowledge.

The actual response: Barry got into a bulldozer and partially leveled his neighborhood. 

Apparently the fence, which was installed by Barry's neighbor several months ago, was blocking Barry from being able to move his logging equipment in and out of his driveway in the small town of Port Angeles, Washington. 

This caused some kind of dispute between the neighbors, which, according to Barry's brother, turned Barry into "a ticking time bomb."

On Monday, Time Bomb Barry exploded. He got into his bulldozer and smashed down the fence. But his rampage didn't end there, he carried on rampaging and destroyed four houses, a boat, a truck, and knocked down a telephone pole. 

Once he was all rampaged out, Barry was arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree assault and six counts of first-degree malicious mischief.

Cry-Baby #2: Monroe County, Pennsylvania 

Criminal mooning?

(via Reddit)

The incident: 18-year-old high school senior Larry Liero mooned a couple of kids. 

The appropriate response: Nothing. Mooning is funny. I guess if it was really bothering the kids, they could have yelled at Larry or something. 

The actual response: Larry was suspended from school and arrested.  

According to police, Larry mooned two 13-year-old girls who were being taken on a tour of his school, Pleasant Valley High School in Monroe County, Pennsylvania. 

The mooning victims told their teacher, who told school officials, who told the school-resource police pfficer.

Larry was escorted from the school in handcuffs and taken to the local police station, where he was charged with disorderly conduct and open lewdness. He was also barred from taking part in his school's graduation ceremony and suspended. His charges could lead to a year in prison.

In a statement, Doug Arnold, the school district's superintendent said, "It's a violation of law not to keep your clothes on. It's unacceptable in school." He added, "I don't know that anybody would condone mooning someone"—suggesting that Doug knows some really, really fucking boring people. 

Who is the bigger cry-baby up in here? Let us know in this poll:

Previously: The school that suspended a kid for being a kid Vs. the farm that fired some people for being sensible

Winner: The school!!!

@JLCT

Click to enlarge.

Previously - The Overtime Secret

Gledhill's microscope work includes experimenting with liquids and crystals to create abstract images, exposing the delicate beauty of butterflies' wings using a macro lens, and exploring the individualism of snowflakes and their complex and intricate structures. Away from the microscope his high speed photography has seen him bounce paint off speakers and snap the frozen action of insects in flight.

Continue reading over at The Creators Project.

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You've probably been asking yourself a lot of tough questions lately. "What does it all mean?" "What is the purpose of my existence?" "What happens when I die?" "Where can I see a great standup comedy show where some of the comics are VICE contributors, and do I even deserve something that cool?" Finally, we have an answer to one of your questions.

A celebrated writer regales the 92 Street Y with a wry account of his recent revisions of his early classics. He informs the younger-than-blue-rinse audience, with an adorably self-deprecating wonder that has made him beloved in all of Westchester and several parts of Brooklyn, that he was much influenced by cultural fashions “in the air” at the time he wrote those novice volumes. Today he shakes his wiser head, recalling that youthful naiveté. Not that he wasn’t already brilliant. The truth is, he didn’t realize then how brilliant he already was, and these airborne notions, political pieties, flights of surreal nihilism, and so on, crept in as crutches for his then-demure ego. Now, after two decades of being called brilliant on the many occasions when he was far from it, he felt that certain passages, even whole chapters, issued from this ephemeral takeout menu of topics and poses, didn’t adequately convey what he was driving at. He explains what he was driving at, and declares that he’s tossed the offending arabesques of verbiage out of the new editions. He wishes them to be read in the future as “stand-alone works,” to appear in the form of those wonderfully cute little items bookstores display next to the cash register.

All right. Boring enough. The maestro rummages through his published masterpieces with a magnifying glass, chortling and cackling away at his own precocious wit, his uncanny insight, his deliciously coy, tartly malicious style, and those cheeky turns of phrase that marked him from the outset as a veritable sperm whale in the mucky sea of literary arts and crafts, spewing winsomeness and wit from his blowhole. Quite the Baby Jane Hudson, really. Thanks for the memories, chum.

In the street, Tom runs into Dick, someone he considers, like himself, a “survivor” of a faraway time when life among an attractive stratum of this difficult city offered different, more intense gratifications, in other words when they were young, reckless, possessed of unlimited criminal energy and multiple circles of friends and associates. That world has dried up over time, suffered the attrition of deaths, divergence of fortunes, personal difficulties numerous and altering enough that they are now entirely different people than they were. Vaguely recognizable to each other, nominally functional, still resisting incitements to suicide, madness, or retreat from all contact with the world the city now reflects, refreshed, if that is the word, every day, with reminders that life itself is a brief scribble of being, sealed off at both ends by an infinity of eternal nonbeing. And etcetera, one could say.

Good enough. Bad enough. Nothing will ever be as it was. Nobody actually wishes anything would be. Everyone does wish it would all be something else, but exactly what, nobody can say. Anywhere but here, comes the thought, and sometimes the words, or, anything but this.

This is what we have. A lot of demanding tweaks in the scanning pattern. Conversations, not that many, marked by avoidance of depressing themes, or else by an uncontrollable leakage of them. Cargo manifests of everything that is wrong. Spontaneous, feeble theories about why things don’t connect, or can’t be rescued, or the ineluctable fact that changes beyond our capacity to adapt have occurred, rapidly. Structures once considered immutable collapsed so easily that people can only gaze at the debris in bovine disbelief, with a hollow feeling where their viscera should be.

Many wonder if they have survived, or if they occupy an afterlife, a coda, an epilogue pinned to their narratives like the tail on the donkey. Who or what wrote this sequel is an open question—not themselves, certainly, because they flounder, circle themselves, run along inescapable ruts, and muddle through forgettable days under sedation, counting out the remaining pills until a visit to the doctor levers them out of the maze again for a few hours.

“You’ll be fine again,” the doctor says, “you always are.” “You’ll pull out of this, you always do.” You’re already dead, the doctor thinks. But it never helps to say so.

Transfixed by information that carries no charge, shifts focus every few minutes or seconds, resists synthesis or repudiation—information that’s useless, metallic, inert, like a lead sinker on a fishing line dropped in a stagnant pond. Yet this information is evidence that some people, in various places, everywhere in fact, work themselves and some unimaginable constituency into a lather, strike poses of indignation, mint watery sarcasms, make shaky efforts to amuse each other, inhabit a bubble of epiphenomena that popped for the rest of us quite a while ago. Yes. There are too many people with too much to say about anything, crowding time with defective, reactive urgency, brains blazing with opinions, parsing intolerable reality like butchers slicing salami—semioticians of the random algae calligraphy on that lifeless fishing pond. If anything lives in its depths, you wouldn’t want to see it, and it wouldn’t want to see you. Some refugee phyla from the Burgess Shale, no, I doubt it, I mean you never know, but you don’t want to know, either.

The non sequitur as the standard form of communication. Two people work themselves up to an unavoidable promise to “see each other soon.” To overcome an entirely impersonal and meaningless silence, they’ve already crawled over a mental kilometer of broken glass, diluted affections dripping all over the restaurant carpet. Yet there is a real wish in there somewhere, that they lived in a world where they would, willingly, see each other, if not soon, sometime, but, how does it go: if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. I think I’ve got that right. A year passes. The ante has gone up a tick. “We keep saying we’ll see each other soon, let’s really see each other soon.” Alas, ahem, no really, I mean it.

Knowing better than to revisit other times, or imagine they would’ve been improved by a little insight, better instruction, kinder parents, different drugs. You’d still be exactly where you are now. Or else you wouldn’t be.

What kills us makes us stronger. And then kills us.

The narcoleptic who won the lottery. He couldn’t stay awake long enough to claim his ridiculously huge fortune, kept falling asleep while pinching the ticket between his fingers. As he lived alone, no one knew how magnificently rich he would have been, if he hadn’t starved to death.

“The shadow of mortality that falls over the prose of writers who’ve lived much longer than the authors of yesteryear”—paraphrase of a review of our popular, high-middlebrow writer who has revisited himself yet again in the course of an inexorable procession of LOL articles, a body of work remarkable for its tendency to feature the same unappealing, reputedly hilarious real-life characters from one piece to another, reviewed by another writer who has outlived the median age of writers 100 years ago, just like the writer under review. Two hardy relics enjoying their good luck, and complaining about what good luck it isn’t.

The graphomaniac who came to dinner. She wrote an entire bodice ripper on her napkin, a genre she publishes under a pseudonym—or whatever one calls a name before which the author’s real name appears, “writing as” the other name. Some have said this nuance comprises the graphomaniac’s major contribution to the literature of our time.

“No contact with savage Indian tribes has ever daunted me more than the morning I spent with an old lady swathed in woolies, who compared herself to a rotten herring encased in a block of ice: she appeared intact, she said, but was threatened with disintegration, if her protective envelope should happen to melt.” (Claude Levi-­Strauss, Tristes Tropiques)

Gogol and Lermontov. Lermontov could never have written "The Nose," but Gogol would have turned "A Hero of Our Time" into a really brilliant farce.

Bassett went through medical school and trained as a neurophysiologist, but avoided getting licensed to practice medicine in New York state. He'd learned he didn't like poking in anyone's brain any deeper than its outer container. He also recognized that his occasional need for Schedule III substances was judiciously met by knowing someone else with a prescription pad, and suspected this would change dramatically if he had legal carte blanche to write his own. Not being financially ambitious, he managed to live well on what he earned. His fees were reasonable. He carried just enough of a client load to leave some free time during the day.

Bassett had written several books, published many articles, traveled on his own dime three or four times every year, usually to countries new to him. He was often a paid speaker at conferences too. He bought more books than he needed, gave a lot of thought to office supplies and dishware, and sometimes purchased small works of art. He ate in very good restaurants. He gave dinner parties three times a year. He preferred the company of escorts over more time-consuming personal relationships. He enjoyed being alone, and never felt especially lonely.

Karen had intrigued Bassett since her first appointment. She tried several analysts she knew she couldn't talk to after one session, before she remembered a friend from college she ran into in front of Bergdorf’s had mentioned Bassett. His name hadn't stuck, but she found it in her diary. She had diaries that went back to age nine.

When Bassett asked who recommended him, Karen told him she would rather not say, in case things didn’t work out. She had, she said, read one of his books, and got a strong feeling from it that he was just the person who would help her. She hadn’t read one of his books, but knew a little flattery goes a long way, especially with writers.

Bassett didn't mind not knowing where she came from. The little Karen said before he asked about it convinced him she would be a reliable long-term client. In case she needed more than his half-listening ear, he sent her to a psychopharmacologist, who took a blood sample and prescribed a cocktail of three medications.

Well, that’s a lie. He didn’t take any blood sample. He wouldn’t have had the faintest idea what to do with it. No one would, psychiatrically speaking. He prescribed this and that, weaned her off one thing, boosted dosage on another, dropped in new pills, subtracted old ones, observing how she behaved from one appointment to the next, for his own amusement. Or to enhance a feeling of doing something important, but never mind. He discounted his ineptitude by reminding himself her insurance covered prescriptions. She had to travel across the city to see him, and these trips, by subway or cab, were absolute torture for her. “I hate this person,” she realized. “I especially hate coming all the way over here.” Finally she dropped him, and only went to Bassett, after her internist confided that psychopharmacologists are full of shit.

A number of Bassett's clients terminated at the same time. Over the course of a month or so, he mentioned to all of them that he was writing his "farewell to Lacan” in the form of a short story he hoped to publish in the Paris Review. He was rather surprised that ten patients dropped him immediately. Bassett called it "the great die-off," as if they comprised a species of elephants or dinosaurs. They had sought him out because he had audited Lacan’s seminar 27 years earlier. He had assiduously inflated this ever since, eventually becoming known as Lacan’s favorite disciple. They had believed they were undergoing "Lacanian analysis." Bassett had never employed any of Lacan's methods in his practice. But he’d let them think so, since saying “Lacan” gave them a vicarious feeling of exclusivity and importance, as it did Bassett himself. They felt betrayed and swindled when he abandoned techniques he had never actually used. Karin stayed, she was in love with Bassett and didn’t know who Lacan was anyway.

Item. Item. Item.

The parts he removed from his masterpieces distracted from the great author’s theme of—oh, for fuck’s sake, all this and I can’t even remember what it was—if I say “betrayal,” I could be confusing it with “blasphemy,” or mixing it up with “barratry,” for that matter (you know, deserting a seaworthy ship)—what a twit I’ve become, just when a pinch of sincerity would probably go down well. We will only know for certain when those deleted passages are published separately, what the point of him actually was. And when they are, you can bet I’ll read them, because he’s an important writer. An enduring writer. A classic who has passed the test of time ever since 1997. Important enough, anyway, to revise his old chestnuts and get some sycophants to write about it as a cultural milestone, and it is, everybody says so, and everybody can’t be wrong.

Everyone can be wrong, of course, but in that case there wouldn’t be anyone to say so, in the same sense that all Cretans are liars including me, a Cretan, and things would follow their anointed course, as they do anyway, without interruption or wayward obstacles, world without end, and so on, and so forth. I would add, Amen, if I actually knew what that means.

Previously - A Stone for Michael Stewart

We hope none of you are parents. We don't say this to be mean, we're merely giving out some life advice. Judging by the comments we get from our most devoted readers on a daily basis, many of you have problems getting out of bed on time and making your court appointments. Not exactly daddy and mommy material.

We bring this up because our most famous DOs & DON’Ts caption writer, the Fat Jew, has a new web series that illustrates exactly what happens when a filthy degenerate decides reproduction is a good idea. It’s called SCUM DADZ, which is great because we love titles that don’t fuck around. We also love to laugh, and this show melts our cold hearts like no other.

Fun fact: babies are too dumb to understand that watching their father get a blowjob from a Jamaican nanny or do insane amounts of cocaine is bad. Apparently, all that bad behavior just washes over them like a bunch of happy fluffy clouds. Probably! This infant is in horrible danger at all times, but it will go on to lead a very healthy, productive life. He might even grow up to be attorney general of the United States. Wouldn’t that be delightful?

Our advice is to not think about it, relax, enjoy SCUM DADZ, and get drunk. Get pregnant! Do whatever you like! We're all just passengers on this crazy starship called Earth. 

Check out more of his work here.

It’s usually kind of confusing when an actor or athlete or musician writes a book. Unless they’ve paid a ghostwriter to make something that seems like the actor/athlete/musician could write, usually it’s a good idea to duck your head between your legs and pretend it never happened. It’s like you can’t be successful at everything, right?

Enter Ken Baumann. Baumann is best known for his role as Ben on ABC Family’s teen-drama show, The Secret Life of the American Teenager, but offscreen he’s of a wholly other mode. Besides spending his TV dollars as publisher of Sator Press, an independent publishing house that traffics in ambitious genre-defying prose, he’s just dropped his own brain-bending first novel, Solip, from Tyrant Books.

The book is unlike anything you’d expect from an actor, or any other kind of person for that matter. Over the course of 149 pages, it cobbles together a mesmerizing string of tones, following a Beckett-ian narrator who by turns sounds drugged up, prophetic, furious, wistful, demanding, and pissed. It’s full of plagues and horses and strange winds—the kind of book you read in a sitting, then read again to find out what you just put in your body, and then read again to try to find the map of where you are now. Quicker said: it’s fucked.

Ken and I exchanged some emails to talk about the novel, acting, and being a person.

VICE: When and where did you write Solip and where are you now?
Ken Baumann: Most of the book was written between October 2009 and February 2010, in Los Angeles. I live in North Hollywood. I would work on it for about an hour per day, sometimes longer. I often stopped writing after having typed out 455 words. This happened many times, which felt weird, but confirmed that there was a rhythm to the work, and that I shouldn't feel bad about walking away from its concentrated, sickly voice after only an hour or so. The largest edit happened after Michael Kimball sent me a fat package of its manuscript all marked up. He's a brilliant writer and an acute editor. I took most of his advice. I only am now feeling like I can be rid of the book's grammar. I've been answering these questions with my phone and on my computer in my house and at an amphitheater where my wife and a group of friends were about to perform Shakespeare. I feel lighter now, but I feel just as dumb, if not dumber.

You’ve said that you didn't feel like you wrote Solip, but found a voice and were discovering what you were supposed to say as you went along. Do you think writing and acting bleed into each other, like you are playing a role of someone typing under a specific set of conditions or constraints?
That's a good way of framing it, yeah. I often feel like consciousness and my pulsing, icky, charged idea of self is a performance, too—that I only write or act to get out of my head and instead try to borrow someone else's for a while. Writing is definitely more lonely, but it also feels more pure, in that the voice can really be anything and I can let myself be beholden to it. If I were to just open up and say whatever on most sets, I wouldn't have work. Ever. Unless I was also a "goof" and a "really funny guy," and then I'd work in every recent comedy movie, probably. And there's a similarity to both actions when the going's good—when I completely forget my body and head and just fall into some imaginary problem for a while. Everyone's an actor. Look at the high-finance assholes of the past 30 years. I just try to get paid to lie in a benign field, which is what art is.

You mentioned the frame here, and there's a line in the novel that says, "Ain't a performance without a frame." I laughed seeing the word "ain't" in there just now, because it reminds me how often the book changes how it speaks and who it seems to be speaking to, which I think is most often itself. What is the frame of Solip?
I'm wary of naming that frame, but I also don't think I feel one that's solid or even interesting. The people who so willingly lay out exactly what a thing is, or preload its audience with guidepost phrases or ideas or genres, whatever—those people confuse me. But I know that once I had finished the book, it still creeped me out and it felt unfamiliar enough—far away from some blatant X meets Y—that I decided it was worth publishing. Maybe its frame is the weird child that I still feel like I am, marooned in a library in a land of greasy worship, hoping to find a portal to places that feel strange but more true than the desert around.

Do you see this novel as "set" anywhere? Obviously there is a room the narrator seems to be contained in at certain points, but the center shifts so often, and yet there's a very feverish sense of atmosphere to the tone of the book. I wonder, even if there's no clear setting, if you had or have some idea of the layout of the landscape, at least as you approached it during the writing? Perhaps the epigraph from Mahler is important here, "The call of love sounds very hollow among these immobile rocks.”
I’m typing this response in an oncoming 102-degree heat, which feels appropriate. That quote feels like a perfect human exclamation to me, especially in the face of the pornographic want of the "human spirit" that so many new books and movies show off. You've talked about this a lot. I think the thin layers of aching mass that sustain our species could not give less of a fuck about our success or our ability to spiritually move one another, and kinks in the biosphere's disease factory sort of point to a system that's trying to kill us. So that epigraph seemed perfectly suited to both Solip and the cheap transcendence being tossed around by our silly, rapacious little species. It's hysterical, romantic, and doomed. The setting of the book got clear as I wrote it. I did a lot of research about white torture and sensory deprivation, and I think there's a part of me that fantasizes about committing myself to such a chamber, if only for the exotic and total silence. I'd last a day. But I kept thinking about what a voice might sound like after an impossibly long duration of total physical deprivation. How the mind would sing, still. I watched the movie Cube when I was a kid, and I still think about it, especially the idea that this massive and geometric structure is somehow encased in an endless sea of other cubes, being shuffled like a puzzle under some cruel stochastic process, and why. Maybe this book is just a C-movie knockoff of Cube, but without any lights on. I don't know. I'm still scared enough of looking back into the book that I want other people to find out for me.

It seems like film could be pointed out as a big influence on the space of the book overall, like suddenly I'm imagining being stranded on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey and hearing HAL 9000 read this book to me before he kills me in my sleep. Besides the acting, how does your love of film/specific directors influence the way you choose to tell a story?
Well, 2001 is my favorite film, and I have tried to cool my idolization of Kubrick to little success. I love the way Kubrick's movies are loaded with meaning and precision—I curse myself almost every day for not working hard enough to become a new iteration of Kubrick—and his films also feel severely nonhuman that way, which is great. He parallels human stuff like mythos and action and emotion, with the opaque meshwork of chaos and stasis and arbitrary dreams. That aim seems as holy as one could shoot for with art. I hope Solip does something similar. I want to read writing that attempts the camerawork in Irreversible, or the abject pace and light of Antichrist, or the grotesque geometries of The Passion of Joan of Arc. Sometimes I can't help but think cinematically just walking around, which plays right into the purchasing fields of a lot of industries—sometimes I feel so saturated and targeted with common narratives that I want to burn the brunt of my hair off and only speak in garbled psalms. My wife told me once about this kid in high school who went to work on an organic farm in Italy for a summer, and that he came back to New Mexico barefoot, wearing the same outfit for the rest of the semester, only speaking newly learned Italian quietly and to himself, unable to socially function. I know that the real madnesses aren't voluntary, and are actually terrifying and hurtful and hard to cope with, but I think that being so soaked by certain formulaic lights and sweaty glints and winky push ins is just as nuts, and less fun because it makes a lot of people broke.

What are you most afraid of?
Utopia.

Previously by Blake Butler: Anton Chekhov Versus Jeffrey Dahmer

@blakebutler

Hi I'm Bertie, this column is basically a place for me to call bullshit on girl-related things I think are stupid.

Twenty-four hours on, Angelina Jolie's decision to undergo a double mastectomy is still everywhere. Not only was it the first thing I got asked about when I got into work yesterday, but since then it has dominated my Twitter and Facebook feeds and generally just followed me around the internet like that pop-up guy who keeps wanting to share his cam-girl secrets with me. I wouldn't normally let Ang get away with overwhelming my life with her ridiculously perfect face, but it's pretty obvious that she has done an incredibly brave thing. Deciding to share her experience with every single person over breakfast via the New York Times is not something we should underestimate, either. Can you imagine waking up and millions of people are talking about your breasts? That's not something little girls dream about. Or actually, God, maybe it is and I'm just an incorrigible optimist.

It's difficult to empathize with somebody you've never met, but the internet seems to be doing a good job of showing support to a woman who, faced with an 87 percent risk of cancer, bravely decided to follow those numbers and have both of her breasts removed and replaced with implants. Sure, you might have had to sit through The Tourist and maybe you still harbor a fierce grudge about that, but it seems like you'd have to be either stupid or insensitive to belittle Jolie's predicament, especially as it's implied in the NYT piece that she'll be forced to tackle ovarian cancer at some point, too.

Unfortunately, there are lots of stupid and insensitive people on the internet and they're all tweeting the same gag about feeling sorry for Jolie's fiancé, Brad Pitt. (Because ew, can you imagine being married to a woman with no breasts? Poor guy.) Hey, I'm not saying everyone should be completely torn to shreds by this and start weeping into their laptop keyboards, but is a woman—any woman—getting a double mastectomy really something you want to use as fodder for jokes about tits? I'm not going to pretend I'm outraged, I've seen DaddysMoney.com and I'm fully aware that the internet's capacity for idiocy far exceeds whatever energy I can muster to damn it. It just strikes me as being really, really lame:

Oh wow, congratulations on being the worst people on Twitter guys. Way to turn a story around. While it's no surprise Twitter is throwing up some bullshit, I'm actually more interested in trying to work out how and why anybody could have that immediate reaction. (That's called empathizing, BTW.)

Here are some theories.

THEORY #1 – THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT A MASTECTOMY IS
This one doesn't actually seem that farfetched, because judging by Zumani Nutli's tweet, some people seem to be of the opinion that Angelina basically did a DIY jobbie of unzipping and "removing" her breasts from the safety of her own walk-in wardrobe. (I don't know if you read the NYT piece, Zamani, but it took three months and it's not cosmetic.) Oh Ang, how could you take your health into your own hands and make a huge life-changing decision for the benefit of your entire family like that? Brad will cheat for sure.

THEORY #2 – THEY'VE NEVER SEEN A WOMAN'S BODY IN REAL LIFE
If breasts are really the only thing keeping a marriage together, then Emma Watson, Cara Delevingne, and Kaya Scodelario might as well start preparing for lives of lonely spinsterdom. I'm not being a bitch, I'm just saying, the idea that a man would leave his beautiful fiancée because of an uncontrollable obsession with boobs? Ridiculous. Doubly ridiculous is the idea that Brad Pitt would ditch Jolie because she underwent a surgical procedure to stop her getting cancer. These are the type of guys who like to think they're Hunter Moore even though they've never had a real relationship, the kind of guys who prefer enhanced breasts to real ones, anyway. If they'd read the article properly (she's had implants) they probably would've been tweeting about how lucky Brad was that his girl had had a boob job.

THEORY #3 – THEY'RE TEAM JEN (DUH, THIS IS OBVIOUSLY IT)
There is one obvious reason why a whole bunch of people would feel compelled to be rude about Angelina Jolie, and you don't have to look hard to find it. If there was going to be any one factor that could unite the concern of @alberthoward360, @morrismonye, and @AllTheOtherCunts, who's to say it isn't a deep love, reverence, and respect for Rachel from Friends? There are times, though, when even the most devout worshipper of the layered hair and sassy, snappy retorts of the queen of the late 90s needs to step back and say, "Look, Jen is a strong woman and she took a serious blow when Brad and Angelina announced their relationship. But I need to put my personal feelings about this woman to one side and appreciate the difficulty of what she's going through."

BB, Jen will understand. I promise.

Follow Bertie on Twitter: @bertiebrandes

This Woman Who Hates Women Just Made My Day

My Day Out with the London Seduction Society

Deep within a mountain somewhere in west Texas, The Long Now Foundation are hard at work building a 500-foot clock that's been designed to run for 10,000 years. I know that sounds a bit like the folly of a Lone Star oil billionaire, but apparently this massive clock is going to adjust the manner in which we understand time itself, so I suppose that counts as having a purpose.

The team behind the construction—boasting names like Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine and, somewhat bizarrely, Brian Eno—want the clock to help destroy the short-term thinking they believe is plaguing society. Their aim is to engage the population so we all properly consider the ways we should be preparing for the future.

The giant clock might seem a slightly excessive way to do that, but when you've got Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos investing £27.5 million in your project, you don't really need to worry about excess.

Executive director Alexander Rose talked me through the concept.

VICE: Hey. So what's up with this gigantic clock?
Alexander Rose: The clock is an iconic project to inspire other people to get the conversation going about long-term thinking. I was once giving a tour to some IBM engineers and one gentleman said, "You know, this is never going to work. In 3,000 years, they're going to be sacrificing virgins on this thing and all the blood is going to drip into it and it's not going to work." And I said, "That may be, but before you walked in the door here, you weren't thinking 3,000 years in advance, so it's already working."

Sneaky.
Well, what we hope to do is make something so mythic and crazy that people want to tell stories about it and it becomes a meme that can be called upon. When people tell you that you can't do long term things, there will always be the 10,000 year clock.

I guess so—at least until the 10,001th year. What inspired the clock, Alexander?
"The Millennium Clock," a clock that ticked once a year, bonged once a century, and the cuckoo would come out once a millennium. If you make it "forever" or of an astronomic time scale of millions and billions of years it dwarfs the human experience and it doesn't feel like there's anything you can do that's important in that time scale. So we thought, What is the human civilizational moment? If you look back to the last ice age, when agriculture started, that's when large parts of the planet started having what we now call civilization. So that was chosen. If we can look back 10,000 years, then we can look forward 10,000 years.

I kind of see what you mean. Why Texas?
The current location was one that came as part of the funding from Jeff Bezos. When Jeff offered the property in west Texas, it was all private and allowed us to get going much faster. It had the attributes of being high in the desert, which is a great preservation environment away from cities—good for something lasting, away from the churn of cities and wars. We also wanted that distance so that people would have to travel to it, and while traveling they would have some conversations about it. Then, on their way back, they'll hopefully have changed a little bit.

You’re building a giant alarm clock, aren’t you? The future is going to be so pissed.
There are elements of the clock that we're leaving undone for future generations and anniversary events. The idea is that there will be a cool mechanical thing that happens on a year, a decade, a century, a millennium, and then a tenth millennium. We'll only build the year and decade ones, then the others would be left for other people to build in the future.

How are they going to know how to program it? Is there a manual?
Over 10,000 years, the platform dependence goes all the way back to the fundamentals of language, so we started looking at ways of making a modern Rosetta Stone by micro-etching silicone and then casting that into long lasting metal, like nickel. We've created a Rosetta disk, which has thousands of languages with parallel information on them so that anyone who found the disk could hopefully understand as many of the languages on the disk as possible. The later steps may be including some of the documentation alongside the clock and other projects that have several major world languages as part of that.

That’s cool.
With the Rosetta Project, we created the broadest language database and archive in the world. We literally had to collect stuff out of shoeboxes in Papua New Guinea, and we now have documentation of over 2,500 to 3,000 languages. We etched that into silicone using a gallium ion beam and casted that onto nickel so that it could last for a very long time.

That’s pretty amazing. So how long do you think it will be until the giant clock is finished?
I'm not sure.

Do you have an estimate?
Nope.

Really?
No.

Do you know how much it will cost overall?
No.

Well, this interview seems to have drawn to a natural close. Thanks Alexander.

All images by Rolfe Horn.

Follow Camille on Twitter: @camstanden

Read what we think will happen in the future:

In the Future, Your Drug Dealer Will Be a Printer 

Woohoo, It's the Future of War! 

The Future of Japan Is 'Very Dark,' Says Ryu Murakami

Desperation is mostly inseparable from masculinity. Men strain for fame, for female attention, for sad, trivial triumphs over one another. We are a people perpetually trying to figure it all out—flexing in the mirror, using lines we've heard before, trying to seem bold and dignified. We're not cowboys or poets. If we are, we wear it as a disguise. Mostly, we are vulnerable and self-conscious and probably masturbating for the third time on a Tuesday afternoon, because we're off and that Lea Thompson scene in All the Right Moves just came on. We are not men, but almost. Note: columns may also contain William Holden hero worship and meditations on cured meats.

If the name Andrew Dice Clay has any significance to you, it is, inevitably, as the blockheaded, spectacularlyleathered obscenity-dispenser who once looked like some combination of Mad Max and Liberace, who now looks like the guy who lives downstairs from your grandmother and can get you a great deal on calling cards. The perfect avatar for all that slimy, bicep-smooching late-80s male machismo, slicking his hair back in every reflective surface, winking at girls in skirts and when the girls snort in disgust he holds up his arms with a "WHATS-A-MATTA-HONEY?" and then tugs on his crotch and lights another cigarette. The definitive representation of the swaggering, filthy, bombastic "I’M HERE, WATCH WHERE YOU’RE WALKING" New York City, a place memorialized in heavy-handed Spike Lee montages, scored to car horns and relentless come ons, all intolerance and impatience and flamboyance, every accent like bad parody.

Andrew Dice Clay is that man. He is so that man. He is throwing you against a motel minifridge and he is chewing the button off of your jeans. He is shouting in your ear as you place his takeout order, and he is telling you to make sure they don’t forget his extra fucking ketchup, sweetheart. But he is also something else. In a sense, Andrew Dice Clay is the greatest comedian you’ve never heard of.

On December 26 in 1989, under the direction of the recently departed Def Jam maestro, Rick Rubin, Dice Clay, the biggest standup comedian on the planet, recorded The Day the Laughter Died, a two-disc, completely unstructured album at Dangerfield’s (capacity: 250) in New York City. Here, Dice Clay abandons all of his recognized routine. The small, tourist- and couple-heavy audience, there in its post-Christmas malaise, awaiting nursery rhymes and gay bits, instead gets a set almost entirely devoid of conventional jokes. It is an hour and 40 minutes of him squashing the crowd like bugs, making fun of the ugly sweaters some pathetic guy from Texas is dutifully wearing because his girlfriend got it for him, and asking where the telethon for hunchbacks is. It is a lecture on, plainly, not giving a fuck. It is one of the greatest standup comedy albums of all time. It is Dice Clay as empowered and undeterred as any comedian will ever be. You know Rockstar Dice. This Dice was more than that.

His insults are aerobic exercises, welding together as appalling and devastating a collection of words as he can without preparation. The thrill is not in reducing women to bologna-lipped cum troughs, or men to ugly gnomes with dicks the size of Gameboy batteries, but in doing this at all, doing it on the spot, indifferent to your reception. He thrives in those sweaty, claustrophobic settings. He lives to be the adversary.

Louis CK had this to say about Dice Clay: “I see him all the time at The Comedy Store, and he struggles through his sets. But he does it on purpose. Dice is a really interesting case, because he really likes the dark side of comedy. I have a lot of respect for that guy. The act that he packaged into this ridiculous character is very boring to me, the stuff that’s on his albums. But seeing him live in a club in front of, like, 12 people is a great study. He really knows what he’s doing, and he is really interesting doing standup when he is more himself.

“He actually has a double album that nobody really knows about called The Day The Laughter Died. It’s him on Christmas Eve, and there’s almost no one in the crowd, and he’s fucking dying, and he’s fighting with people in the audience and getting heckled. People are walking out. He put it on an album, and this was at the height of his fame.”

His arena shows are about FUCKIN' HOOERS and quotidian inconveniences, texting and Starbucks menus and lane changes, because his audience of howling white philistines needs something they can process easily and celebrate. In that context he is only the balding loudmouth with a keep-my-dick-in-your-mouth-so-I-don’t-have-to-hear-you-talk-honey chauvinism. The audience salutes the mirage, and he respects it because it’s his, but he lives in its cold shadow. The real Dice Clay, The Day the Laughter Died Dice Clay, is fearless and precise. He’s at his best not during rehearsed material, but in improvisational moments, shredding subjects in the audience for their blind adherence to societal conventions. To Dice Clay, they exist specifically to be exposed. It’s not so much target practice as it is shooting a bazooka at an anthill. Frustration swirls into an indignation uninterrupted by reason or basic human respiratory functions until his voice is just a frothy, spitted sputtering of words. The Angry Guy is a tired archetype in comedy, but there is a real beauty in a sincere irritation devoid of all that shrill, contrived Sam Kinison rage. He talks in a whiny, half-annoyed, half-disgusted tone, as if someone just told him they shit their pants and wanted him to change them. He alternates between insouciance and window-pane-rattling God wrath. In the second season of Celebrity Apprentice, when explaining to Donald Trump why his team lost a challenge, he said, “We get there in the morning and there’s no bagels, there’s no butter…”

The real Dice Clay is self-aware, contemplative and insecure, still loud and brutish, probably wiping his hands on his jeans in the parking lot of a Wendy’s with the car idling, but none of that casual disregard for women, morals, and condoms. He is volatile and almost fragile. The man perched on stage with the Tony Manero cool, smirking and taking long drags from his cigarette is cemented back there in 1987, talking about Old Mother Goose (he fucked her). His latter-day Howard Stern appearances see him interrupting Howard’s GOTCHA revelations with "See the thing is" and "Ya not LISTENING tuh me" insistences.

He is someone who sees comedy, the stage, the canvas for performance, simply as an amplifier. When you know, with such profound certainty, exactly who you are, you are able to pretend to be anything else for recreation. Dice Clay has played the racist, the homophobe, the inattentive sex-haver, the repugnant philanderer. It was all for you, for them. It should be seen as no less a stain on his character than it is on Scorsese’s for portraying unrepentant gangsters as protagonists, than it is on Notorious BIG’s for portraying ruthless thieves as urban heroes. It is an artifice. It is a means of engaging, of grabbing you by the throat and making you reconsider why people behave the way they do, but more importantly, making you laugh at something that is ridiculous.

“Why do they call it multiple sclerosis? Can’t you get it just once? Everybody I meet’s got multiple sclerosis.”

He does three voices— voices women make, voices dentists and nerds and people who use Twitter make, and the voice he makes. You either get fucked or never fuck or fuck like he does, like some rabid Caligula disciple. He sees the universe in such absolute terms. There is no subtlety or room for nuance. As he once said, “I don’t understand bisexuals; you either suck dick or you don’t.” He is crude and indelicate, blowing money on garish furniture, his dih-vawse, blackjack, walking to get the newspaper in his underwear.

Few people have ever so willingly abandoned discretion and decency just for a laugh, detonating everything in sight and cackling as the pieces fall to the ground. He’s Paulie Walnuts making conversation on a car ride from New Brunswick to Binghamton to pick up stolen iPod Nanos. On Dice Clay’s podcast, which debuted last week, in the back of a truck in Las Vegas at two in the morning, a question from the audience about his favorite TV show growing up spiraled from “Petticoat-fuckin-Junction” to “Petti-cum-junction” to “Petti cum all over my fucking dick,” to a six-minute absurdist recollection of his first orgasm, which was reached when he had an itchy penis and decided to scratch it by having sex with a “furry glove that my mother got me at Sears.”  

In 1990 the New York Times said witnessing his standup is to “come to a fresh realization of what a Nazi rally must have been like.” But to say he is just some wretched misogynist is an inaccurate, lazy hypothesis reached by a generation prone to immediate outrage. On Howard Stern, Dice indirectly admitted to his wife regularly licking his asshole; in a Slate interview he talked about how exciting it is when the girl gets on top and “bangs the shit out of you.” He says he doesn’t watch porn because it’s artificial and implausible. He has an entire bit about being “Richard Nixon in that ass,” and he talks about girls needing to make sure there aren’t any toilet paper bits in their vaginas because he loves to eat pussy. He is maybe not a Romantic, but he is not a lecherous date rapist either. Dice is an instigator; as eager to elicit a human response as he is curious what the response will be. He is the deal with it dog, a giant neon billboard of him squeezing a waitress’s ass with "HI, HATERS" written in blinking Christmas lights at the bottom.

There is a kind of spectacular wrongness and stridence to the Dice Clay persona that is almost charming, the way it captures a specific place and time in America. It is like seeing a cartographer’s map before the discovery of a spherical Earth. Whether or not he—Andrew Clay Silverstein—actually is this person should matter little to the audience’s consumption of his act; there was and is something identifiable about it, a familiarity that you can recognize and that makes you smile, even if it also makes you groan. He is the taste of cheap light beer or your uncle farting on the couch in his sleep. He is a character you could revile if he were real, but repackaged as a comfortingly blatant imitation. Laugh at this guy you recognize without worrying about him calling you a faggot. He is someone so willing to be the douchebag, debasing himself for our enjoyment.

Photo by Adrienne Brawley, via

If you see him now, the aesthetic is the same, but Dice is more subdued—kind of a lumpy, deflated, stubbly symbol of excess, of hubris stretched thin over a smoldering ball. He holds his cigarette but rarely lights it, compulsively putting it to his mouth, waving it around, holding this whole routine like a relic from a better time. You wait, you nod, you chant along to the bits in unison. If you’re patient, there’s something else there, too.

Previously by John Saward:

Why I Love Watching Ron Jeremy Fuck

Octomom Masturbating Is the 38th Wonder of the World

Infomerciless

John Saward likes O.V. Wright and eating guacamole with no pants on. He lives in Connecticut. Follow him on Twitter @RBUAS.

Andrew Ucles (you-cools), the young hunter/conservationist who runs around in the wilderness wrestling wild beasts with his bare hands, tends to elicit a bemused, somewhat scornful reaction from the punters. “He's a lunatic!” they cry. Indeed, few people would think to smear themselves with intestine-juice and hide under a roo corpse in order to catch a swamp hawk, or scare a pride of big cats off their prey just to see if they'll attack. The sheer physicality of the 25-year-old's feats, which include running down feral dogs, pigs and wrasslin' crocodiles as well as plucking birds from the sky are somewhat confounding, especially when combined with his natural flamboyance and love of Michael Jackson (he practises moonwalking while staking out his prey). Maybe it is a form of madness, or at least impulse; but it is not without purpose.

For most of his life Ucles has been crashing his way through the undergrowth towards a pedestal in that lonely pantheon of mad, steel-balled outdoorsmen including Steve Irwin (one of Ucles's heroes), Bear Grylls (whom he begrudgingly respects) and maybe the Turtle Man (who I'd like to see him wrangle). There is always a raw end to this kind of entertainment, no matter how slick it gets, and Ucles is down for getting as dirty as the best of them.

Speaking to him in his parents' home in one of the low-rent suburbs that sprawl south of Wollongong, where Ucles completed an Environmental Science degree, I find a man not greatly removed from his on-camera persona. He is lithe, self-assured, and from an interviewer's point of view, hard to control, often prowling around the room to animate his tales.

The Truth of Africa

Ucles has recently returned from a 10 week trip to Kenya, where he accumulated some 50 hours of footage shot by a young local who'd never used a camera before. The trip was ostensibly self-funded; some of Wollongong's pubs and nightclubs threw fundraisers in his honour. Eventually though, he might get his money back. He has entered into a ‘talent holding agreement’ with Discovery International. The Africa tapes, he says, 'blew Discovery away.' No shit. Aside from rolling with poachers and almost getting speared for trespassing, Ucles racked up some heavy feats on camera, like outrunning a charging elephant, swimming with hippos and fucking with a whole bunch of lions.

VICE: What's the endgame when you do that? You get the animals to a point where they're captured and then you release them, but it's gotta be different with a lion or a hippo, right?
Andrew Ucles: Definitely, because it's the sort of animal that catches you, chooses whether or not to release you (laughs). OK... the way that I started looking at Africa when I was half way through was, this has all been one big lie... to bring tourism to Africa, a lot of it is based on how dangerous and ferocious the animals are... a lot of it is media talk. Don't get me wrong, you get these animals in a bad situation, and they are extremely dangerous. To honestly be attacked by a wild lion, you've really got to go out of your way. In a controlled environment, these are dangerous animals. I've always said, what is worse, a wild animal, or a tame one? I go, a tame one, because they're not scared of people. Generally wild animals have a fear of people. The only reason they want to attack you is out of threat, not out of food. That's about 90 percent of the time.

At the end of the day, when I had my confrontations with lions, and there's footage of me chasing a pride of lions, literally, it was the footage I wanted to get off the trip... there's great footage of me walking side by side with a lion... as I stopped, he stopped. I actually went down on the ground and started moaning as if I've been injured and start dragging myself on the ground. The animal was so intelligent, because he'd been watching me over the course of about a kilometre, he knew I wasn't injured, he knew I was trying to bring him in close, so he sat and watched me as I put on this little performance for about ten-fifteen minutes. He knew very well what I was trying to do. When I stood up he took off.

Did any of the Africans just think you were fucking crazy for doing that shit?
They all thought I was crazy. They called me The White Wizard. They saw me capture a range of animals that they don't touch, they just don't go near.

You've obviously got brass buttons. What does it take for you to actually reach a level of fear? For me, if I'm wading into a croc infested swamp, I'm already fairly scared. Where are you at, at a base level?
I guess that fear level starts coming into play when I don't have control anymore, and I think that's what fear is– the feeling that you've lost the essence of control. For instance, because I told you I had the edge on that elephant– yeah there was fear, but I knew I could outrun him over a distance. If he'd kept gaining on me, then obviously my fear level's going to increase. If I trip over and he's on top of me, then my fear's hittin' like a fuckin' peak!

Was that your most intense moment in Africa?
Well, I saw a man get attacked by a baboon. That was pretty hectic. I went to an animal sanctuary because I needed to acquire some experience of handling primates. In Australia the closest thing we've got to a primate is a black possum. One of the worst mistakes you can do is be a white man walking into somewhere in Kenya with a little bit of money and say to someone, 'I need experience, can you show me?' because they'll all say 'yeah, I've got experience, I can do it.' And that's exactly what happened when I walked into this animal sanctuary. This guy goes, 'oh yeah, I've held plenty of baboons and plenty of monkeys before, I can show you how it's done.' You pay me thirty bucks and I'll show you. They're always willing, I kid you not, they're always willing to put their life on The Edge for like twenty, thirty bucks. And they do! So anyway... he took me into this enclosure with these smaller monkeys and I go, 'I'm looking to handle a bigger monkey', you know, one which is a bit ferocious, cos we wanted to set up some footage of me wrangling with a baboon.

Which are renowned for being vicious, right?
Amazingly vicious. You know, you've got large baboons which come up to waist height, and then obviously you've got the smaller ones. So I thought, well, I'll probably just go an average sized one. So he sets up a cage trap and calls me early in the morning and says, 'I got one. And he's really, really mad.'

So I saw it in the cage, and it was going crazy. Trying to shake out, trying to grab you through the cage... we didn't have the camera on and I had everyone helping me around the cage. The guy says, ‘I’m gonna grab it by the tail and hand it to you.’ I go, ‘that doesn’t sound right...’ He says you kinda shake it around and stuff, and it loses its co-ordination. I go, ‘alright, no worries. I got the trust in you.’ I lift up the cage door and he grabs it by the tail... it’s screeching, going crazy... anyway, he manages to pull it out. I think for the first six seconds he had it under control. It happened so fast. The monkey jumped back onto the cage and then used that as a leverage point to jump back onto him. Boom, boom... it took a chunk. It took a chunk like that [indicates fist-sized morsel of forearm]. To the bone. It could have been a lot worse, cos that monkey was one pissed off monkey... If it woulda got him on the throat, which it was trying to, fuck, it would have annihilated him. I’m spewing, cos I never got the altercation on camera. It would have been perfect for Discovery. They love that sort of stuff.

So, do you find a line for yourself there? Do you go, ‘well, I’m not gonna fuck with a baboon?’
Yeah, 100 percent. At the end of the day... I don’t like monkeys anyway. If you catch them, there’s a very good chance they’re gonna catch you.

Is it true that you wrestled a hammerhead shark?
A small one, yes.

You can’t really train for that, right?
No, you can’t.

Meat Puppet

Ucles first attracted attention from the somewhat mainstream media in 2010 when he announced his plan to spend 100 days alone in western New South Wales bushland. Then 21, he accompanied this statement of intent with a video in which he implored would-be rescuers not to come to his aid. The purpose of the trip, he told me, was “definitely thrown out of context. The media never picked up on why I went out there. It was a message to the Government to show how much of a problem we have here in Australia with feral animals. Western NSW has one of the highest densities of feral animals–foxes, rabbits, feral goats, feral pigs, carp... the first thing you need to do is identify that you cansurvive for a hundred days out there... you need to identify a staple food source–I mean, a food you can always acquire.”

He left after facing unexpected, potentially mortal hardship during the first weeks of winter, feeling, after 67 days in the wilderness, that he’d at least proved the point to himself.

“The hilarious thing is,” he says, “the reason why the executives reached out was the Capturing Rabbits Using Snakes video that went viral. It's funny how the attention for me has come from this stupid thing.When I was doing it I didn't think anything of it. 'You've confronted the remotest part of the Zambezi River, you've went out and survived, neck-deep, 67 days in the Australian bush... and people are picking up on six minutes of you catching snakes? It's amazing.

“I'm looking at the formula... I've seen the niche for a very long time... all you've gotta do is give me the opportunity and I know exactly how I can craft my own thing. I know exactly.

“We've all seen a hundred people catch a snake, big deal, we've all seen a hundred people jump on a crocodile... what about if I do this: the crocodile is a very curious animal. Why don't I go catch a feral pig? I hitch him up to a tree where he can only move a little bit. I've strung him up and I've attached another little bit of rope to his front arm. I then go all the way down to the bank where I dig a hole, right? Cover myself in mud. You can't see me, you can't see me. And all I do is, I start playing, like a puppet, with that feral pig. The idea is I can get the crocodile to pass me, or over the top of me... that's where I see documentary going. It likens me to an animal in the moment...

“A lot of presenters, the way they get caught out is when they start losing respect for the animals. There's a line. There's a very fine line between getting amazing footage that shows the animal's behaviour and then going over that line. I think in wanting to get into this industry and wanting to lay the benchmark for that sort of stuff, you've gotta know where that line is at. Because there's a very fine line between you provoking the animal to see what instincts he's got, and then provoking him too much to where he goes, oh, 'tonight's the night I'm gonna kill you.'”

I ask about his plans beyond a successful TV show. Would he like to own a reserve, or maybe a zoo? He says he would like to be a shikari, if he had to pick. “My happiness honestly comes from chasing animals,” he tells me. “I know it sounds crazy or insane but that's where my happiness is. Not in driving a fuckin' Bentley or a Ferrari or having a mansion. I'll continue to do it. Even if nothing eventuates, I'll still be doing it.”

See more strange stories involving animals:

Animal Penises Are Super Weird, You Guys

Are Drones Really Helping to Save Rhinos and Elephants from Poachers?

After my sweet release from prison last year, I struggled for about a year looking for a decent job. I badly wanted to work—it was like I like I had to take an explosive urination in my pants, that’s how urgent it was. I quickly became discouraged when my first ten applications were shot down. This was unusual for me. In my former, preprison life, I had been hired on the spot a number of times for waiter jobs, but it just wasn’t working this time around. I figured that maybe it was the bad economy, maybe it was my long hair and moustache, or maybe restaurant managers checked on my name and found out about my checkered past. Regardless, I was frustrated quickly and basically quit.

It wasn’t like I was totally broke. Between the columns I wrote for VICE and welfare, I earned enough to scrape buy. Plus, thanks to the good credit rating I had built up back when I was living high on the hog during my drug-dealing days, I bagged up a $20,000 credit line with 0 percent APR. Suddenly, getting a job wasn’t really all that necessary. My girl wasn’t working either, and we had just suffered for two years without each other, so we took a long vacation together.

However, I fell into a self-destructive state with my idle hands doing dirt—though I gotta admit, it was actually a helluva a good time. A whole lottta drinking, rapacious bone sessions left, right, up, down, and all around from the ceiling to the floor and up against the garage door... Eventually I got reckless with my drug use, which I thought of as consequence-free since welfare was giving me money, and I didn’t have to work for it. Besides, I had spent a couple years of living like a monk in prison, so I felt like I deserved to BALL until the downfall. That downfall hit when I got in legal trouble again, and parole put their boot on my neck.

It was obvious to a retarded duck and also everyone in my family that I needed to get a job more for the structure than anything else—that way I wouldn’t get stopped-and-frisked for no reason by some cock-smoking pork chop in Queens. I went hard on round two of the job search. I had all these outpatient rehab groups to go to every week, so I needed flexibility with my hours, which really made waiting tables the only option, and that was what I was most experienced at anyway. After getting shut down at 25 or so places, my confidence and self-esteem were shot. I was in disbelief. I felt lower than low, and stress was mounting, ‘cause I was dropping dough like a dummy all over my credit cards. I couldn’t help but think about selling drugs again… Only weed this time 'cause it’s so much safer, but thank baby Jesus’s penis, my girl is smart enough to tell me to shut shut shut my fuckin’ cock-polisher any time I even entertain those thoughts.

I applied to be a nude male model and was told I wasn’t boner-able enough, which was a solid shot to my manhood. I thought I was mucho fuego, and there I was telling this sleaze-breezy pimp that I’d happily let my nuts hang for the camera, and he sneered, “Nah, you’re not tall enough.” I was very close to agreeing to being in porn or sacrificing myself to the fat horny ones at bachelorette parties.

I was due for one more indignity before things really got ugly. Part of my prison routine consisted of fastidiously exercising like a crazy man, so I’ve always seriously considered personal training or something like that, but I was too busy being a doped-up and drunk toto-eating bum to take the classes and get certified like a responsible go-getter. I decided to try to get a position to train at a top health club by sliding in the backdoor, working as a janitor before ascending to the top of the training game. I was ready to pay my dues and live out the American rags-to-riches melodrama, and the guy at the gym was ready to hire me. He was laughing at the notion that a skinny cracker with a BA from some pretentious college was going to be emptying his garbage can and laundering his sperm socks, but lo and behold there was an impasse. As we got my hours straight and agreed that I would be paid $8.25 an hour for the first few weeks, while it was established that I could properly mop a floor and dispose of gym members’ discarded sperm socks, the manager received an email from HR—the background check came back, and I was not fit to be a lowly fuckin’ janitor, thanks to the time I got caught with an amount of cocaine that was above the arbitrary cutoff that makes me a felon for life. The manager told me he was sorry, but absolutely nothing could be done. I was not janitor material.

Finally, a couple months ago by some magical miracle, a highly bonerable restaurant in Brooklyn hired me as a server. I’m 99.9 percent sure that they googled me, but they were forgiving enough not to care about me playing with some cocaine back in 2004.

I cannot stress enough how lucky I am to have found this job. Most parolees are not this lucky. Most parolees cannot pronounce Beaujolais or rock a look that makes you acceptable to all the moneyed hip people who show up at the restaurant. Sometimes all a cracker needs is a chance. Unfortunately, many people on parole are never given that chance, so they revert to doing dirt, like I almost did. It’s better to be lucky than good, I guess.

Bert Burykill is the pseudonym of our prison correspondent, who has spent time in a number of prisons in New York State. He tweets here.

Previously: Bert Meets a Real Rapper Who’s a Year Out of Prison

You probably didn’t learn very much about the sex lives of animals in school because your poor science teachers had enough to worry about without saying the words “elephant cock” in front of a room of teenagers. But animal sex and the evolved features of animal sex organs are often wonderful things, and there’s no reason that today’s young people shouldn’t learn about the tiny—and sometimes startlingly large—wonders that are animal penises.

So we got some of our contributors together and wrote about animal dicks. If you are excited to learn more about animal sex, we encourage you to watch Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno series. Or just go to the park and see if you can catch squirrels fucking.

Sea Horses

Photo via Flickr user jimg944

Did you emerge from the head of your father’s dick as a fully formed baby? Congratulations, you’re probably a sea horse. Sea-horse females impregnate males during one-night stands and leave them to foster their young without so much as paying child support, like a Beyoncé song in reverse.

Courtship begins when the female and male start scraping their tails along the sea floor. (Hot!) The male has his head tucked into his chest the entire time because he’s a little pussy bitch. The female circles around him, forcing him to pay attention to her colors. Then she grabs him with her tail and penetrates him. (Yesssss…) They swim face to face, locked together, as she excretes up to 600 eggs into his brood pouch. Then she fucks off forever. 

After just a few weeks, the male undergoes contractions and finally blasts a bunch of miniature sea horses out of his little sea-horse dick.

-Kara Crabb

Echidnas

Photo via Flickr user Reilly

The echidna is an endangered egg-laying mammal native to Australia and New Guinea. If you’ve ever heard of it, it was probably in the context of Knuckles the Echidna, the red guy from Sonic the Hedgehog that almost no one remembers. It’s nicknamed the spiny anteater, but people should call it the alien penis creature because look at this thing, it’s got four freaking heads on its shaft. Echidnas' dick heads are called rosettes, and all four can ejaculate. But if you're picturing these spiky beasts shooting four streams of cum as if their dicks were those sprinklers that kids play in, get that image out of your brain—it’s actually more like a gun, according to National Geographic:

The reason why the echidna’s penis has four heads is still up for grabs. The female echidna has two love canals and Stewart [Nicol, echidna sex specialist] believes that the penis works like a double double-barrelled shotgun, firing out of the two heads on one side, and then again quite quickly on the other. 

OK, but how does it pee? Does it just spray everywhere? Actually, echidnas only use their dicks for fucking. For everything else they have a multipurpose hole called a cloaca. The males poop and pee from their cloacae, and the females also use them for laying eggs, because even though these guys are mammals, they lay eggs like birds or reptiles. Truly, these are marvelous creatures. Here’s a video of a zoologist arousing a male echidna. Do not watch it.

-Ryan Grim

Slugs

Photo via Wikipedia

Slugs are gross, but the process by which more slugs are made is even grosser. When a slug gets horny, it leaves a trail of special hormone-infused slime to let other slugs know that it's DTF. If another horny slug gets a whiff of the slime—slugs are hermaphrodites and any two of them can reproduce—it will follow it to its source and give the other slug a little bite on the ass to let it know that it also wants to bone. Once they've established that they both wanna bump uglies, they set off together to find an overhang (like the underside of a branch, or the bottom of a ledge) where they can do it. 

First they cuddle up together in a little circle and start to spoon. After about an hour of this (boooooring), they produce a special rope made of mucus, which, still entwined, they slide down. 

And that's when their dicks come out. They're blue, semitransparent, and emerge from tiny little holes in the back of their heads. Their penises coil together, then fan out to make the weird blue, flower-orb thing you can see in the above photo. 

And then they hang there, pumping semen back and forth, until both slugs are fertilized, at which point they drop to the ground. 

-Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

Cats

Photo via Flickr user Hunter-Desportes

The internet has given cats a wholly undeserved reputation for being cute. Sure, there are plenty of adorable felines out there in the world, but the truth of their sex lives is almost too horrible to think about. The cat penis is the most mutated hellspawn in all of dickdom. Cat sex is painful, and the cat penis is an instrument of torment and rape.

The cat penis is covered in somewhere between 120 and 150 backward-pointing penile spines, which measure around one millimeter long. (You can see some closeups here.) These spines prevent the female cat from escaping the sex act until the male has ejaculated. If she does try to run, the spines will rip the walls of her vagina asunder. This is the reason that when cats fuck it sounds like the female is being tortured—it’s because she is being tortured. The larger the spines are, the more male hormones are present in the cat. I imagine there are parties in feline society where cats measure the barbs on their dicks, though there’s an old saying between cats, “It’s not the size of the cock barb that matters, it’s how badly you maim the vagina.”

-Dave Schilling

Ducks

Photo via Flickr user Glen Bowman

First of all, all duck sex is all pretty much rape. Female ducks are not happy about getting it on and have evolved twisty vaginas to protect themselves from unwanted semen. This has led to male ducks evolving “elaborate corkscrew-shaped penises, the length of which correlates with the degree of forced copulation males impose on female ducks,” as a scientist who studies duck sex wrote in Slate. The penis also comes out of the duck’s body wayyy fast. This is what an emerging duck erection looks like, slowed down to one-tenth normal speed:

Gross. Aren't you glad you're not a lady animal?

-Harry Cheadle

More on dicks:

How to Suck an Uncut Cock

Seka, Raising Penises for Three Generations

Informerciless

Coupland toys with Canadianisms in everything he does, but nothing compares to the work he has shown recently at the Daniel Faria Gallery in Toronto—QR-code paintings alongside cheeky Group of Seven landscapes which distort the Canadian memory. As he notes below, barely anyone outside of Canada knows what the Group of Seven is—in fact, I'd like to argue that many Canadians have no idea what the Group of Seven is, either. The Group of Seven were a group of painters who defined Canadian landscape art in the early 19th century. In other words, every painting of a tree refers to them unknowingly.

Douglas Coupland is also sick of email, or so he said once. I understand. Most of us are so caught up in the email world that we forget that a reality exists outside of that.

And yet, the Vancouver-based writer and artist prefers to do email interviews. But is there any way to make an email interview more interesting?

To spice things up, we opted for a JPEG interview. I just wrote down questions on pieces of paper, photographed the questions, and fired them off to the West Coast.

It was up to Coupland to decide how to reply. He replied with JPEG answers—words on paper, in various fonts. Each background is descriptive of what the question is about. Through a series of back-and-forth digital photos, Coupland and I chatted about Dubai, what he learned in Tokyo, and how he looks back on the prenovelist era of his youth (with a shudder). I’m not sure if he likes his handwriting, but he came to one conclusion. You’ll see below.

Follow Nadja on Twitter: @nadjasayej

Also from Nadja Sayej:

The Gayest Story Ever Told

When ecstasy became widely available three decades ago, it was largely consumed by suburban white kids wearing baggy cargo shorts who sucked pacifiers in abandoned warehouses, while listening to electronic music of some sort or other until they collapsed in exhaustion. Over the past decade, it seemed to fall out of favor with drug users, who veered more toward cocaine and other stimulants to fuel their partying needs. Then some narcotics-marketing genius (I’m convinced this is a real job) decided to rebrand MDMA, ecstasy’s key ingredient, as “molly,” and everyone from Kanye to Rick Ross to your little sister at this very moment is putting it in his or her mouth and asshole with reckless abandon. The hip-hop community’s embrace of the drug has been especially striking, since historical stereotypes dictate that rappers are normally more interested in chilled-out drugs like cough syrup and weed. But one hip-hop group from Brooklyn is not onboard. Stereo Marz, a trio who formed earlier this year, titled their debut track “Anti-Molly,” and the message is pretty clear:  “Yo, this drug is fucking wack! / [they] ain’t fucking with that molly / and if you do you can’t come to my party.” I spoke with two of Stereo Marz’s three members, Desi Dez and Shaun “Bizy” Gabriel, about what was wrong with a drug that makes you love strobe lights and songs and sticking your tongue down some stranger’s throat all night long. 

VICE: Why do you hate molly so much? 
Desi Dez: I’m disgusted, in fact, very disgusted with all these artists being big advocates for this molly thing. We’re totally against that—for us, it’s weak. We don’t feel that. 

Shaun “Bizy” Gabriel: The atmosphere in schools has changed in the past five years with kids doing molly. They’re selling it in candy wrappers, tricking kids.

Why do you think its popularity has increased so much over the past few years? Most rappers seem to love it.
Desi: That’s the reason! All these top-notch artists are the voice for this drug, so the younger kids see it as cool. Same with any propaganda, if it’s repeated enough, people just accept it.

Bizy: I don’t know if people are being paid to rap about molly, but I’ve heard people say that could be a possibility. It just came out of nowhere. What we do know is it’s being promoted every day. 

Do you think molly will become a sort of new crack epidemic?
Desi: Definitely. It’s targeted at kids. That’s what it’s geared up for. The suppliers are going to put more stuff in to make it more addictive, and by that time, you’ve got a lost generation caught up on this, just like what the crack game did. It’s all a setup. 

Do you have any parting words for rappers who can’t get enough of it?
Bizy: Man, pop the molly up your ass! We don’t respect molly.

More about molly on VICE:

The Dutch Love Ecstasy So Much Their Dirt Is Toxic

I Used My Stock Market Millions to Throw Raves and Sell Drugs

SiHKAL: Shulgins I Have Known and Loved

The UK's mental health institutions came under fire this weekend, when the British Psychological Society (BPS) launched an attack on those engaged in the rival profession of psychiatry. The BPS argue that it's wrong to treat mental illnesses as a biological problem that can be fixed by doctors with tons of drugs. They say it's time for a "paradigm shift" in the way mental health patients are treated and that diagnoses like autism and schizophrenia are neither valid nor useful. We should, the BPS argued, be looking more at how social and psychological factors contribute to mental illness.

A supporting argument for that arrives when you look into the problem of discharging psychiatric patients back into public life. It's all well and good tending to people while they're institutionalized, but if they're not armed with ways to deal more easily with the outside world once the meds run out, what chance do they ever have of integrating back into society? An unfortunate side effect of that problem is that patients become dependent on being in care, as they know that it's the only place where their problems will be effectively addressed and dealt with.

My friend Alice is one of those people, and has described her dependency as an addiction to psychiatric hospitals. Which struck me as odd at first, but when you imagine being in the outside world as something that spurs on depression and suicidal thoughts, I suppose it makes sense. Alice was eight years old when she was first admitted to a psychiatric ward. She stayed there for seven months after being incorrectly diagnosed with autism and has been in and out since. I spoke to her about her about her addiction.

Alice with one of her paintings.

VICE: Hey Alice. Why were you admitted to a psychiatric ward when you were only eight years old?
Alice: I had bad anger issues as a child, and instead of social services realizing it was because I was being physically abused, I was sent to a psychiatric ward and told I had autism. I was at boarding school for six years after coming out of hospital, then I was in care. Mental hospitals feel like my second home and I’m still struggling with mental illness now.

How did the doctors eventually realize that you're not autistic?
When I was 15, social services did an investigation with the police into my home life. The police were coming round my house frequently because I’d call them after someone close to me had been really violent towards me, but someone close to them would call them back saying I'd lied.

Did you ask for help?
I called helplines all the time. I’d call Childline and the NSPCC and I always felt frantic because I was scared of my environment. After the investigation, they realized that my behavioral problems were due to my home life and not autism. Autism is a lifelong condition—I wasn’t showing the symptoms any more and it’s not something you can "grow out" of.

Do you feel let down by the system?
Yeah, I do. I’m worried that this will never end, or that the only way it will end is if I’m dead. I was on the waiting list for therapy for a year and a half before I went into hospital. At 17, I was living on my own with no family support and struggling to cope. I spoke to my head of sixth form and told her I was suicidal and depressed. Nothing happened and I waited for my appointment for a year and a half before I went back into hospital. It was a relief. If I had a referral and help earlier on, I wouldn’t have had to go back into hospital. I ended up dropping out of school and it’s now been four years and I’m still waiting for the therapy.

A selection of Alice's paintings.

Wow. Were you monitored while you were staying on the ward?
Yeah, but people snuck in weed, scales, pills, alcohol—all of that. I was around people who were a danger to themselves and others, but these things weren't monitored. If we were feeling unsafe and had pills or razors, it was our responsibility to tell staff. It doesn’t make much sense if you don’t have a clear mind and want to hurt yourself. Why would you ask for help if you were in that state?

Was there anyone you felt particularly scared of?
There was a guy with a foot fetish who begged me to show him my feet. I said "Good morning" once and he grabbed my boob and started screaming that I was a bitch, but the two nurses on duty continued their conversation. The girls are put in quite vulnerable positions, so I would try to stay in my room and just paint.

Have you heard of people lying so they could stay in longer?
Yeah, obviously. I was one of them. We were all definitely still sick, but they wanted to discharge us earlier than we should have been so it looked like treatment in that particular ward was effective. We’d be running around scared that we’d be released to no family, friends, or support. At one point, being released was my worst fear.

Have you met anyone else who's addicted to mental hospitals?
I wouldn’t say this lady was addicted on purpose; she was ill and she couldn’t survive outside of them. Her name was Cotton, she was about 70 and had bipolar. She’d been in and out of mental hospitals since she was 18. There was another guy on our ward who was around her age, and they'd met in hospital around the time she first went in. So the cycle of coming back to hospital has obviously been going on for a while. 

Cotton ended up getting engaged to this guy. It’s hard to meet people outside of psychiatric wards, I suppose. They must have felt like soul mates always bumping in to each other. About 40 years ago, they snuck off and got caught having sex. That’s about the most exciting it gets in there.

Are people always scared of leaving?
Yeah. There were loads of young patients, around 16 years old, and they refused to change. They wanted to stay because outside isn’t nice for people like us. Also, they thought if they stopped cutting and being self-destructive, people would stop caring and forget about them, but we’re already forgotten.

Did you feel like that?
To an extent. I had the worst relationship with my mom, but we were closest when I was most ill. She was incredibly caring and loving towards me—more than she’d ever been. I suppose I thought that the more ill I got, the more she would care.

When was the last time you were in hospital?
Two days ago. It wasn’t a psychiatric ward, it was because I was on a drip for two days because I took 32 paracetamol. Then I was discharged.

Why do you think mental hospitals are so addictive?
When you’re inside, you feel the safest you’ve ever been. You become so dependent on other people instead of them helping you make decisions for yourself, so I now don’t know how I’d survive on the outside world. You're away from reality, completely absorbed in another world. I loved it, and the thought of leaving frightened me. When all the help and support is taken away, it can be really scary. You don't want to get out while you're in there, which I suppose explains why they're so addictive.

Follow Mica on Twitter: @MicaSpeaks

More stuff about mental illness:

Inside the Loony Disco

Manic Depression

Photographing the Sweet Crazies of Addis Ababa

Between World War II and the fall of Communism, many fled Soviet-controlled East Germany and headed westward. The stories of these dissidents, defectors, and hardworking citizens who were simply looking for a better life have been exhaustively documented. But much less is known about the histories of the few who headed against the tide, from west to east, repulsed by capitalism. Victor Grossman was one such person. 

Born Steve Wechsler in New York City in 1928, Victor’s political ideology was shaped by his experiences living in America during the Great Depression and the events of the Spanish Civil War. After earning an economics degree from Harvard, his communist ideals led him to earn a simple living as a factory worker. In 1950, in the beginning stages of the Korean War, Victor was drafted and while stationed in Germany, his left-wing past was uncovered by the military. Fearing a court-martial for his beliefs, he sought refuge in the Soviet bloc, changing his name to Victor Grossman and settling among like-minded comrades in the German Democratic Republic. 

For 30 years, Victor thrived in the GDR as a journalist and author. He published numerous books on US history and culture, lectured frequently, and hosted a popular radio show that introduced East Germans to the antiestablishment folk songs of Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Phil Ochs, and Bob Dylan. Despite his criticisms of the GDR establishment, Victor still felt that he was seeing his ideal—“an antifascist state with economic security for everybody”—transformed into utopian reality. By the late 80s, however, it became apparent that the Soviet system could no longer sustain itself and would soon collapse under its own weight. Victor came to the bleak realization that he would have to “start over from zero.” 

In 1994, he returned to the USA for the first time, where he was officially discharged from the army, 44 years after being enlisted. He remains today in Berlin and continues to write prolifically in German. In 2003 he published an English-language autobiography, Crossing the River: A Memoir of the American Left, the Cold War, and Life in East Germany. Regardless of what you think about his political convictions, Victor’s ideological steadfastness is impressive. In a way he seems to be a man out of time, which made me think that speaking with him could provide not just a window to the past, but a different context for viewing the present.

Victor near his apartment on Karl-Marx-Allee.

VICE: When did you first become disillusioned with capitalism? Was it a gradual progression or was it one event? 
Victor Grossman: The 1930s were a left-wing period. My first recollection from a newsreel was the big sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, which broke General Motors. I remember that and [what was happening in] Spain, the soup lines and college graduates selling apples on the corner to make a living. My father was an art dealer. Who buys art in depression times? It was often tight, but we never went hungry. We were never really down and out, especially because we had a bungalow in New Jersey in an experimental single-tax community called Free Acres. It was very simple; it had running cold water and no electricity. And it was wonderful, just wonderful. We ran around barefoot all day. It was like Huckleberry Finn. A lot of people living there were bohemians from New York and left-wingers. Some of the nicest people in that place were left-wingers who really determined my thinking. 

You went to Harvard, but after graduation you started working in a factory. Why? 
When I graduated Harvard, the Communist party secretary from Boston came to us and said, “You’ve got a Harvard diploma, but our party is supposed to be a workers’ party, and we don’t have enough workers. Have any of you considered becoming workers?” I was one of three people who said yes. I was provided with an address in Buffalo. I hitchhiked there and walked to this black neighborhood. I came to this rundown wooden house, and on the porch was a middle-aged black lady in a rocking chair. I said, “I’m looking for Hattie Lumpkin, do you know where I can find her?” She said, “That’s me.” She was the head of Buffalo’s Communist Party. 

Hattie’s place was Buffalo’s left-wing hub. The family her daughter had worked for had been leftists; they had asked her to sit at the table with them to eat. This was absolutely unheard of. She became a Communist. At first, Hattie had told her to get the hell out with her atheist ideas, but they argued and Hattie was convinced. Hattie’s place became my home away from home when I worked the awful graveyard shift at the factory.

Victor’s Harvard yearbook photo, 1949.

Did anyone at the factory find out that you were Ivy League-educated?
I didn’t tell anybody. One of my co-workers, who was known as “the intellectual,” asked me if I’d ever thought of going to college. I had to be careful. Of course, people noticed I was a little different. Also, being Jewish was rare in the factory. Most of the workers were Polish, Italian, or German—and almost all were Catholic. 

Then you were drafted into the army, which was a much more dangerous place for a Communist to be than a factory in upstate New York. 
The draft began again in 1948 with the Korean War. At the same time, the Internal Security Act was passed, a law that said that members of the Communist party or its front organizations had to register with the police as foreign agents. For every day that you didn’t register, it was up to five years in prison. I got my draft notice in October of 1950. I quit my job and went back to New York. When you got drafted, you had to sign a statement: “I am not and have never been a member of the above organizations.” There were over 100 organizations listed—a couple of fascist and Nazi organizations, but 80 to 90 percent of them were left-wing organizations, some dating back to the 20s and 30s. I was in about a dozen of them. I thought, Should I sign this damn thing?

Would you have been excluded from the draft if you had admitted you were in those organizations?
Yeah, possibly, but I would have been liable. The whole atmosphere was extremely tense. Anybody with a left-wing view was considered an agent and a traitor. Many years later, I talked to this guy I had been with at Harvard who said, “You should have refused to sign.” He refused and said that it was against his constitutional rights. Years later, of course, the Supreme Court ruled the whole thing unconstitutional. But I was scared. I figured it was two years, and maybe if I kept my mouth shut, I would make it through. I was sent to Bavaria and given a job as a company clerk. It was an easy job, but then I made a mistake. When you go into the army, they give you tests to see what you’re good at. They had one for Morse code, and I did well on it. So I was given an offer to leave Bad Tölz and go to Munich to do radio work. I knew they might check me over, but of course it was hard to say no.

When I got to Munich, they didn’t put me on the radio work. I knew something was up, but I just had five or six months left and wanted to get through it. Then one day I got a letter telling me to report to a military judge because I was a member of six organizations. That’s when I panicked. I didn’t want to go to jail. 

Victor interpreting for Jane Fonda at the International Documentary Film Week. Leipzig, Germany, 1974. Photo by Elke Thionke.

How did you cross over to East Germany? 
I took the train to Austria, crossed over the border, and got in to Linz in the late evening and headed for the Danube. I didn’t dare ask anyone how to get to the river. I just kept walking in the direction that seemed right. Finally, I saw the river—it was about a quarter mile across. I threw my jacket and shoes into the water, because I thought I wouldn’t make it otherwise. I put my important papers in a pouch and started swimming. The tide pulled me in the right direction. 

I expected Soviet soldiers to be waiting on the other side of the Iron Curtain, but it was totally empty. There was a road along the river. I waited until I was sure there was no one coming and started walking. I had no shoes and had torn my sleeves off to hide my military affiliation. In the afternoon, I was picked up by an Austrian cop. He took me to the police station. I said I wanted to speak to someone from Soviet command. They looked confused but called them anyway. A guy picked me up in a jeep. He asked me my name, where I came from, where I had been stationed, and delivered me to the Soviets. The first thing they said was, “What did you tell that guy that brought you here?” I told them. It turns out the guy who had brought me to the station reported me to the American side. 

The officers drove me to the headquarters of the Soviet army. When I arrived, they locked me in a cell for two weeks. When they let me out, they took me to Potsdam and put me up in a very fine room—a really elegant place with a bed, a big desk, sofa, and opaque glass windows you couldn’t see out of. I was kept there for two months. A Russian cook would bring me meals, and a uniformed guard would walk me to the bathroom. There were other people there, too, but I wasn’t allowed to talk to any of them. One day a guy passed my room whistling, “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” It was almost certainly an American, I thought.

After two months, I was taken to Bautzen—a town where the Soviets sent Western deserters. That’s where I spent my first two years. I got a job hauling lumber. After six months, the Soviets came to me and asked if I would be the cultural director for their clubhouse. I said yes. I ran chess, ping-pong, and pool tournaments. I organized English classes, dances, and movies. The Americans and the others looked at me as being on the side of the German Democratic Republic. It was very difficult. Eventually I applied to Leipzig to go to the university. I was interviewed and got in. 

You earned a journalism degree from Karl Marx University. What was it like to be a journalist in the GDR? Was there a lot of censorship and repression? 
I approved of the GDR but not blindly. There were dogmatic people and careerists and idiots at all levels. In the whole GDR period, you had two elements: the progressive and the stupid. I got used to it.

In 1956, after Khrushchev gave his speech about Stalin, there was lots of discussion and disagreement. At the journalism school, we had a student newspaper full of critical articles. Then came the Hungarian events. The Soviets got very scared and started tightening the screws. The next issue was very tame. There were periods when everything was more open, but never 100 percent. In 1964, you had a whole series of very good and very critical novels. Then at the end of ’65, Khrushchev was gone, and Brezhnev tightened the screws against all kinds of people. They stopped 11 films, kept them out of circulation. Later things eased up again, but then came the Czechoslovakian events in 1968, and they were tightened again.

The people I was most close to generally approved of socialism and the GDR as an antifascist state, with economic security for everybody. I saw all of the things you didn’t see in the States: medical care, free education, childcare, job security. At the same time, I could see that they were unable to sell the Soviet system to their own people properly. The leaders were a mixture of careerists and dogmatists who were ready to turn anyone who criticized them into an enemy. They alienated people unnecessarily. 

In the West, they were more clever. They learned to sell not just toothpaste but politics, too. They never learned how
to do this in the GDR, where they were still back in the 1930s, with the old dogmatic stuff. There were some people who tried really hard to break out of this. They often became foreign correspondents. 

Victor with Hattie Lumpkin (far left) protesting nuclear weapons on a street in Buffalo, 1950.

In the years since, you were granted access to your Stasi [the GDR’s state security service] and FBI files? Who kept better tabs?
Yes, I’ve seen both, and I’m considering writing a book comparing them. In America, during the Second World War, if you heard something about the Nazis, you’d report it to the FBI. In the years that followed, if people heard about Communists, they reported them. The FBI had reports of things I said at a picnic. Now, it’s the Muslims.   

The Stasi also watched me, obviously. In my lectures I used to be very openly critical of things I didn’t like, which was not so common. So they kept track of that. After a while, I wised up to the fact that they were keeping their eye on me. This sort of thing was very widespread, more widespread in East Germany than in the States, but it happened in the States too, and certainly in West Germany. It basically happens in every country, especially if that country feels threatened. 

Having experienced McCarthyism, Stalinism, glasnost, and now post-Soviet-era capitalism, how do they all compare? Is socialism still a viable ideological possibility for the future?
I still believe there has to be a socialist answer. Capitalism just doesn’t work. The gap between the very wealthy and everyone else is increasing all the time. But when it comes to a really big crisis, there is no party leading the charge like the old Communist parties tried to do. At the same time, the danger is that when it comes to a crisis point, if there’s not a strong left, then it will just turn to the extreme right, as it did here in ’33.

There is a growing neofascist movement in Germany right now. Does that worry you? 
I think that’s by design. A lot of our political leaders may not like these Nazis, but I think they’re keeping them in reserve, because of the view that it’s better to have them than the left. Like in Spain: better Franco than the Popular Front. In the former East Germany, they’re much stronger. There are whole areas where a foreigner or a person with dark skin can’t go, including parts of Berlin. I think the big danger is that it could turn to the right again. 

I know I won’t live to see any more major changes. But I get a kick every time I see something like what happened in Tahrir Square, or the Indignados in Spain, or the Occupy movement. I hope we’ll see something like that in Germany. 

Want to learn more about Communism?

Life in Communist Romania Was Rough

Nathan Farb Made Communism Look Groovy

Explaining China's National People's Congress

This past Monday I did a standup show, and one of the other comics said something along the lines of, “I have depression, but I recently stopped taking my medications.” The crowd applauded in support of her strength and resilience.

I am very happy for my friend and fellow comic if she is feeling good. I appreciate that people have a great respect for self-reliance. But as someone who goes into a month-long manic tailspin every few years, as well as more frequent batshit-crazy days-long episodes of depression every few months, I know I need my pills. I take medications every morning and night—they’re my breakfast, and they’re my dessert. I love them. And frankly, I was a little weirded out that the idea of not taking medication is worthy of applause.

Can you imagine if a comic walked on stage and said, “I have diabetes, but I haven’t taken my insulin in three weeks”? The room wouldn’t have been so supportive. People would probably say, “Wait, why?” or, “Oh, you shouldn’t do that!” or, “Please don’t have a seizure, I only have one spoon with me right now and would rather not use it to secure your tongue. Also, please don’t ask why I brought a spoon to a comedy club.”

That audience’s reaction brought me back to the feelings of trepidation and shame I had when I was initially thinking about going on medications, a decision that in hindsight, I’m extremely proud of. Getting help for my issues was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, because when I get dangerously sad or manic, those feelings seek to perpetuate themselves. My sadness compels me to hide it so that people won’t judge me. Seeking help would have blown my cover. Meanwhile, my mania convinces me that it’s making me fun so I’ll want to dive further into it. Seeking help would’ve ruined that good time. Overcoming the effects those feelings have on me—and they way they make me antisocial, unapproachable, and impossible to deal with—was very hard, even without the social stigmas that come with declaring to the world I can’t handle my shit.

My medications make me easier to deal with. They don’t interfere with my creativity or turn me into a zombie or dull my real personality. They help me connect with people, allow me to stay calm when situations seem overwhelming, and help keep my thoughts from racing out of control. They help me leave the house when I’m scared to. They help.

I won’t lie—there are certain drawbacks to medication, mostly the side effects. It’s important to note that the side effects of these drugs have generally lessened since I started taking them in 2002. But I’d argue that even at their worst, these side effects don’t detract from one’s well-being more than being a lunatic with out-of-control emotions does. To illustrate this, I’ve listed the side effects of various medications I’ve taken over time, as well as the behaviors that made those medications necessary. We can all judge together if the pills are a net benefit or not.

Side effects of Depakote (in 2002):
First of all, there was the short-term memory loss. I would often find myself in the middle of conversations with no knowledge of what I was talking about. This affected my work (I often had to have things explained to me multiple times because I would forget what conversation I was having) and my social life—I was once on a date with a young lady and had to interrupt her to say, “I have no idea what we’re talking about, I’m sorry.” Needless to say, my game was not as smooth as it could have been. I also became a real fat fuck. I was warned when I went on Depakoe that it would be hard to lose any weight I put on. Instead of watching my eating and starting to exercise more, I altered nothing about my life and ballooned up to close to 180 pounds, the largest I’ve ever been.

How Depakote helped me:
I was able to talk to other human beings, including girls, without averting my eyes and wanting to shit my pants. This allowed me to have calm conversations with people I was intimidated by. I was able to ask out girls when I sensed they thought I was charming, instead of quaking in fear and avoiding seeing them ever again. So while I was now fatter and occasionally forgetful, I could take ladies on dates and comfortably interact with other humans. Also, before I went on Depakote, I had an overactive long-term memory focused primarily on self-hatred and doubt. While my short-term memory suffered under the effects of medication, my non-medicated memory kept bringing up all the times I fucked up, all the conversations I ruined, and all the unlikeable things about myself.

Who wins:
Being skinny and silent loses out to being chubby and social, especially since the skinniness was at least in part due to the constant shitting caused by my anxiety. And while my memory lapses lead to some truly uncomfortable interactions, the overall improvement in my opinion of myself is decidedly worth it.

Side effect of Risperdal (in 2002):
Risperdal is arguably the most heavy-duty drug I’ve ever been put on. It is a straight-up anti-psychotic that I took for a few years when things got really bad. Risperdal itself only gave me tightened-up back muscles, but the muscle relaxer they gave me to deal with that had a severe side effect. How do I put this?

It made me ejaculate water.

That’s really the simplest way to explain it. I’m sure that it wasn’t actual molecules of hydrogen bonded to oxygen emerging from my penis; I’m sure that the substance actually did include bodily fluids more akin to the substance I ejaculated before and after being on Risperdal. That being said, whatever I was cumming, to the naked eye, looked like pure H2O.

I can remember few instances in my life that were sadder than the first time I masturbated after these side effects set in. I cried instantly when I saw the results. The anxiety of it potentially happening again lead to future instances of crying during masturbation, which was actually less sad—the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain intermingled so directly that the experience was borderline poetic.

How Risperdal helped me:
While you may think that nothing is worth cumming water and crying while masturbating, the behaviors Risperdal helped solved were scary and were probably putting my life in danger. Specifically, I suffered from severe bouts of paranoia. This paranoia presented itself in some innocuous but annoying ways, like my inability to sleep through an entire night without waking up 15 times thinking I had slept through my alarm and was late for something. There were also less-innocuous manifestations, like how I refused to push the button to signal busses to stop because I was convinced the government could track me if I did, or how I was unable to drive at night because I would convince myself the car behind me was a cop about to pull me over. These were life-altering fears and behaviors that only got worse over time. On top of that, my personal relationships suffered immensely because of my ever-growing suspicions that people around me were out to sabotage me.

Who wins:
Tie. The paranoia was insane, ruined my life, and I remember the exact day when the medication took hold and my paranoid behaviors began to lessen. It remains one of the best days of my life. That being said, I came water. Nothing’s going to balance that out completely, so we’ll call this one a push.

Side effects of Wellbutrin (from 2007 onward):
None.

How Wellbutrin helped me:
Oh I don’t know, maybe it helped me not feel the way I felt when I crashed a car just to see if I would live or die.

Who wins:
Not taking this medication. Psych!

Side effects of Adderall (in 2012):
Intense muscle cramps, a constant need to urinate, alternating inability to gain an erection and inability to ejaculate once an erection was maintained, and increased muscle tension that led to internal hemorrhoids that caused me to shit bright red blood.

How Adderall helped me:
My shrink had a hunch that a lot of my anxiety was rooted in some ADD and OCD tendencies, so she put me on Adderall. The benefits were that I felt like a superhero who didn’t need to sleep or eat, I could get projects done seemingly as soon as I thought of them, and my ability to be charming and quick-witted increased by roughly 1,000 percent.

Who wins:
Not taking this medication. Adderall is not for me. It’s pretty clear that I didn’t have OCD/ADD imbalances and was  basically just turning into a meth head. That said, I have an unfinished bottle of Adderall in a drawer somewhere, so if any NYU sophomores want to trade goods for them, hit me up.

For those keeping score, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks by a tally of 3-1-1. It’s not really a contest.

I’m down to support anyone who looks to get better. If someone feels strong for not taking pills, I applaud them. But I hope people out there who might not suffer from mental illness themselves understand that those who are not in a healthy frame of mind often have a lot of fear and paranoia about admitting weakness, and it makes getting help a truly terrifying prospect. From calling a doctor to showing up at his office to getting a prescription to putting a pill in your mouth, there are a lot of chances to bail on giving yourself the help you need. To actually admit that you have a sickness, get help for it, and get to a point where you’re regularly taking medications involves a lot of soul-searching, shit-eating, and fear. Not needing pills is strong, sure. Taking them is sometimes even scarier, so let’s applaud that too.

PS: I'm still not sure if cumming water is worse than shitting blood.

@ChrisGethard

Also by Chris: Why I Quit Drinking

Attention riders of skateboard toys: it is with a mixture of happiness and bummertude that we can confirm Michael Sieben, artist and prolific writer of VICE articles, has accepted the job of managing editor at that old stalwart of skateboard rags, Thrasher magazine. Happiness because he now has a steady job and will probably be able to feed his child, and bummertude because he will no longer be writing his weekly VICE column, Kill the Engine.

The whole thing started as an accident, when Thrasher tried to offer Michael Simmons the job but mistakenly emailed Sieben. They had this to say about his hiring: "We had already offered him the position before we realized we had called the wrong guy, but by that point it was too late. He was sort of crying and thanking us for saving him from financial ruin and kept talking about his kid and dental insurance and shit like that. So now I guess we're stuck with him."

I don't believe Michael has ever had a full-time editing gig before, so Michael, I'd like to be the first to tell you that it is a thankless job filled with long hours, carpal tunnel syndrome, and an ever-inflating gut. The only positive part is being able to form a butt-mold in your chair at roughly twice the clip of other, more mobile professionals.

Best of luck at your new job. Don't screw it up.

Oh, the times we had:

Crazy Hot Turds

Guided Tours of the Skate Spots in My Neighborhood

A Review of My Skate Video Second Hand Stoke (by Me)

Who Shaun White Is

Here's some Dirty Churches:

A Guest in the Cavern will be at the Engine 212 Firehouse (134 Wythe Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn) this Saturday, May 11. Performances will take place at 6 and 8 PM.

We can hardly believe we're saying this, but the sixth episode of our HBO show is airing on Friday night. Time flies when you're hanging out with child suicide bombers, chatting up gun-toting preachers, and looking for love in China. We feel so old. But, like some old people before us once said, "ever onward." And so Friday at 11 PM we will thrust our faces and adventures into your living room yet again, provided you have HBO. Here's what you can expect.

China appears to be doing pretty well for itself right now. We owe them about 1 trillion dollars, they're inventing all the cool new gadgets, Liu Wen is from there, and they're building massive apartment buildings and entire cities left and right. Unfortunately, that last part comes with an asterisk, as they don't have anyone to live in many of the buildings and towns they are constructing. It's a tableau that is eerily familiar—yet on a much larger scale—to the time leading up to the US housing collapse a few years ago. We sent Ryan Duffy to investigate some of the ghost towns littering the country.

In the second part of the episode VICE co-founder Suroosh Alvi heads to Egypt to find out how the country has been getting along since the revolution that ousted former president Hosni Mubarak. As you might have heard, things aren't going as peachy as most had hoped. Morsi has plenty of his own detractors—many of the same people who were instrumental in the toppling of Mubarak's regime—and the unrest only seems to be growing. Suroosh met with representatives from the Muslim Brotherhood (with whom Morsi has strong ties), as well as protesters and members of the infamous Black Bloc to hear both sides of the story.

If you're out gallivanting around town on Friday at 11:00, give it a watch on HBO GO sometime over the weekend.

Boy who held pencil like gun suspended

(via)

The incident: A little boy pointed a pencil at someone and made a gun noise.  

The appropriate response: Saying "Argh! You got me!" then falling to the ground as though you've just been shot with an actual gun. Then getting up and laughing. Or, if you're not good with kids, you could just like, do nothing.

The actual response: The boy was suspended from school. 

Seven-year-old Christopher Marshall was in class at Driver Elementary School in Suffolk, Virginia, last Friday, when a teacher found him and another boy pointing pencils at each other and making machine-gun noises. 

Despite the fact that Christopher stopped doing it as soon as the teacher asked him to, he and the other boy were suspended from school for two days. 

"When I asked him about it, he said, 'Well I was being a marine and the other guy was being a bad guy,'" said Paul Marshall, Christopher's dad. Adding that he felt the school "overreacted."

Amazingly, Bethanne Bradshaw, a spokesperson for Suffolk Public Schools agreed to be interviewed by a local news channel, where she defended the suspension saying, "Some children would consider it threatening, who are scared about shootings in schools or shootings in the community." She added, "Kids don't think about cowboys and Indians anymore. They think about drive-by shootings and murders and everything they see on television news every day." Which is a pretty fucking bleak way of looking at the world. 

Cry-Baby #2: Crisalida Berry Farms

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The incident: Some farm workers fled a wildfire that was burning near the farm they were working on. 

The appropriate response: Nothing. 

The actual response: They were all fired 

The 15 strawberry pickers were working at Crisalida Berry Farms near Oxnard, California, last week, when smoke and ash from a nearby wildfire began to make it "hard to breath."

Fearing for their safety, they left the farm, despite being warned by their foreman that they would be fired if they did so. 

When they returned to work the next day, the foreman followed up on his threat and let them all go. 

The workers contacted a local union who agreed to help them, despite the fact that none of the workers were union members.

After speaking with farm management (and giving the story to local news outlets), the union leaders were able to get the farm to offer the workers their jobs back, but by that time all but one of them had found alternative employment. 

Which of these fools is a bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this little poll down here:

Previously: The woman who hates Anne Frank's vagina versus the airline that hates Tourette's.

Winner: Anne Frank lady!!!

@JLCT

You’d think it would be pretty fun to write for a magazine where you constantly get to talk about the end of the world—the gigantic battle between good and evil, the seven seals, the Antichrist announcing himself, all that cool stuff. It’d be especially thrilling for you every time a new pope gets announced because, obviously, you get to ask, IS THIS POPE THE FINAL, EVIL POPE WHO WILL USHER IN THE AGE OF THE ANTICHRIST? Plus you get to run a cover of that new pope surrounded by flames and resembling a villain from one of the Star Wars prequels.

(The secret to making the Catholic Church look evil is that any old man in fancy robes like that looks evil. And that collection of cardinals behind the pope on Endtime’s cover provide another ominous-looking visual. If the Church wants to improve its image, maybe it should stop dressing its leaders in blood-red robes and having them assemble in high-ceilinged places full of ancient, grotesque statues? Gatherings like this look fucking terrifying. But I digress.)

Unfortunately, this issue of Endtime, despite the cover story featuring the new pope, is tame. Boring, even. The big feature on Pope Francis starts with a promising tagline…

...but the story itself is mostly a dry, almost textbook-like account of the recent history of the Church and an explanation of who the Jesuits are. The only way it differs from one of the countless news accounts written by nonapocalyptic sources is that it also discusses Saint Malachy’s “Prophecy of the Last Pope,” which is, like, the lamest prophecy ever. It’s a list of 112 popes that was supposedly revealed to Malachy in 1139 and “rediscovered” in 1590, but more likely, given that it describes all of the pre-1590 popes very accurately and gets vague after that, was written by some goofball who only claimed it came from the 12th century.  

Malarchy’s (or whoever’s) prophecy claims that the 112th pope will be the last one, and Pope Francis is (duh duh duh) the 112th pope on the list. According to Endtime, prophecies say that the last pope (a.k.a. the False Prophet) will “endorse a program of global socialism, causing all people to receive a mark or number that will be required for buying and selling. This "mark of the Beast" will apparently be a global scheme for wealth redistribution (social justice).”

Endtime Magazine is a little bit confused about the prospects for a global government run by socialists—it says that “most of the world is presently rejecting capitalism and embracing socialism,” which is craaaAAazy—but even these worrywarts don’t seem that concerned that Francis will be the pope to usher it in. Why? He might be an evil socialist who is dangerously popular, but he’s too old. The False Prophet’s reign as pope is scheduled to end only after a seven-year period “that will begin upon the signing of a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement.” Since that won’t happen for a few years at least, Francis is probably going to be too old and frail to perform his end-of-the-world duties. So the article ends with a wishy-washy, “We can’t yet say for sure whether this pope is the final one.” C’mon, Endtime! I subscribe to you because I trust you know how the world is going to end. Enough with this equivocating horseshit!

I also don’t subscribe to Endtime to read about Obama’s trip to Israel, which happened nearly two months ago at this point. The only thing that this has to do with the end of the world is that the folks who write Endtime say that the big apocalyptic event will be a Middle East peace treaty, which will last for a few years before resulting in a war that will kill one-third of humanity. Obviously, that peace treaty is a dream at this point, so this article just sort of fills up space. What else is in this issue?

Oh yeah, this piece of shit. From the headline, you would think that this prophecy, which is in the book of Daniel, would have a “date on it!” But no, there’s no date. It just once again reminds us that there’s that “seven-year period” that will feature animal sacrifices in Jerusalem, peace in the Middle East, a false messiah who will unite the world under one government, and horrific war. Thrilling stuff, but I already read all about it in your last issue, guys. That big scary prophecy in Daniel just says that a couple things will happen before the end times—the coming of the messiah and the destruction. Both of those events happened nearly 2,000 years ago, so it could be another two millenia before the last seven years, or it could kick off on March 11, 2014. That’s a date, assholes. I know it’s tough writing “The End is coming!” over and over for three decades, but you could at least do your job without the intentionally misleading headlines.

Those three dull articles are the only things in this issue apart from the regular features (the letters to the editor and the short news items that rehash the same information you get elsewhere in the magazine), but there were a couple highlights. First, there was this:

All timelines should end with an arrow pointing toward “eternity.” It gives them a certain amount of authority.

Then there was this ad (as usual, all the ads in the issue were for products from Endtime Ministries):

WWII: ENTRANCE RAMP FOR THE ANTICHRIST! I found this on YouTube, and it turns out that the video is a bunch of vaguely threatening images and a long, long lecture from Irvin Baxter, the Endtime Ministries head honcho, who looks like a balloon of old skin that is slowly leaking air and sounds like a cartoon frog who has been smoking for decades.

But! That title! “Entrance Ramp for the Antichrist” is a phrase that needs to be recycled—a metal album, a video game, an entrance ramp… let’s give it a new home, guys. And soon. Because you know what’s coming any day now.

@HCheadle

Previously: The March/April Issue

“We’re going to change the world. If my theory is correct, this will change everything. This will ruffle feathers, don’t you think anything else. You ask Galileo, you ask Darwin. This is going to cause an uproar.” – Jim Penman

You’ve probably seen a picture of Jim Penman’s face on the sides of his trucks. There are thousands of them driving around the country, mowing your lawns, fixing your antennas, washing your dogs. In the picture Jim has a thick beard and he’s wearing a bucket hat. He’s always smiling.

I’m sitting across from Jim at his training centre in a sprawling complex in the foothills of the Dandenong Ranges. He started his business, Jim’s Mowing, back in 1982. He’s aged a bit since then, and he’s lost the beard, but as he tells me about his plans for world domination, he’s still smiling.

The story of Jim’s rise to fame and fortune is already a matter of public record: cash-strapped uni student begins a lawn mowing business to help pay his tuition. With an initial budget of $24, business grows to become a gardening leviathan. With over 3000 franchisees throughout Australia, New Zealand and the UK, Jim’s Group provides 35 different services from Jim’s Bookkeeping to Jim’s Bath Resurfacing. At 60, he’s still heavily involved in the running of the business, which generates an estimated annual revenue of $320 million.

What most people don’t know is that Jim never wanted to be a businessman. He started mowing lawns to raise cash to fund his research for a PhD in History at La Trobe University. The uni wouldn’t give him any money because, according to Jim, his ideas were “too radical, too wild.”

Jim’s research is concerned with the rise and fall of human civilisations. He tries to explain why certain historical events have happened to certain peoples at certain points in time. To do this, he conducts experiments on populations of rats and guinea pigs, messes with their diets and their family units, and if all goes according to plan, he’ll be doing the same to humans.

Jim’s been giving money, so far over $1 million, to a team of scientists at La Trobe, to continue the research the university turned its back on three decades ago.

To put it simply, Jim has a theory that the big shifts in society (wars, revolutions, influence of religion etc.) are explainable by changes in brain and hormone activity. As an example, Jim cites WWI. According to Jim, the Great War was brought about by widespread hormonal change in the Austro-Germanic people of the 1880’s, which made them more aggressive and warlike. In this way Jim can explain why Rome rose and fell, why Stalin was able to stay in power for so long and why the West is in a really bad state.

Just how he identifies these hormonal changes so many years later, and without any physical evidence, only Jim knows, but he thinks that by studying these patterns he can predict the future, and is developing a drug to change it.

Image via

Jim’s ideas are based on a scientific stream called epigenetics. Epigenetics studies the changes in genes which are not programmed into the DNA sequence. In practical terms, if a scientist (or a gardener-cum-scientist) was able to identify the link between particular genes and behaviours they could alter people’s behaviour by modifying the genes. Jim sees it as the final frontier of scientific study. “For years people thought that genes were just genes, they didn’t realise they could be switched on and off.” And he has big plans for humanity once the drug has been developed.

“Why haven’t we been visited by intelligent aliens?” He asks me a little later. “Why is that? There must be trillions of Earth-like planets across the universe, why hasn’t some race gone and spread into space? And I think that one of the more plausible reasons is that when any civilisation rises past a certain stage of technology, it becomes easier and easier to destroy itself.”

A lot of his initial testing has focussed on developing treatments for alcohol addiction, drug addiction, overeating and other kinds of psychological problems. Jim thinks that a drug could be ready by as early as next year.

But Jim wants to change more than that. He wants to change people’s personalities, change how they think and act, how they see the world. He believes that Jim’s drug can make people more focussed, more hard working, more intelligent and creative. Basically, better humans. “It could be something as simple as a nasal spray, it could be a treatment, a drug, a pill you swallow,” he says. “There are implications that this could raise IQ.”

Jim envisions a society where everyone’s chemical and hormonal deficiencies have been corrected, making them completely functional members of society. “Imagine if the average person is what used to be considered extremely capable, if not a genius…We could make ancient Athens look like a stodgy small town. We’ve never had any human society ever that has lived up to human potential.”

Jim thinks that the world needs this drug. He’s crunched the numbers and he has a pretty bleak outlook for this planet if he can’t get his nasal spray out. In the next few years Jim predicts that the West will continue its economic and moral decline, with China taking over the reins as the big world power, followed by a few thousand years of hegemony from a unified body of African states.

By the year 4000 Jim envisions the world as a Mad Max style apocalyptic wasteland comprising of “poor peasant farmers where women are mutilated by cliterodectomy, and this kind of garbage, which is really what the human race is headed for—poverty-stricken peasants.” And Jim is doing everything in his power to stop that happening. A large percentage of the profits that he takes from Jim’s Mowing go into a foundation that will continue his research and—if his theories are proven correct—save the world.

Of course, Jim is wary of the potential dangers of developing his wonder drug. He worries that it may be so powerful that it could actually bring about the apocalypse. “Technology would explode because people would become far more creative and capable by a factor of hundreds of times over. Now whether that would end up destroying the human race, or we would end up spreading out across the universe I don’t know.”

Image via

Jim’s theories have informed many elements of his personal life. Strangely, his scientific study brought him closer to God. “My theory showed me the value of Christian beliefs such as the focus on chastity and a strong family life.” Though they are no longer members, Jim and his family were part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, better known as the Mormon Church. Jim calls it as an “excellent church for building character and self-discipline.” He now describes himself as an “evangelical Christian.”

Jim’s life is a clipped lawn of cold showers, office work, and an almost monastic moderation of his personal habits. His website says, “he has no plans to retire—ever!” He strictly regulates his consumption of his one and only vice, chocolate. Jim also abstains from sex as much as possible. “Limiting sexual behaviour is a very powerful driver of temperamental change.” He nods gravely. “It makes you more driven, hard working, more focussed.”

This seems incongruous when you delve deeper into Jim’s family life. Since starting the business he has fathered ten children to a number of wives. I asked him how his prodigious progeny-production tallied against his dim view of sex. “Societies that have less sex have more children.” He pointed to the reproductive explosion during the Victorian era as an example of this. It’s not all doom and gloom in Jim’s bedroom though. He begrudgingly admits, “I suppose sex has got a point in establishing relationships between husband and wife. Ideally you want to limit it though.”

Jim also wrote a book. It’s called The Hungry Ape—Biology and the Fall of Civilisations and Jim self-published it in 1992. I managed to track a copy down on Amazon, and it makes for some interesting reading. The front cover shows a photo of a gorilla superimposed over a vista of skyscrapers. Amazingly, it didn’t sell many copies.

Reading The Hungry Ape is like stepping back in time. Jim has this idea that different races and ethnic groups have distinct “temperaments” decided by attributes he refers to as “Restraint and Vigour”.

Jim believes that “Restraint is the temperamental basis of civilisation,” and can account for the domination of white European ethnic groups over the past few hundred years. All of the other races have lost out because they lack either Restraint or Vigour, or sometimes both. There are lots of comparisons between black people and baboons, and even more about Jews and rats.

The book reads like a bad piece of propaganda, or a weird eugenics experiment. At best you would call The Hungry Ape the scientific equivalent of racial stereotyping. Here are some of the highlights:

“Jews have traditionally been far more inhibited, more driven by anxiety and insecurity… The key to their success has been high Restraint, which has been linked to their trading skills as well as hard work.”

“Black sexual behaviour is freer, on average, than that of whites. Unemployment is higher and occupational success lower, reflecting, alongside racial oppression, a lack of high-Restraint work ethic and commercial skills. Rates of crime are higher, because of the reduced respect for law and authority in lower-Restraint groups.”

On Aboriginals: “Unsuited in general to the discipline of academic study and of many jobs, they have become a poor-underclass. A high proportion are unemployed and the rest are in menial jobs.”

Jim is concerned with altering the Restraint and Vigour of the ethnic groups that he believes have been dealt a bum hand in the epigenetic stakes. He wants to make the blacks more restrained and the Jews more vigorous, he wants to change the Aborigines personality so they can function more effectively in “our society.”

“Aboriginals [sic] are hunter-gatherers,” he tells me. “Their temperament is suited to that. They don’t work steadily… You need people who can work hard, who can work by the clock… It’s a serious question as to whether they would want to be more like us, or they should be more like us, but if they wanted to be successful in society they would have to change temperament to become more like Europeans.”

Image via

To Jim, racism and prejudice are not the reason why many Aboriginals around the country are unemployed, unhealthy and disenfranchised, it’s because of their temperament. “It’s not the prejudice that causes the problem in the temperament, it’s the temperament which causes the prejudice.”

Jim compares the history of the Jews, to prove his point. “They’ve been discriminated against, loathed, persecuted, pogromed [sic], murdered, forced out of home after home… By all logic they should be the most poor, downtrodden people on earth. Are they? No, they’re not. Why? Because Jews are different. They have a certain temperament.”

He’s aware of just how un-PC his ideas are, and how they will be received, if they were ever to gain widespread attention. “People with a left-wing orientation, with a belief that all people have the same temperament, will find it hard if not impossible to grasp this stuff… like trying to hold a blob of jelly in their hands.”

When I asked Jim whether his ideas were racist, he denied it saying, “I find racism particularly disgusting. My wife’s Chinese... If you were a genuine racist you would hate this book. A racist would say that Aboriginals [sic] or blacks are inferior, that they have lower intelligence, whereas I would say not at all, it’s an epigenetic change, it’s not built into the genes at all. It’s changeable.”

There’s no doubt that Jim firmly believes in what he’s doing. He sees himself as a kind of saviour, a misunderstood idealist who wants to make the world a better place. “Our civilisation has achieved a tremendous amount” he says. “I’ve got ten kids and every one of them is still alive, do you know how remarkable that is? Nobody needs to die of hunger anymore. People don’t need to live their life in mindless toil… I’d like to spread the blessings to everybody, and my theories seem to show that that’s possible.”

When we first started our correspondence he sent me the manuscript for his follow-up to The Hungry Ape, which he’s planning to publish sometime next year. He’s played up the scientific angle a little more in this one. Restraint and Vigour have been replaced by the terms “Q” and “Z”, but the basic premise of the theory is the same. Jim’s not sure when his drug will be ready for human consumption. He says it could take a couple of years, or it could take a couple of decades. Whatever the case, he has the dedication and the resources to make something happen.

“I'll be the first person to try it.” Jim grins. 
 

For more genetics:

China is Engineering Genius Babies

Anthea Pokroy is Trying to Create a Ginger Utopia

Long considered one of the forefathers of the contemporary short story, Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) has continued for more than a century to be held up as an example of how to tell a human tale. There is perhaps no larger precursor for realistic short fiction in its most popular form: clearly stated, socially involved narrative displays that set out to objectively mimic human life. I can certainly tell you that more than a few times while I was studying fiction as an MFA student, Chekhov was passed around like some holy washcloth everyone should rub their faces on.

You might also be familiar with Jeffrey Dahmer (1960–1994), who raped and murdered 17 known male victims over a period of 13 years. Made most infamous for his proclivity to store or cook and eat parts of his victims’ bodies, Dahmer remains one of the most unnerving of all repeat killers, despite his oddly calm and mechanically regretful outward demeanor. I can’t remember ever having a teacher mention Dahmer as someone I should use as a model for good art.

And yet, somehow in my mind these two keep crossing paths. I find I can’t help myself from thinking about Dahmer every time I hear someone mention Chekhov, like a lurking shadow in my spirit. I can’t help but want to draw them out, to put them together in a cage and watch their brains bump. Finally, the other day I started culling quotes from both and began to find weird intersections between their thoughts. Below I’ve pitted some of each against each other, and tried to make sense of the wide gap between the two.

I realize this likely means I will never be allowed to teach collegiate fiction. 

1. ARC

CHEKHOV: “If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.”

DAHMER (of his first victim): "I, uh, didn't know how else to keep him there other than to get the barbell and hit him, over the head, which I did, and then strangled him with the same barbell."

If I could point to one artist’s quote that has done the most damage to keeping things interesting, it’s Chekhov’s faux-ominous gun. Besides the fact that it completely discounts the concept of mystery or aura, what it really means to me is Chekhov imagined his audience as too stupid or bored to appreciate anything that doesn’t go boom, kind of like a 19th-century Russian take on Michael Bay. A gun is a gun and a face is a face and death is death. There’s no need to pretend that just because we’re in a novel or a movie that everything you see has hidden purpose, or can’t be beautiful without application to the human.

Dahmer doesn’t pretend that he began the hell he created out of anything beyond blood-drunk improvisation. His murder weapon, the barbell, was just something that happened to be there—a tool used and then discarded. Even his fumbling way of explicating his procedure adds an eerie layer that reflects more turmoil and overrun emotion than the idea that everything in life has its special little place. Instead, the tools are all around you. Anything could be a door toward an end, even if that end is you being put in prison and killed almost exactly the same way. Life repeats because it has no choice, not because some dick in a smoking jacket says so.

Winner: DAHMER (1–0)

2. SCOPE

CHEKHOV: “Don't try for too many characters. The center of gravity should reside in two: he and she.” And: “I'll have to limit myself to descriptions of how my heroes love, marry, give birth, die, and how they speak.”

DAHMER: "I was completely swept along with my own compulsion. I don't know how else to put it. It didn't satisfy me completely, so maybe I was thinking, 'Maybe another one will. Maybe this one will.' And the numbers started growing and growing and just got out of control, as you can see."

Yes, please, don’t confuse me, for God’s sake! I read so I can feel superior to something, to watch it play out before my eyes like a little Christmas menagerie. I’m definitely very interested in hearing all about the relationship between the man and lady characters you made up, because there’s not enough of that already going on literally every-fucking-where I look. I am very interested in who is fucking who in a book and how and what emotional garbage they got into between the fucking. 

That is the fuel of bad TV and movies, as well as books that follow the model like they’re shamelessly begging someone to film them. No, actually, I want a wildness, a stringently orchestrated amalgam that makes me wonder how it was even made, one that I perhaps want to understand but know there isn’t really a definitive answer beyond the wonder of being in the throat of a collision of events, ideas, words, images. The book or film or whatever, I believe, should in the end find a way beyond its creator’s control. It should circumvent his original plan, like a weird shitty baby released into the wild to crawl all over everything, getting bigger as it goes.

Winner: DAHMER (2–0)

3. UTILITY

CHEKHOV: “A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer. He is a man who has signed a contract with his conscience and his sense of duty.”

DAHMER: "I would cook it, and look at the pictures and masturbate."

In my book, “a man who has signed a contract with his conscience and his sense of duty” is called a priest. Or a Boy Scout leader (if there’s a difference). Chekhov would have probably kicked ass at heading up a troop, leading his boys to receive the most merit badges ever: the Realistic Dialogue merit badge; the Compassion merit badge; the Most Students Published In the New Yorker merit badge… OK, now I’m just being a dick.

But certainly a parent’s greatest fear is that lurking in all Boy Scout leaders is a latent Jeffrey Dahmer, cooking in his brain a feast of grotesque proportion, fantasy with the constant threat of becoming real. And yet, how many truly great den leaders wrote a book you’d like to spend some time with?

Even when on its face a book is comprised of a very specific and heartfelt system of morals and emotional clarity, such as with David Foster Wallace’s work, there remains lurking there a gray area in its deployment. The would-be profane sense of masturbation behind all the mechanics is what brings out of order something more true, more broiling with not only ambition, but jacked-up color, infection, shit that makes you go “wow,” not “oh.”

Winner: DAHMER (3–0)

4. INTENT

CHEKHOV: “Literature is accepted as an art because it depicts life as it actually is. Its aim is the truth, unconditional and honest.”

DAHMER: "The only motive that there ever was was to completely control a person; a person I found physically attractive. And keep them with me as long as possible, even if it meant just keeping a part of them."

I can’t help but get the image here of a guy sitting in the Grand Canyon reading a book about the Grand Canyon, which is a more contemporary image than Chekhov necessarily deserves. I don’t know about most people, but I don’t read or look at art because I want to learn about myself, or about the world. Nor is it used as an escape. Instead, it’s kind of a morbid fascination, a force against the nagging idea that there is some kind of truth and I must uphold it. I can go to the mall whenever I want and see all the people and hear them on their phones, and from there walk out into the warm sun and go sit in the car again and drive somewhere and experience more life. The moment I know what you are talking about, I usually don’t want to listen.

I believe what you read or see in unique images becomes part of your life—it creates a place that you have been that is not accessible beyond its particular frame. It’s not truth so much as terror, even in the calmest of bodies, that for a while you can be taken over, erased, filled with thoughts, images not yours, but now inside you whether you want them to be or not.

The problem is, as Dahmer found, the drugs don’t work if what you’re trying to do is hypnotize somebody into loving you, into swallowing your secret truth. Don’t give me time to realize I don’t believe you.

Winner: DAHMER (4–0)

5. SHAPE

CHEKHOV: “Man is what he believes.”

DAHMER: "If I'd been thinking rationally I would have stopped. I wasn't thinking rationally because it just increased and increased. It was almost like I wanted to get to a point where it was out of my control and there was no return.”

It’s a bizarre world, full of bizarre bodies, each with their own arms and their own minds, each recalibrating everything around them in their minds every second whether they want to or not, whether it is true or not. Anything can come next.

Winner: DAHMER (5–0)

Previously by Blake Butler: Sarcophagi of Prisoners Covered in Cocaine

@blakebutler

Just about everyone loves dogs, and if you don’t, you’re one of those “cats only” people who has trouble connecting with the human race. So it’s no surprise that dog owners around the world spend bazillions to ensure that their butt-sniffing buddies are happy, healthy, and looking good—including paying plastic surgeons to achieve their ideas of pooch perfection.

Brazilian veterinarian Edgard M. Brito is one of the world’s leading plastic surgeons for animals. He and his clients believe loving your pet means helping it look its best, and if that means surgically straightening ears, performing eye-widening lifts, replacing testicles, or smoothing out wrinkles, so be it. I wanted to know exactly what he does—and why—so I asked him.

VICE: What are the criteria for a dog to be considered good-looking? 
Edgard M. Brito: Firstly, in my opinion, the attraction that humans have for dogs is natural. The beauty, symmetry, and hygiene [of the dogs] help make this relationship a perfect one.

If it’s such a perfect relationship, why do you think some dogs need cosmetic surgery? 
For reconstruction and sometimes for corrections of anatomic defects and physical or functional abnormalities that can appear during an animal’s life.

What’s the most common defect you correct? 
Damaged or inappropriately positioned ears.

Doesn’t that seem a bit shallow?
We aren’t painting dogs pink to match their owners’ nail polish. Our focus is on improving the animal’s quality of life and helping to achieve a perfect relationship between animal and owner.

So you’re saying that this relationship hinges on the owners finding their dogs attractive?
Certainly. An ugly dog is an unloved dog, left forgotten in the backyard, without a ride, dirty and mistreated. A clean dog, with bright teeth, is loved by his owners. 

Do you own any dogs?
Yes. I’ve bred Dobermans since 1973.

Have you operated on your Dobermans?
Yes, I’ve straightened their ears. 

In your professional opinion, does a dog experience a higher quality of life postsurgery?
Yes, because he will be shown to the public more, go out more with his owner, and be given better products and top food.

More pets on VICE:

Is It Weird when Pets Watch You Have Sex?

You Will Never Be as Rich as These Pets

Do Dogs and Cats Understand Us?

The media keeps telling me that, thanks to the new LA condom laws and the fact that the internet exists, the porn industry is flat broke. But if that's true, how can they still afford to get their logos tattooed on to my friend Hostgator Dotcom's body and face?

Hostgator and I got to know each other when I interviewed him about selling his skin as advertising space to porn sites so he could afford to feed his family. After that article was published, one of the companies who had tattooed their logo on to Hostgator's face decided they felt bad and offered to pay for Hostgator to have all of the tattoos removed. Which proves three things: 1) that online journalism CAN change lives, 2) that people who run internet porn sites are human beings with souls, and 3) there comes a time in every man's life when he must get the tattoos of porn websites removed from his face.

Anyway, Hostgator emailed me the good news so I thought I'd call him up to congratulate him. It turns out he's doing great and his kids aren't starving, but he also has some worrying new plans to make money.

Hostgator with his kids.

VICE: So, great news, man. What happened?
Hotsgator Dotcom: Yeah, so the website cam4.com is going to pay for the tattoo removal on my face. They advertised on my face a long time ago, read the VICE story, and decided they wanted to help me—they're just doing it to be nice. I had my first laser removal treatment last week.

Did they apologize for getting them done in the first place?
No, they said that they appreciate me advertising for them, but that if I don’t want them any more, then they’re happy to remove them.

So they’re not just removing their logo from your face but everyone else’s logo, as well?
Yeah. It won’t ruin my contract with anyone. Actually, I never had any contracts with anyone anyway.

What does your wife think?
She’s happy, she’s excited. I'm excited, too. I'm excited to get a better job and move on with my life.

Awesome. That’s great news.
Yeah. But I lost my job as a counselor for people with mental illness and I’ve been working as a courier. But work cut some of my hours and it’s making it harder to get by financially, so I’ve been thinking of some new ways to make money.

Oh no.
Yeah, I’m planning on selling advertising space for my funeral. I plan on living for a long time, but I thought it would be funny to have a funeral entirely sponsored by websites.

Oh god, Hostgator. Are you sure?
They could have their names carved into my casket.

OK, but you’d better be getting a lot of money for it. Hostgator is already going to have their company name carved on your tombstone for eternity.
That’s true. The other thing I’m thinking about is—if the money is right—getting a tattoo advertisement on my thing.

Your thing?
Haha, yeah. If the money was right.

Oh, we’re talking about your penis?
Yeah, maybe Viagra could advertise.

How much are you asking for?
Well, it would have to be quite a bit—that’s a good 12 inches of advertisement space. Haha, I’m just kidding.

Sounds painful.
Yeah. I’m also trying to sell my name again, so if VICE wanted to advertise with me—which I know they don’t—my name would be Vicedotcom Hostgatordotcom.

Don’t you think having that kind of name will make it harder to get a job in the same kind of way that it made it harder to get a job with the face tattoos?
Yep.

You do?
Yep. I mean, some places might just think it’s funny, but the tattoos definitely hurt me really bad.

OK, so you’re selling your name again, as well as advertising space on your penis and at funeral casket—are you really this desperate? Do you really need the money?
I mean, I’m just entertaining offers. The money would have to be right. I’m pretty OK right now, actually—I just thought it would be fun.

Are you looking for more jobs on the side?
Yeah, I’m doing security now, too. I’ll be starting tomorrow.

Are you starting to think that if you never got the tattoos in the first place you’d have a better job right now?
Oh, I’m sure I would. If I didn’t get the tattoos I’d have a really high-paying job right now.

Do you have any dreams for your future career?
Well, I want something that pays more than I earn now, and hopefully something in the field of helping people. I really like helping people. That’s what I’d like to do with the money from selling space on my dick: start a business that can give back to the community.

Maybe you can help other people sell their bodies as advertising space?
I get tons of emails from people who want advice on how to sell their bodies as advertising. I get pictures from women from all over the world, usually of their breasts. They say, “Do you think anyone will want to advertise on these?” I get questions from guys sending pictures of their dicks, too. They’re all short on money and they want to sell their bodies. I've probably had around 500 of those emails in the last year.

It’s sad to think that so many people need the money that much.
Yeah, it’s come to that. I always tell them how I went about doing it, but I tell them not to do it on their face.

Are you getting any new offers from websites?
Yeah, one company called Peepmeat.com reached out to me. They want to advertise on my arm, but I don’t know what their company is. I’ve never visited it online.

OK, I’m just loading the website now. It seems to be some kind of porn website for meat.
Is it porn?

Well, not really—it’s food-porn. Just hamburgers, actually. It says, “Peepmeat: a delicious gallery of burger snapshots.”
Haha, really?

I’m amazed. Sometimes I think I understand the internet, then I speak to you for five minutes and my world gets turned upside-down.  Since when do websites like this exist? And how do you all find each other? Is there some international symposium for internet weirdos?
Haha, no. People just find me through Facebook.

So is there anything else going on in your life?
Not a lot, just trying to survive in this world.

You’re financially stable now though, right? Your kids are healthy?
Yeah, we’re doing OK. I’m not going to be homeless any time soon.

You sound a lot happier. Are you a lot happier?
Yeah, I’m really hopeful for the future.

Great. Good luck with everything, Hostgator. 

Follow Matt on Twitter: @Matt_A_Shea.

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Dimethyltryptamine is so hot right now. Ever since Enter the Void and DMT: The Spirit Molecule showed up on Netflix Instant, kids have been going gaga over this technology from another dimension.

An extremely effective, naturally occurring psychedelic compound that’s simultaneously spiritual and more fun than bumper boats, DMT is perhaps most famous for its instant and intense visuals. Within a few seconds of inhaling its thick, harsh smoke, one is taken to a place very different from what most contemporary Westerners refer to as reality. While there is a lot of debate regarding where that place exists (or if it exists, or if anything exists for that matter), it can be said with absolute certainty that DMT Town looks very cool. The passenger is immediately overwhelmed with exotic patterns, colors, textures, emotions, and other things that we don’t yet have words for. I recently came across some, shared it with my pals, and talked to them about their trips just as they floated back down to Earth.

Jodie

I felt what God was like. It was something that was smaller than anything. It’s not made of anything—it is everything around the thing that it is and everything inside of it at the same time and it kind of moves about in a way that’s not on the grid.

It was like time traveling, but it wasn’t time before or after, it was just adjacent to us. Early on I saw that Earth was having a vibration. That it was like a constant breath, but we can’t see it. You can’t see it from photos. The edge of everything. It got so hot. It was like a wave that was like electricity. It was black and then red and then white, and it was rounded and arched as if it were in orbit somewhere.

Your bodies were, like, singing—everything you were doing was like a song. You were making a symphony. The scratching and the movements were all in a rhythm, and I felt very happy. I was also seeing all this fun, wacky clown stuff. All these crazy geometric patterns. It seemed like they were laughing at me. Then there were these little elf things. I couldn’t see them but they were letting me know that they were there. I felt very happy, like, “Yeah, this is where I’m supposed to be.”

Oren

That was the most intense thing ever. The whole room was dancing. To my left all I saw was fantasy. I was going through something very fucking serious. You’re beyond consciousness—but you are consciousness—and you want nothing to tie you down to this physical realm. I went through so many dreams and so many scenarios. It was basically a concentrated dream. I was awake but I couldn’t make the dream stop.

Taylor

It hit really fast. After the second puff there were like Slinkys everywhere. Colorful Slinkys that were not necessarily attacking me, but coming towards my face. And all the colors that were in the room, that I imagined were in the room, were coming at me as well. It was beautiful.

I felt really physically heavy. I couldn’t even lift up the bottle to smoke or hold the lighter. And time slowed down. It felt like a good 15 minutes, but maybe it was only 30 seconds. The colors were really awesome—lots of greens, lots of neons. I felt like I was watching myself through a wall for part of it. The sound of the camera was really trippy. 

Adam

At first it was like straight up kaleidoscopic. And then there were pyramids, and then symbols within the pyramids, and they were melting together, combining. It felt like I was in infinite bosoms. Straight up love and warmth and tits and honey. It was like having the sun shining right here. It wasn’t super hot, just like the warmest glow. 

Sarah

Everything looked like a painting. And her hair was going mental—it was like spaghetti. Every angle was tripled. Everything had angles. Looking around was like paint-by-numbers. It got really weird at some point. I felt like the room was closing in and everything was smaller, and that white space tripped me out. I was like, “Wow, there’s so much white there!”

Victor

The visual side of things was like doing acid or mushrooms. I felt tingly and I had a body high or whatever. When I lied down and was listening to Iggy Pop, you were taking a picture of me and I still felt self-conscious. I don’t think I lost sight of myself enough to think that wasn’t absurd and funny. So then I sat back up again, and it got hella intense when I sat back up. It was a lot like the more intense moments of acid.

Almost the strangest part is how quickly you come down. With acid it lingers for a day sometimes—the whole next day you feel weird. With this you pretty much feel normal almost immediately afterwards. I still feel kind of strange because I remember the experience of doing the drug. And I’m probably gonna think about it a few times for the rest of the day. It’s like a way less time- and energy-intensive acid trip.

Lex

It’s hard to talk about it. I could see patterns within the design patterns that were supposed to be there, and they all moved and looked ill as shit. The curtains looked like doilies. There was like this weird place where I felt like it had its own motion, and then there was a place where everything I was listening to and looking at and thinking about met, and that place was the drug… or something. It’s weird how it comes off, too. It’s just a little less intense and then a little less intense until you’re not high anymore. The visuals are so strong. Like everything looked beautiful. For something that extremely mind-bending it’s really easy.

Joshua

When it first hit I could see the room start to breathe, and then I felt myself going limp. It was what I imagine being in the womb would be like. Everything was safe and warm. It was very fluid and what you imagine the sun would be like. I cried for some reason. I remember thinking there was a message for me there.

http://mexico3000.tumblr.com/

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According to such sources as Hollywood, history textbooks, and the word on the street, the Middle Ages were a thousand-year grunge revival in which everybody walked around covered in fleas and mud and you could tell a person’s class by the particular stench of their balls. This is total bullshit. I know this because I just spent two weeks adhering strictly to premodern hygiene techniques and aside from a few skid marks, unexplained sores, heavy dandruff, lots of smegma, and a possible case of Saint Anthony’s fire, I turned out fine. Here’s how it went.

		THE BASIC RULES I was not allowed to indulge in any sanitary practices developed before the Age of Enlightenment, and I had to wear the same set of clothes for all 14 days. I went with an all-white ensemble because I wanted to keep track of the grime. I also thought it gave the whole endeavor a sort of Fitzcarraldo expeditionary vibe, but I’m only able to admit that now, after the fact.

PISSING
I am what you might call “lackadaisical” about cleaning myself in the first place, so the only thing separating my first few days of medieval hygiene from three days of my regular hygiene was pissing. I’d initially decided to go al fresco, a move I’ve perfected over many nights of drinking. But then I discovered that pissing on the sidewalk, sober, at 10 in the morning feels like a dress rehearsal for exposing yourself to a kindergarten class. So I got a chamber pot.

These are probably the best thing to happen to peeing since the bladder. There were a couple of basics I had to get down, like holding the pot up to my crotch instead of trying to aim into it on the floor and never starting full-stream. But after mopping up a couple early loads with my sleeve, the whole apartment was now my bathroom.

The only downside was emptying the pot. Heaving it out the window doesn’t work since I live above my landlord (it’s also been illegal since the 500 BC Roman dejecti effusive act). Most mornings I would just dump it out in the gutter between a couple of parked cars or, if I was feeling particularly civic, the storm drain at the end of the block. It took me three days to figure out that you have to pitch the urine if you don’t want it dribbling all over your pants.

TEETH
After two days of neglect, the plaque at my gums started to shift from faint yellow to ocher and I was increasingly finding deposits of caramelized soda in the top of my crowns. My girlfriend classified the scent of my breath as somewhere between the smells of garbage and human crap.

Miswak is a weird Middle Eastern stick that Mohammed loved so much he should have married it. It’s just a twig that frays down into a decent toothbrush, but that didn’t stop the prophet from bringing it up in the Hadith every chance he got. Nor does it stop present-day miswak exporters from claiming it “strengthens the back,” “keeps away devil-thought,” and is the “cure of every disease except death.”

I gave the stick a dry run, at which point I learned that miswak tastes eerily similar to the smell of urinal cakes. Then, following an ancient Egyptian recipe, I ground up a bowl of ox hooves, pumice, burned eggshells, and myrrh and whipped it into a thin, grainy paste with some of my spit. This concoction sounds pretty gross and it felt a lot like I was buffing my teeth with sand, but guess what? It is basically the same thing as contemporary toothpaste, give or take a little fluoride. Without being too much of a skirt about it, it got the job done.

SHITTING
I’m a fairly infrequent shitter, so I was lucky to enjoy a three-day honeymoon period with my chamber pot in which it was a urine-only receptacle. Eventually, inevitably, I was forced to break the seal and drop a log in there. This was a shame because, as I came to discover, no matter how carefully you piss away the little brown flecks on the side, you will never kill the smell.

Still, shitting in a pot was a lot easier than I thought it was going to be. All you have to do is make sure you’re squatting over the right place, tuck back your dignity for a couple seconds, and gingerly let rip. This seems counterintuitive, but I found that it helps to have a teensy pool of urine at the bottom of the pot—not enough to splash back, but just a little puddle for the turd to land in so it doesn’t instantly graft itself to the pot’s ceramic surface. I consider this discovery on par with the invention of modern plumbing, as it transformed the process of dumping my shit by the East River on the way to work from a terrifying five- to ten-minute ordeal into a simple stop-and-slop.

WIPING, PART THE FIRST
At the beginning of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, young Gargantua uses rudimentary science to figure out the best ass-wiping material in the world. Turns out it’s the neck of a well-downed goose. The runners-up include bedsheets, a march cat, calf’s skin, a lady’s velvet mask, several pillows, and a penitent’s hood.

I couldn’t get my hands on any of these to use, but I did try subbing in my t-shirt for the bedsheets. Wiping your ass with a soft linen is one of the most luxurious sensations on earth, but only until your ass is clean. After that you’re stuck trying to figure out whether to shove the shit-encrusted cloth in the chamber pot or clean it with your piss, as the Romans liked to do. I’d already emptied my bladder and didn’t feel like saving the shirt in the shower for later, so I smushed down my freshly steaming loaf to make room in the pot. That was not fun.

The bread-and-butter of my wiping was the old nautical standby of fruit. On my first try, I used a couple of bananas peeled very carefully down one side. My first impulse was to hold the skin by the outside and wipe with the fleshy innards. Total amateur hour. It felt like I was applying a cool, refreshing wet wipe to my shitty ass, but all it accomplished was coating the feces in a sticky layer of banana meat. Even worse, because there was no dook visible on the used peel, I assumed I was done. The banana residue carried me for a few hours upright, but the second I sat down, the entire inseam of my boxers looked like it’d been dipped in cake frosting.

Orange peels worked a little bit better, although after a night stewing in my own juices they made the chamber pot reek like nothing I’ve smelled in my life. One thing I realized is that the size of the fruit doesn’t matter. Peels with a big surface area like grapefruit may prevent you from sticking a finger up your ass, but unless you take an entire crate with you to the bathroom, you’re still going to walk away with at least a light spackling of dung. That might just be me, though.

		SMELL, PART THE FIRST By day 4, I had a pretty good goat going. Nothing crazy, but enough to make folks sitting near me ask “Who’s smoking weed?” anytime my coworker’s desk fan passed over my armpit. While the medieval consensus was to let this sort of small shit slide, the Egyptians used little balls of porridge as deodorant. Seeing as how they built the pyramids instead of a bunch of lousy churches, I decided to go with them on this one. I cooked up some oatmeal, let it cool, and slopped it under my arm. After a couple seconds, the porridge slime congealed into a thin, gluelike film that completely sealed off the smell for two days. The oats, on the other hand, embedded themselves in my skin like deer ticks. Thanks, oats.
		SKIN Putting on my second layer of porridge several days later, I noticed several dime-size spots of blood on my undershirt that didn’t correspond with anything on my body. While looking for their source, I also turned up a large welt, complete with pus, an inch above my left elbow. Everyone thought it was gross, but I saw them as medieval beauty marks meet stigmata.
		LAUNDRY The Roman method of pissing on your clothes to clean them sounds crazy enough to work (especially if you know that urine contains trace amounts of broken-down ammonia). I tried this out on one sleeve of my shirt, but no matter how hard I rinsed and scrubbed, I couldn’t get the pee smell out. I guess the Romans were OK with that.
		HAIR Entering week 2, my hair was like Ally Sheedy’s inThe Breakfast Club (but without the cuteness), so I decided to look into some olde-time product. Anticipating their descendents’ style by a good 3,000 years, the ancient Israelis concocted a simple, volumizing hair gel from ash and pine oil. After rubbing a few dollops of this into my scalp, I looked like a cartoon bomb had gone off in my hands and I smelled like hamster chips. Later I learned that each of the cowlicks I’d given myself with this crap is now permanent.
		MORE WIPING Having spent a week caked in at least a little shit, I decided it was time to, as they say in British erotica, “pamper my bottom.” The xylosphongium is an ancient Roman wiper that consists of a sea sponge soaked in salt water and tied to the end of a stick. This thing is so much better than a wad of paper it’s ridiculous. The only trick is remembering to keep one side of the sphongium dry for the final wipe.

MORE SMELL
By day 8, “Who’s smoking weed?” had devolved into “Who’s frying dog shit?” and I’d been relegated to an empty corner of the office on account of smelling like homelessness. I was still smearing porridge under my arms, but after the second batch, the smell of oats merely commingled with the stench instead of quashing it.

But even my pit stink was no match for the centimeter-deep layer of tallow coating the entire surface of my balls and tinting the base of my cock breakfast-sausage gray. I learned long ago, on drugs, not to ask other people if they can smell your crotch, but now the curiosity was destroying me. Every time I sat down in a chair, my face ended up nose-level with a cloud of dick cheese.

Since Egyptian hygiene had failed me, I decided to move a few thousand years forward to the Greeks. Loosely following a recipe by first-century pharmacist Pedanius Dioscorides, I made a perfume from myrrh and the roots of various flowers steeped in boiling olive oil. After straining out the plant crap, I rubbed the unguent all over my body (except for my balls—they were literally too greasy for it to stick) and got ready to go out. I’m not very good with fragrances, but the result smelled somewhere between head shop and one of those bookstores that sell crystals. I think it may also have contained the pheromone well-to-do Greeks used to seduce other guys, because no girl would talk to me for longer than 20 seconds at a time.


At midnight of day 15—at the insistence of literally every person I know—I slid into the tub and watched two weeks’ hard work flake off my body in visible chunks. Overall I feel like I did a pretty good job of keeping my worst odors concealed by the lesser ones. Unfortunately, the one smell I could never mask was the acrid funk of prejudice. Maybe someday the rest of the world will wake up to how good we used to have it, but for now I guess it’s back to wiping my ass with a piece of paper like some kind of sucker.

A lot of times when you end up on the naked end of a wager, it means you lost more than your clothes in the challenge. However, in this case, our founder Shane Smith had promised he'd give a video tour of the VICE offices in his birthday suit if you helped us reach our goal of 2 million subscribers on the VICE YouTube channel. Settling a bet never felt so good. 

Thank you, champions of fine journalism, for having the impeccable taste and towering intellect of Mensa members who can smell the difference between a Pinot Noir and some fancy sparkling grape juice. Thank you for subscribing to VICE.

If you have yet to jump on the VICE train to Best Shit Ever Town, subscribe right now. When we hit 3 million subscribers, Shane will get naked again—on a mountain top. Who doesn't want to see that?

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This illustration is a page from Molly Crabapple's sketchbook.

Only two people have ever gotten angry when I drew their pictures: a Moroccan religious fundamentalist and a New York City cop.

I was 19 when I sat sketching in Fez's Old City. I came to Morocco with a hallucinogen-chomping writer and an orientalist streak as deep as Fez's open sewers. I abandoned both by the end of the trip. Besides motorbikes and street harassment, Fez's main sounds were those of tour groups clomping toward their guide's carpet shop. I didn't want to be like them.

Tour groups took photos. They'd jam cameras into someone's face. Before their subject could respond, they'd run off, happy to have proof that they'd stood somewhere quaint.  

I drew.

I'd curl up on filthy steps with my sketch pad. Street kids watched. Drawing was a monkey dance to prove that despite my dopey American face, there was still a skill I could rock. I'd draw the street kids. They'd scamper away with my sketches.

The man who didn't like my drawings had the long gray beard of the religiously devout. One morning he ripped my drawing from my hands and shredded it with a satisfied grunt. Dopey-American-style, I burst into tears.

A decade later, I sat next to journalist Matt Taibbi in a New York misdemeanor court, watching a judge pressure brown men into plea bargains for walking their bikes on the sidewalk. I drew the cop who was guarding the courtroom. He looked as pink and shiny as a boil. The cop stormed over. "What are you doing?" he hissed.

"Drawing. It's allowed."

"You were looking at me. When someone looks at me, they mean trouble."

The back of the courtroom burst into laughter as he stalked away.

In Morocco and Manhattan, I was channeling the art's twin desires—to mock power and to please.

I started drawing when I was four. It fast became a way to relate to a world where classmates wrote death threats on my book bag. In grade school, I'd draw kids so they wouldn't hit me. Artists are courtiers more often than rebels. Painters survived the gulags by drawing criminals' kids. Being small and skilled, you learn to create little portals of escapism—to which the strong are as susceptible as anyone else.

Later, drawing let me look. Since my tits came in, I've learned to walk with blind, bitch-faced indifference. If my eyes strayed, guys would take it as an invitation to fuck. They'd follow me down the street screaming "Cunt!" when I declined. The upside was that if I did want to fuck, I just had to look up.

Women are looked at. But as an artist, I had permission to look back.

Where the respectable avert their gaze, artists stare. In the Renaissance, we dissected bodies in order to grasp the workings of a shoulder joint. We drew naked models at a time when women corseted themselves neck to knees. We took rooms in brothels and captured courtrooms where no cameras could go. Our sketchpads are our excuse.

But as cameras came to dominate image making, artists retreated to our studios. During my modeling years, I developed a black envy of photographers. I posed for one of those inevitable portrait series of burlesque dancers without makeup (The Woman Behind The Mask!). As I shivered in my sequined G-string, I stared at the photographer's past portraits. Drag queens. Fetish stars. Performance artists with butterflies for lashes and 18-inch waists. It was the New York I had read about but was too awkward to approach. I longed to meet them, charm them, make them mine.

I slept with girls until I realized that I wanted to draw them instead.

When I was 24, I got the gig as the official Toulouse Lautrec of New York's most depraved nightclub. Onstage, my three-and-a-half-foot-tall punk friend would paint himself blue and mime intercourse with a girl dressed as a Smurf. In the audience, bankers vomited up champagne that cost more than my college tuition. I got the job by pulling out my sketchbook while sitting next to the club's owner. Drawing is disruptive. You're producing when you're expected to consume. Nightlife barons are no different than third graders. Art's magic trick works just as well on them.

Two years of 4 AMs found me curled up on the club's stairs. I drew girls in G-strings as they stretched their legs over their heads in the blue backstage light. We were both working, they and I. They were goddesses. I could capture them. I traced their images over and over, tattooing the moment, dancing with my hands.

When I was 29, I balanced on a railing and live-drew the Madrid general strike. It was the diametric opposite of my New York nightclub. But my impulse was the same.

Later, I'd draw anything or anyone that interested me. Piled on top of one another, my sketchbooks make a stack taller than me.

We live in the age of the ubiquitous image. Our phones are filled with porno selfies. CCTV cams survey our shopping trips. Cops post GIFs of the Boston bombers. Drawing is charmingly ineffectual in comparison. You take photos. Drawings you make. Cameras steal life force. Paintings, like The Picture of Dorian Gray, give you more.

When you draw, you're feeding an image with blood. I got tendonitis from drawing too much. My right hand periodically stops functioning, and I have to pay someone to electrocute it back to life. During long projects, I punch my palm over and over to make it hold a pencil. Constrained by mud, blood, and tendons, I'd keep on working. It's all I can do.

I didn't have any more encounters with the cop who didn't like my sketches. But I went back to that square in Fez the next day. A teen boy stopped me. "Sorry about that guy," he said. "He's crazy."

He shoved something into my hand. It was my drawing, its pieces taped up like a broken arm.

@MollyCrabapple

Previously:

Talking About My Abortion

I first met Rajiv a few years ago when I interviewed him about his band, Oh No Forest Fires (RIP). Besides having a beard that would make lesser men envious, he was also born and raised in Newfoundland, which means he’s capable of drinking most other human beings under the table. Since I’m also from the East Coast and we share several mutual friends, we got along pretty well and stayed in touch after he moved to St. John’s to study medicine. Recently, I was perusing the ol' Facebook and saw that he was engaged in an “experiment” where he could only eat Hawkins Cheezies (the Canadian equivalent to Cheetos) for 127 hours straight (or one business week), with just water and one vitamin pill per day to keep from dying. To make this challenge even more interesting, his friend Ian also participated, eating only Hershey’s Nibs. This all sounded incredibly stupid to me so I checked in with them a few days after they finished to make sure they were still alive, and find out why exactly they put themselves through such an ordeal.

VICE: Are you an idiot?
Ian: No, we were just at a party and Rajiv was eating some Cheezies and said, matter-of-factly, "You know, I could probably eat only Hawkins Cheezies for the rest of my life." I instantly said, "Really? How long do you think you could actually live on only Cheezies?" On some level I might have just grown tired of hyperbolic statements that are thrown around so casually, but that's probably not what actually went through my head. We went back and forth deciding how long he could realistically go and came up with 127 hours, with the justification that if a guy could live trapped under a rock for that long, it should be easy enough to just eat a delicious snack for the same amount of time. And, I think to really push him to find out, I said I'd eat something else exclusively for the same amount of time. He came up with Nibs, a candy that isn't really one of my favorites but one that I do like, and for some reason, I agreed.

Rajiv: I think the more important values—if we can call them that—at play here were things like raw stubbornness, curiosity, and a sense of one-upmanship. In a lot of ways, it's the same reason I drank a pint of my best friend’s urine or ate a raw hot dog out of a puddle on George Street.

You didn’t just eat them as is. What are some of the methods you used to prepare your food? I saw the Vine of the Cheezies smoothie...
Rajiv: Yeah. I mean, let's face it, they taste best raw, room temp. We tried boiling them, straining it, and eating a pasta-esque dish. It ended up just being like warm, mushy, processed cheesy corn meal... and to be honest, it wasn't all that bad. The Cheezie smoothie was much worse. I tried to get it down quickly, gagged, and brought the whole thing back up.

Ian: I tried a few different techniques to keep my meals interesting, but neither of them made my food taste any less like Nibs. 1) Frozen: just made them really hard and cold. 2) Fried: tasted a bit worse than regular Nibs—almost like burnt hair, maybe—but at least it was a slightly different taste. 3) Boiled: they just melted and became slimy and hard to eat. 4) Smoothied: flavored water, nothing special.

Rajiv, you're studying to be a doctor. You should know better than anyone just how incredibly unhealthy this challenge was.
Rajiv: Yeah, I'm in school for that. I don't see why that should change anything. I still functioned reasonably well at work. The worst part was having to deal with all of the questions from people who saw my posts about it on social media, like, "How are ya doin with the cheezies?!" or "CAN I GET YA SUM CHEEZIES!!!!" every damn day. That might have been the hardest part about all this, actually—forcing myself to NOT tell people to shut up when they were talking about it. I can talk about it. Why are YOU talking about it?

Maybe that's not fair either. Because I loved the Facebook and Twitter aspect of it. I like narrating events. Strangely enough, I actually reconnected with a half-dozen people who had kind of drifted out of my life. So that's a plus. Regardless, I certainly didn't trust my own opinion about the health risks of this whole thing, so I asked someone who would know. He's a staff general surgeon here in St. John's and he said, and I quote:

"You can go a week without eating anything and nothing would happen. But it's still idiocy. You should cancel this.”

When were you the closest to giving up?
Ian: About 14 hours into the challenge I started getting really hungry and was pretty close to calling Rajiv and admitting it was too ridiculous of an idea. I figured I'd at least try to get through the day, but in my head there was no way I could last for the whole duration. Day two and three were relatively easy, I assume because my stomach was no longer expecting food. I went out to dinner with a few people on Tuesday and couldn't help continually smelling everyone's food. Other people's reactions, and them telling us how stupid we were for doing it, were pretty motivating I guess. We obviously like to think we have a lot of willpower and control over our bodies, and personally I wanted to see just how far that could go.

Overall, my body felt awful for the whole week. I had constant headaches, my stomach was pissed at me, and I felt light-headed and dizzy a lot. I tried to stay busy without being too active, just to occupy my mind with something not related to Nibs. I went out to lunch for my dad's birthday on Wednesday and after them trying to force-feed me for an hour, it eventually came out and I explained it to my parents and received the disappointed look I expected. Friday was very difficult to get through, and if it wasn't the last day I probably would have had to quit. I felt kind of delusional for the first time all week, and as much as she disapproved initially, my girlfriend was pretty supportive toward the end.

Rajiv: Not once did I consider giving up.

Did you notice any changes in your bodily functions?
Rajiv: No overt changes. My poop didn't turn orange/glow/kill me as most people kept asking, but it definitely took on a strange consistency. There was one night where I woke up with a persistent stabbing pain in the right side of my belly, which I've never had before and absolutely never want to experience again. My pee also remained normal-colored. To be honest, I was more worried about putting myself into heart failure or getting edema [fancy doctor talk for "swelling"] on my ankles because of the sheer amount of sodium I was getting.

What has this experience taught you about the limitations of the human body?
Rajiv: Undoubtedly, there are people reading this who are just bored while they're pooping, thinking, This is stupid in a lot of ways. But if you were to put a romantic spin on it, maybe it's in the same spirit of discovery and respect for the natural world that led us to do things like fly to the moon. Yeah, that's it.

Follow Max on Twitter: @Max_Mertens

More bizarre eating adventures:

Vaginal Discharge Is the Breakfast of Champions

This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

Girl Eats Placenta

Photos by Alison Stevenson

I grew up where all the porn is made. Not all of it, but most. I knew that growing up, then I left and found out other people knew it, too.

“The Valley. That’s where all the porn is.”

“Yeah,” I’d say, taking an apologetic sip of beer, shame, whatever.

Not that I was ashamed of the place, or that one should be ashamed of such an association. On the contrary—I was ashamed because I had absolutely nothing to show for my pornographic origins. I had no stories to corroborate the Boogie Nights fantasy of the Valley as the campus town for the co-ed fraternity Sigma Phi Big Porn. Growing up here, porn was just as distant to me as it was to anyone else—through a laptop with my mouse hovering over the X. And I was fine with that. You want to be fine with things like that.

But you also want places to deliver. You go to New York, you want a stranger to tell you to go fuck yourself. You go to London, you want a stranger to tell you to go fuck yourself while it’s raining. You go to the Valley, you want to see someone you've watched fucking. And so, finding myself here as an adult, I decided to do just that, in a minimall in Burbank, at Sardo’s Bar and Grill, the home of Porn Star Karaoke.

Every Tuesday night, performers, producers, crew, and regulars turn out for what has now become an almost decade-long tradition in an industry where careers rarely span half that time. As bar owner Seymour Satin explained, the event was born out of a lack of industry-centered events available to the public, and soon became a staple for performers and fans alike. “When people come to Hollywood and want to see movie stars," Seymour told me, "they go to Jerry’s Deli. When they want to see porn stars, they know to come here on Tuesday nights.”

The evening began slowly, like any karaoke night, with mostly older white males singing Creedence, Alice in Chains, and the Clash, each taking his song as seriously as a book report. By the end of the first hour, the only visible porn presence in the room was event host Tessa Lane, but by hour two, more performers began to show, and suddenly it was packed. Yes, there were popped collars. Yes, there were men with too many buttons open. Yes, there were visors. But it was also a good time, and the beer was cheap.

Siri was the first porn star to sing, and her choice was CeeLo’s “Fuck You,” perhaps the greatest karaoke song of the last five years. As the piano intro played, Tessa Lane asked the crowd, “Can everyone just stare at those fucking tits for a second?” We complied. Siri, seeming at once unsure and absolutely sure of what to do, pressed them together and shook them, just in time for the refrain.

After Siri’s crowd-pleasing performance, it was time for the first porn giveaway of the night. The game is simple—you hold your drink up and yell really loud while the host reads off porn titles. If you yell loud enough, they give you free porn. A collective roar broke out as each name was read: “Big Black & Fat,” [deafening unisex roar] “Cinderella Sex Connection,” [deafening male-heavy roar], and “Gangbang Virgins” [a lesser, exclusively male roar].

Kurt Lockwood was the next star to perform. When introduced, he took the mic and said, “I’m so lucky to work with these fabulous ladies. And you can tell they love their work because once they’re done, you can see it all over their faces.” Then, in a tonal shift unlike any I’ve seen before, he said, “This one’s for Boston,” and did a deeply moving version of Bob Marley’s civil rights anthem, “Get Up. Stand Up.”

I stepped out and decided it was a good time for an interview with the star of the show, the great Tessa Lane.

The rest of the night was divided into two narratives: enjoying the karaoke and praying for Ron Jeremy to show up. Seymour was giving me half an hour updates, leaving Ron voice messages. Ron said he wasn't sure if he was coming out. "Call back in another half hour." By 1:30 AM, it was clear that Ron was not showing up. I was disappointed and ready to leave when the second porn giveaway started. I picked up the rest of my whiskey and screamed bloody murder. Siri walked a copy of Hairy Ass Cherries over and handed it to me. I took it home and unwrapped it, and that's where this story ends and another began.

Words have a tendency to hurt when they’re right and soothe when they’re wrong. Read this:

“We are getting to that age when we can no longer rely on anyone but ourselves. It’s not college anymore. People are there for you when they want to be and gone when they don’t.”

The person who said this to me did not know that he had just shot me in the chest. He did not know that he cut through me like butter and now here I am, melting fast on a bar stool, my insides dripping carelessly on the floor.

Because he’s right. If there’s anything I’ve learned about being single, it’s that this world wasn’t meant to be experienced alone. We were created for the purposes of fucking, loving, and mating and every day you spend failing to do just that, the universe ignores you a little bit more.

You will feel the most invisible at 2:00 on a Sunday afternoon inside an air-conditioned movie theater. That’s when you disappear more and more until you’ve got nothing left. Just FYI.

***

Six years ago today, I was hit by a car while walking across the intersection of Sunset and Yorba in San Francisco. Since then, I’ve had six surgeries, one skin graft, a three-week hospital stay, four casts, approximately 6,000 painkillers, and a partridge in a pear tree.

Complications arose from my accident. So many complications. For one, the muscles in my left arm decided to die on me. Doctors talked about “bringing them back” and negotiations were held. Money was waved around aggressively. Still, no dice. My muscles were basically like, “No. We like being dead. Bye.”

They opened me up again and again. Then they had the audacity to tell me that they couldn’t close the wound. I would have to get skin taken from my thigh and grafted onto my forearm in order for that to happen.

“It will hurt,” they said.

No shit. I wasn’t expecting a skin graft to feel like a massage.

Things were bad for a very long time. I dropped out of school to recover from the accident and moved into an apartment in Beverly Hills adjacent (it’s important to mention the "adjacent" part) to a crazy lady who only ate Cool Whip and wore athletic gear. I lay in bed and ate Chipotle four times a week. Sometimes I’d try to masturbate, but the orgasms were usually such weak pussies, it hardly even seemed worth it.

My left hand was basically dead. More words were thrown around, words like “compartment syndrome” and “very rare.” In the meantime, I was expected to go to hand therapy four times a week and get better. That’s all I was supposed to do because that’s all I could do. I couldn’t even put deodorant on. My father had to do that. He had to do everything—including bathe me. The first time he did it, I got embarrassed that he was seeing me naked as a fully formed adult with a fully formed penis, but then I stopped caring. I stopped caring about everything. After all, I’ll probably have to do the same for him one day. Eventually, he’ll get Alzheimer’s or have a stroke, and I’ll be the one trying to avert my eyes from his naked body.

My father did not experience this world alone. He never felt invisible at 2:00 on a Sunday afternoon. He was smart. He found a partner, had kids, and now has people to bathe him until he dies. He doesn’t have to rely only on himself, because he thought ahead.

I, on the other hand, am thinking backward. I am not buying the life insurance.

***

Six years later, it would appear that I’m better. It would appear that I am functioning and can do normal adult things like live alone and have sex. And it’s true. I can do those things. Sometimes I can even do them well. Still, there are messes that will never get cleaned up. For example, I can’t handwrite; I text with one finger and type with two, and I can’t tie my own shoes. (This is perhaps the most annoying thing. As I write this piece, I am wearing untied boat shoes that have the laces tucked underneath my feet, and I look like an idiot.) All of these deficiencies make me feel like a child. Once my friend saw my handwriting and, not knowing it was mine, he screamed, “Ew! Who wrote this? A retarded person?”

No. Not quite.

The thing is that I truly am better and thankful to be alive. Getting hit by a car actually forced my life to go in a better direction, so, really, I’m OK with it. The one negative effect of the accident is that it has filled me with a sense of dread about going through experiences without a partner. It’s just too hard. I know that now. I know what it’s like to really rely on someone and need them to survive. I’m not saying that we should all marry someone just so we have someone to clean up after us when we start shitting our pants at 80. I just think that sometimes the difference between living and dying is having someone who provides you with that electric shock. If something terrible happened to any of us, God forbid, we would need as many reasons we possibly could to keep on living.

Previously - Give All the Drugs to the Gay Boys

@ryanoconn

It could be argued that the main reason gay marriage has yet to be legalized throughout the US is that a majority of Christians can’t deal with two dudes doin’ it. Most conservative Christians cloak their objections to same-sex relations in a few Bible verses that say stuff like, “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is an abomination.” (Leviticus 18:22) But an anonymous group of Christians is claiming that, actually, the parts of the Bible that are interpreted as references to homosexuality don’t say anything at all about diddling someone who has the same type of junk as yours—and they’ve gone a step further by retranslating the respective passages.  

They’ve named their resulting text the Queen James Bible, and while it only contains about 100 words that have been changed from what can be found in the King James Bible, the altered passages read quite differently. That famous line about homosexuality being an “abomination,” for instance, was tweaked in the QJB to read, “Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind in the temple of Molech: it is an abomination” (emphasis added). The QJB’s editors explain that this change was made due to historical context. It’s their view that this section of Leviticus is all about banning forms of pagan idolatry, which included “lying with” male prostitutes in certain temples, and wasn’t intended to condemn specific sex acts. 

The editors have drawn criticism from conservative Christians for using historical context to interpret verses rather than relying on literal translation of the Hebrew. Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry (CARM), a right-wing group that opposes gay marriage, posted an especially harsh line-by-line attack on its website, claiming that the editors “altered [Leviticus 18:22] to fit their sexual preference.” 

“To take offense with historical context is to take offense with historical fact,” the anonymous QJB editors wrote me in an email. “To fixate on the idea that God and the Bible hate gay people based on a few words is like worrying about the intonation of a vocal harmony on a Beatles demo instead of enjoying the music and letting it enrich your life. We encourage any non-Christian to sit down and read the entire Bible front to back. Nobody’s going to come away from that experience hating gay people.” 

The academic argument over translation is mostly symbolic—if the majority of Christians decide to ignore the parts of the Bible that condemn homosexuality, as they already ignore the bits banning tattoos and eating shellfish, they’ll do so. But the editors of the QJB believe that it’s important to fight their opponents on their own terms, rather than just dismisswing certain verses as archaic. “People point at the Bible and say, ‘Gay people are bad because this book says so,’” they said. “We wanted a Bible people could point to and say, ‘Not anymore.’”

Read more heresy about the bible from VICE:

The Bible Is Nothing But Fan Fiction for Jesus

A Chat with the Creator of "Bible Fight"

Holy Unicorns!

Sexomniacs fuck or dry-hump people in their sleep and have no memory of it when they wake up. Think that sounds cool? Well, perverts, it’s not. Sufferers of sexomnia can find themselves on the pointy end of fun charges like rape and sexual assault. And for their loved ones, the simple act of catching some hard earned Zs can result in a rampant, uninvited pounding at the hands of their zombified partners. Talk about a bedtime boner-kill.

When I first heard about the condition, I asked some mates if they thought it was for real. Every single one replied: “Sexsomnia? I think my boyfriend/girlfriend/ex has that,” before adding: “Call me if you need some help with your research.”  Luckily not everyone thinks it’s as hilarious. Associate professor Gerald Kennedy at Victoria University has been researching and treating sexsomnia for years. And, judging by his experience, this sexy sleep disorder isn’t as fun as it sounds.

VICE: So Gerald, this is 100 percent a real thing, right?
Gerald Kennedy: It is. It’s similar to sleepwalking and night terrors in that those behaviours occur during deep sleep so you don’t have much memory of them. The same is true for sexsomnia. The person isn’t actually having sexual dreams, they’re just acting automatically.

Are some people more likely to have it than others?

People who suffer from sexsomnia are those who have an extended history of sleepwalking or other unusual sleep behaviours.

Is it more common in men? I feel like it might be... From my experience.

From what I’ve seen so far, and I haven’t seen a lot of it because despite what you might think it’s not very common, it is more common in men.

Are you more likely to suffer from it if you’re a particularly sexual person in waking life?

It doesn’t really factor into it because it’s an automatic behaviour. We get people doing non-sexual behaviours like eating or washing their hands when they’re asleep. It’s just another type of behaviour that occurs during the deep sleep cycle.

Sexsomnia has been in the press lately because several people accused of rape have blamed it for their actions. How can you prove that someone has it?

I actually recently went to the Port Phillip jail to interview a guy who claimed he had killed a woman in his sleep, which is similar legally. She was a hairdresser from Reservoir, which is where I live actually. Her body parts were found drifting off Phillip Island. Anyway, I asked: does this man have a medical history or anyone who can corroborate that he’s previously done things in his sleep? The answer was he didn’t, so I knew he was making that up on the spot to have a defence. It’s the same with sexsomnia. If someone wants to use it as a defence they should have a documented history of doing unusual things in their sleep. It doesn’t just occur out of the blue.

Have you personally ever seen anyone use sexsomnia as a defence?

Yes, I acted on behalf of a client who had a documented history from his doctor, mother, and ex-girlfriend of sexsomnia behaviour. He was accused of a sexual assault that he didn’t remember so the thought that he might have done sexsomnia was brought up. It preoccupied the whole trial. I was on the stand for a whole day being cross-examined about it.

What kinds of questions were they asking you?

About sexsomnia and what we’ve talked about here. I explained it’s a real condition where someone can have sex without realising or wanting it and not remember anything. As well as my diagnosis of his problem, confirming that he had a documented history of it.

And what was the resolution of that case?

Well the interesting thing about that case was there was no evidence of sexual assault. So even if he hadn’t brought up his sexsomnia, the case would have been dismissed. But because he brought it up it had to be fully examined in court.

Anyway, he ended up being found not guilty. I actually felt sorry for the complainant because she actually believed she'd be sexually assaulted. They were both very drunk at the time so she honestly believed she’d been sexually assaulted even though it turns out she probably hadn’t been. It was just a confusing case of two people being unsure what happened and someone being concerned that they’d had a sexsomnia episode.

Sounds like a frustrating episode of SVU. If you can prove that someone was asleep when they acted, can they still be charged?

Well it’s like, if I get drunk and I kill someone, I’m probably still going to be found guilty. But it’s going to affect the sentencing side of it. If I knew I had sexsomnia, and I sexually assaulted someone in my sleep, the judge would probably say: you knew you had this and you didn’t warn the people around you. Therefore you would probably still be found guilty, but be punished more lightly.

How about if a person has a proven record of sleepwalking, but they rape someone when they’re awake. Isn’t there a risk that they could use their history of sleepwalking as an excuse for their crime?

Sleepwalking and sexsomnia are similar but separate. It’s likely that people who have sexsomnia have other movement disorders when they’re asleep. But if you’re just known to be a sleepwalker, and then you sexually assault someone, it’s totally unconnected. You’d need a proven record of specifically having sexsomnia.

If you know you have sexsomnia, and you know that you could possibly be a threat to people, are there things you do to make sure you don’t hurt anyone?

It’s not likely that the person will wander out of their bed to have sex. It’s more likely that when they’re lying in bed with somebody they’ll have a sexsomnia episode and have sex in their sleep. It’s about proximity. If you do have it and you share a bed with someone, and they wake up to you sexually assaulting them, then they’ll probably have some complaints. So you have a duty of care towards them. It’s like if someone had AIDS, they have to tell people they have it if they’re going to have sex with them so they can take the appropriate precautions. There is no specific law about sexsomnia like there is with AIDS, but you still have a responsibility.

Is it only trying to have sex with someone or can it also be sex acts or masturbating?

Often it’s not full intercourse, it’s just rubbing up and down against a person. With the females I’ve seen, it has been more rubbing and touching themselves in the genital area.

That must be pretty disruptive to your personal life.

Well it can be because it can be pretty annoying to a partner. Automatic sexual behaviour is very rough and robotic. It’s not a very pleasant experience, especially when they can’t wake them up until after a bit of mauling.

When you treat sexomniacs, do you also work with their partners?

Recently a couple rang me up because the male in the relationship claims his partner, who has had more sexual experience than him, masturbates in her sleep. To be honest, I’m not even sure if she actually even does it as she doesn’t remember. But if she does it’s creating stress in him because he somehow feels inadequate.

Oh he thinks it’s a reflection on his manhood.

Yeah he thinks he can’t satisfy her because she keeps doing stuff in her sleep. And he also won’t believe me when I tell him that it’s an unconscious decision. There is the possibility that he’s actually just making it up and using it as a way to control her and make her feel bad about herself.

Imagine that.

Yeah. So in those cases, they might also need couple counselling as well as medical treatment.  

And what would treatment consist of?

There are a couple of treatments. They’re similar to insomnia where we try and get them to have very regulated sleep and wake cycles, avoid taking substances, or watching TV before bed. That’s the conservative treatment, it’s called sleep hygiene. If that doesn’t work there are medicines, they’re like sleeping pills but they also stop movement.

Is there a stigma that accompanies sexsomnia?

Not really, probably because it’s so rare. Most of the people I’ve see with it you wouldn’t class as overly sexual types. They’re not Don Juans, or really that interesting other than the whole sexsomnia thing.

You’ve mentioned a couple of times it’s so rare, getting back to the legal side of it for a moment, I came across a lot of legal cases where it had been called up. Do you think it’s being abused in that sense?

It will occasionally be abused in a case when someone has assaulted someone. It is very rare, but it could be more common that we think because people don’t report it and talk about it.

Are people are embarrassed about seeking help?

Yeah people are 100 percent embarrassed. And people don’t think it’s a big deal when they have a long-term partner who is used to it. But as soon as you begin having several different partners it’s going to become an issue.

Does that make it hard to research?

Yes, in 20 years of doing sleep clinics I’ve only seen four or possibly five genuine cases.

I guess the obvious question is why don’t people wake up when they’re doing it? You’d assume if a sleeping person started having sex with you, you’d make a fuss.

They will wake up eventually. One of my clients, even if I asked him to schedule sexual activity with his partner, after he went to sleep sometimes he would jump on top and proceed to have sex with her. She would hit him, bite him, scratch him and he wouldn’t wake up. But it depends on the person.

His now ex-girlfriend told me that she would think he was just amorous then realise he was asleep. Usually he’d wake up and they’d just continue having sex because they were a couple and she understood it and didn’t think he was assaulting her.

That’s a pretty understanding girlfriend.

She was pretty good. The guy was the one who was in the sexual assault case, she spoke on his behalf in the trial, even though she wasn’t in a relationship with him.

It’s great she was able to see past all the sleep-humping.

Follow Wendy on Twitter: @Wendywends

My parents settled in Thailand shortly after I was born. It just happened to be the place my father got a job after he finished his doctorate, and so I called it home, never doubting that I would spend my entire childhood. Aside from my father’s work, we had no connection to the country—no citizenship, no family. After I left with my mom, my dad moved to the US shortly after, and so my older brother and I were planted halfway around the world from where we grew up and lost every connection to that far off place the moment we arrived in America.

Having attended American school during our years in Thailand, we adjusted relatively quickly to life here, and any subsequent nostalgia for our original home was fleeting. Finally, just before my brother’s 23rd birthday, the thought struck him that a return to the motherland would do us some good. I was a sophomore in college at the time and, over my six years in America, had grown curious about aspects of life in Thailand that hadn’t occurred to me as a child. Mainly, I had no real idea what marijuana was at 13, and by college I was so enamored with the substance that I couldn’t imagine a time when I could entertain myself without it. Thailand promised to have strains and flavors that I’d never tried before, despite the fact that I’d grown up surrounded by them. Moreover, I never drank when I was that young, so I was yet to experience Bangkok nightlife. This was going to be an adventure in inebriation.

That winter, as the weather in Southeast Asia was turning perfect, we embarked on a three-week trip to Bangkok and down south to some beaches, all loosely planned around my brother’s five-year high school reunion. Anticipating some difficulty, I had asked my brother what the weed situation would be, and he assured me that his buddy Prik (not his real name, but rather the Thai word for “chili”) would take care of everything.

My brother had never divulged it to me as a kid, but Prik was his weed mentor. As a local Thai, he had access that ex-pat kids just didn’t, and so he led my brother to his first weed-smoking experience, which went down in the bathroom of the Bangkok Hard Rock Café. Ever since he emerged bleary-eyed from a door marked with Pete Townsend’s framed guitar pick, my bro became a lover of tree and he had Prik to thank for it. By the transitive properties of peer pressure, I had Prik to thank for my good times as well.

When we arrived, Prik had an unmarked plastic bag, an item somehow more ubiquitous in Thailand than anywhere else in the world, filled to the brim with minimally cured marijuana. By appearance, this was shwag, but smoking it revealed a deep high, one that complemented the weather and created a particular brand of cottonmouth treatable only by Thai iced tea.

We estimated the bag to be about two and a half ounces, and at the conversion rate of the time it cost us about 15 dollars an ounce. Upon concluding this mathematical exercise, my brother and I exchanged a look that decided how reckless we would be in our consumption of this product. That first week, we smoked heartily, heavily, and wastefully, brushing excess weed that wouldn’t fit in the J right into the trash, tossing half-Js before they were even finished. We had more than we knew what to do with and we acted like it.

A few days in, Prik’s maid found some of our careless leavings in the room my brother and I were crashing in and she brought the contraband to the attention of his parents. Through Prik, they conveyed their dismay. If we got caught with weed in Thailand, it would be a dilemma beyond their influence—some truly unfixable Brokedown Palace shit. Well warned, we took this into consideration and decided to scale back our consumption in public and in cars. When it came time to re-up, we let Prik handle the entire transaction and were merely there to catch the bag.

Somehow, shortly after making this purchase, we found ourselves at an intervention for one of my brother’s high school friends. The upcoming reunion had brought a lot of old friends back together from all over the world, and they collectively decided that Harry had a pill problem. It was also noted that Harry had dropped out of NYU after developing symptoms most often associated with schizophrenia, which led him to act on the suspicion that the institution was monitoring his thoughts. As the little brother of one of Harry’s friends and a guy with two and a half ounces of weed in the cargo pocket on his shorts, I was the last person who should have been at this personal and revealing analysis of his life. The intervention got off to a rocky start when Harry refused to believe what the fuck was going on, and at one point one of the friends asked me to break out a little bit of weed to at least calm the guy down. While an older T. Kid would have had the reference of 400 episodes of Intervention, the young me wanted to blaze at every opportunity, and so I obliged. It was kind of hard to pull a tiny bit of weed out of the bulge in my pocket without Harry taking some notice and clawing at my shorts a little in search of the mother lode. He started mumbling about how I had stolen it from someone he knew, a definite hallucination. I tried to laugh it off and change the subject, but that’s difficult at an intervention, where the elephant in the room comes to take that epic shit onto everyone involved. In the end, my brother had to distract Harry with a cigarette he convinced him was a joint while I stole out of the room with the trees.

This debacle was one of the last things on our to-do list, so with our unplanned time in the city, we returned to our hometown, a university campus just north of the city. Seeing the house we grew up in and walking around a place that had somehow shrank significantly over the last few years, our minds began to implode with contemplation, possibly exacerbated by a peyote experience we had down on one of the southern beaches a few days earlier. We quelled this existential crisis by walking to the one place on campus where we could reflect on our childhood without being bothered. Throughout our youth, the cricket field had served as sporting ground for every game but cricket, and had been the venue for every campus fair and school event. It was here that we planted ourselves, at the pitch in the very center of the field, and smoked the biggest J of the entire trip. Rather than achieving some kind of joint epiphany, my brother and I walked off that field and out of that campus, forgetting what we had left behind like all survivors do. We went back to America and went on with our lives. It’s a shame, but we haven’t been back to Thailand since.

@ImYourKid

Previously:

Weediquette - Thoughts on a Pothead Terrorist

Weediquette - Postcard from Cannabis Cup

Weediquette - I like to Stay Home

About a year ago, in an attempt to stop people from being excessively nice to the handicapped, the Gothenburg Cooperative for Independent Living (GIL) made a physically challenged doll with cerebral palsy. I was kind of unsure of the whole thing when I first heard about it; surely there are better ways to make people treat the handicapped like everyone else than a limited run of dolls with cerebral palsy. But it couldn't have been a complete failure, as GIL are still putting out the dolls and have just released their own brand of handicapped beer.   

The cerebral palsy beer, or CPA, was previewed at Gothenburg's annual whiskey fair and was later premiered at Live and Function, one of Scandinavia's biggest health and care fairs. I have no idea what alcohol and healthcare have in common, so I called up our friend Anders Westgerd at GIL to find out.

VICE: Hey, Anders. How can brewing beer help the handicapped?
Anders Westgerd: Well, this is part of how we work socio-politically. In Sweden in the early 2000s, an investigation called Patient to Citizen decided that all restaurants, bars, and public spaces in general would become easy to access and have all kinds of obstacles removed by 2010. But when we realized in 2009 that not a thing had been done to improve public spaces, we decided to draw attention to limited access bars and restaurants. Because these are cool environments where people would like to hang out.

So what did you do about it?
Well, everybody wants to be part of society—drink a beer, have fun, and live life. So we listed three bars in the Gothenburg area that the handicapped cannot access and wrote them letters informing them of it. We also listed one bar that's easy to access to show them a good example. So you could say that all of this is the reason for us to now brew our own beer.

I remember you mentioning the beer drinking when we talked to you about the doll.
Yeah. When we made the doll, we wanted people to share with us how they experience problems in society. And many people told us that when they go out in bars they feel like they're being questioned. It's like, when you drink one beer people look at you, and if you drink two, three, or four beers, well then people start morally panicking. Making a beer makes it easy for us to claim some space in bars that aren't normally aren't accessible for us.

How has the beer been received so far?
It's a success. At the sneak peak at the Gothenburg Whiskey Fair, for example, we didn't think that their audience would care much about the message behind the beer. But people at the fair thought is was a pretty clever way to address the problems that surround this issue. And since it's a hell of a good beer, well, I think they were impressed.

And how did the audience react at the health and care fair?
Very well. There, everything is kind of about how to make life easier for the handicapped. But we wanted to focus on life and how to live life. I mean, you can drink a beer no matter who you are. And with a beer in your hand, you become yourself and not your disability. So it was a success there too.

What does it taste like?
It's a mix between an Indian pale ale and an American pale ale. So it's what you call a hybrid between an IPA and APA. And that's where the name comes from: CPA. It's also brewed on the four classic hops, which all have names beginning with a C—as in cerebral palsy—so there you have yet another reason for its name.

That's genius.
There's a lot of thought behind the beer. It's a brilliant messenger.

More beer?

Beer and Bongs

Why I Quit Drinking

Let me be clear about something—despite the fact that I no longer drink, I’ve never been drunk. This is because I’ve only been drunk. From what I hear, there is a middle ground between being completely sober and crying/vomiting/blacked out. This sounds like a lovely place. I’ve never had the chance to visit. As an Irish kid with very poor impulse control, my alcohol train is a one-stop express that leaves Sober Station and arrives hours later at Fiasco Junction. I can honestly not remember one time in my life where I had a few drinks and relaxed. I can only remember times when I had a few drinks, then had a few more drinks, then had a few more drinks, and then everyone else was unable to relax.

I’m very happy with my decision to go sober. It’s helped my life. It’s helped my mental stability. I can still go out to bars; I drink ginger ales and opt not to feel out of place.

When people ask me, “Why don’t you drink?” I usually smile and say “Because I’m not good at it.” If they press me for specifics, I tell them the following stories, which I will now present both out of the hope that any young people who have problems with the sauce realize I made it past these incidents and they can too, and so the public at large can enjoy voyeuristic laughs at the expense of who I was and how I behaved in the brief, alcohol-soaked period of my life that stretched from the ages of 17-21.

High School  

I had a friend in high school named Sam Mestman, and I fear him to this day. I haven’t seen Sam in about 12 years, and he was nothing but nice to me for our entire friendship. The reason I fear Sam is because somewhere in his possession is an audiotape of the first time I got drunk.

Now that I’m about to turn 33, my panic attacks about this tape’s existence only happen about once a month. I sometimes wonder if it’s going to surface and wind up on YouTube or something. I can’t imagine anything more humiliating happening to me, and I am a person who once cried while a dominatrix affixed nipple clamps to me on public access television. Humiliation is kind of my thing.

Despite the fact I was at the time operating through a two beer haze, I remember the following facts about the audio tape Sam made of me after we drank beers in his attic bedroom a decade and a half ago: my voice hadn’t quite changed yet. At one point I drunkenly grabbed his audio recorder and recited “Scenario” by A Tribe Called Quest in its entirety. I then proceeded to run down a list of which girls in our high school class I would have sex with and why. I named close to every female member of our class. I later slept on Sam’s floor, and had the first wet dream I remember having. It featured my friend Megan, a beautiful Jewish punk rock girl who sprouted breasts well before anyone else in high school. They were size 32D, and I know this because she told me often.

I woke up from said dream panting and grunting, and immediately made direct eye contact with a confused Sam. Years later, Megan would come over my parents’ house when I was house sitting for them during my college years, and we took a bath together. I was too scared to make a move.     

Fran’s 21st

I ruined my friend Fran’s 21^st birthday. Fran was a year older than me, and we’d gone through high school together. His older brother was a fellow Rutgers student, so he often hung out in New Brunswick despite not being a Rutgers kid himself. We were the two youngest members of our crowd, so when the other dudes were done drinking at home and headed to bars, he and I were usually stuck by ourselves, drunk with no one but each other.

So when Fran turned 21, it was a sad occasion for both of us. I was the last runt of the litter and wouldn’t be legally able to enter a bar for about seven months after him and he knew he was leaving me on my own for a while. So on his 21^st birthday, he pulled me aside.

“I’m going on my first legal booze run,” he said. “What can I pick you up? I’m honored to now be able to illegally provide you with alcohol.”

I was 20, which meant I was already aware that I had a severe problem with binge drinking. Instead of sobering up, I’d dedicated myself to drinking lighter drinks at higher quantities. I’d spent the past six months or so drinking Boone’s Farm Wine, hard lemonade, and Hooch pretty exclusively.

“Strawberry Hill Boone’s,” I told him. “Two bottles.”

“Dude, don’t make me buy Boone’s on my 21^st birthday,” he begged me. “I have to come more correct than that.”

“Well, I get too fucked up on beer,” I told him. “So something light. Maybe cider or something? I don’t know. Something fruity.”

He glared at me.

“I know, I know,” I said.

He left the house and returned a half hour later with all sorts of bottles for all of our friends. Everyone was psyched to get free booze on account of his birthday happening. The last bottles he pulled out of his bag were for me.

“And for Chris,” he announced, “fruit flavored, just like he likes it.”

A laugh broke out. Fran handed me two large sized glass flasks of strawberry-banana flavored Mad Dog 20/20.

If you’ve never had Mad Dog 20/20, congratulations, you are not homeless. Mad Dog is straight up bum wine. It’s a dangerous concoction that eats your body from the inside and then crawls into your skull and punches your brain in its fucking face. It’s basically fruit flavored turpentine. You shouldn’t be allowed to drink Mad Dog 20/20 unless you also agree to evade a bulldog down in the railyard before hopping a freight headed down near Nashville way.

None of my friends knew any of this when Fran handed me those two bottles. They just all thought it was funny that he had gotten me a strawberry-banana flavored drink since I was avoiding manly things like whiskey and beer in those days.

I proceeded to open up the Mad Dog, grin at my condescending friends, and chug it to completion in one try. I threw the bottle on the ground and thought to myself Jesus, that shit tasted like gasoline. I didn’t express that sentiment out loud, and instead opened the other bottle and chugged it into non-existence.

Three minutes later I was so drunk that I tripped while walking and slammed my head into a countertop. Between the insane, sudden, and extreme drunkenness and the concussion I gave myself, I proceeded to go completely insane. For over 40 minutes I insisted on shrieking in a high pitch while sprinting around my friends’ house smashing anything I could get my hands on that was made of glass. I vaguely remember this feeling like fun even though everyone else was trying to pin me down and punch me for it.

I made my way to the second floor of the house, a now angry group of my friends following me and trying to keep me under control, when the physical effects of the Mad Dog snuck up on me out of nowhere. I went from a fist throwing, banshee screaming mad man to crumpled up in a ball in the corner quivering and crying in zero seconds flat. I don’t remember much, but I do remember going blind and getting very scared. I also remember oscillating between feeling extremely hot and totally cold.

When I came to, three of my friends were sitting on me while I screamed “I’m dying! I’m dying!”

I heard Fran yell, “You’re not dying!”

Then I heard my friend Sean say, “I don’t know, look at him. He might be dying.”

Then I heard myself say—in what can only be described as a terrifying demonic Exorcist-like growl—“I’m dying and I’m going to hell. Tell God I love him.”

Fran was freaked out. “What?”         

“I’m going to die tonight,” I said, again sounding like the singer of Slipknot. “I’m dying and I’m going to hell. I will not meet God. Tell God I love him.”

I then blacked out again. I was told that the reason they didn’t send me to the hospital was because I was able to remember my four-digit numerical character password for NBA Showtime on Nintendo 64, a game I was obsessed with at the time. My password was “space space space space”.

The Night Before Halloween, 2000

My favorite bar in the world is the Peter McManus Café at 19th St and 7th Avenue. It’s a popular hangout for comedians from the Upright CitizenB scene, and I’ve been going there since I was 19. It’s also one of the last places I ever consumed booze. Four other comedians (Shannon O’Neill, John Ross Bowie, Chad Carter, and Jake Fogelnest) were present on the night in question, and if you know any of them I invite you to ask them the question: “Should Chris Gethard ever drink again?” All four will undoubtedly say no with a level of concern that hasn’t lessened in the 13 years since.

I’d had about five beers when I decided to call it quits. One of my friends off-handedly said “Ah, you quit first, pussy!” Because I can’t handle peer pressure or threats to my non-existent masculinity, I immediately ordered another pitcher of beer and drank the entire thing by myself. I stopped talking, began slumping over, and I remember thinking vaguely about my father and whether or not he is proud of me. The next thing I remember is being face down on a table, crying uncontrollably, and punching the wall, while mumbling the words “My father never knew me.” By this point, the four aforementioned comedians were surrounding me and trying to calm me down.

I decided I needed to throw up, so I headed to the McManus bathroom. I tried to puke, but couldn’t force myself, and instead laid down and went to sleep on the bathroom floor. For as much as I love McManus, I think even the McManus family themselves would say that laying face down on the bathroom floor of their establishment is ill-advised. I would think that making face to floor contact in that bar’s bathroom is probably a New York experience equal to licking a subway pole or drinking from the Gowanus. If you don’t get deathly ill, you should at least be slightly ashamed.

Anyway, my friends scooped me off the floor, and I threw a punch at one of them and ran outside. Halfway up the block on Seventh Avenue, I encountered a homeless man who was hobbling in the opposite direction. Because it was the night before Halloween, he was wearing a ratty devil costume he had somehow procured.

“YOU DID THIS TO ME!” I shouted at him. He was taken aback, and lurched backwards. I ran toward him and grabbed his shoulders. “Satan! Satan! You did this to me!”

“I don’t know, man!” he screamed.

I responded by power vomiting all over the sidewalk, then turning and looking him in the eye. At that point I inexplicably shouted –

“ROY G BIV! ROY G BIV! COLORS OF THE RAINBOW! ROY G BIV!”

The homeless guy was now out-and-out scared, and my friends came and wrestled me into a cab. I slept on John Bowie’s couch that night. It was the first time I ever went to Queens.

Batman Mask

When I was a senior in college, everyone I knew shared my opinion that it would be best if I stopped drinking. As a young man with his whole life ahead of him, I slowed down on the drinking but occasionally attempted to drink and show moderation. The ultimate failure that shored things up and made me kick the sauce forever came towards the tail end of the year, just before my 22nd birthday.

I was at a bar with my friends Jill and Katie. I was madly in love with Katie, and she was madly in love with not being sure if she was also in love with me. Jill and I had a strange relationship where we often wrestled, and many of my friends told me this was a sign I should make a move. I never made a move. Needless to say, it was a fun happy hour with two lovely ladies.

The bar was three blocks from my house, but I got so wasted that I got lost on the way home. I was smart enough to call Jill.

“I’m lost,” I slurred into the phone when she picked up.

“You’re lost?” she asked. “Dude, we were around the corner from your house.”

“Call m’back in halfenhour,” I told her. “If’m not home by then yagatta come rescue me.”

“OK,” she said. “Please be careful.”

I eventually managed to find my way home without her help, but I did not honor her request that I be careful. My roommates were drinking, and as I walked through our front door one of them handed me a 40 of King Cobra malt liquor.

I’d been smart enough to call for Jill for help. I knew I was already that drunk. That didn’t stop me from polishing off that 40 in under ten minutes. I proceeded to yell at all of my roommates, even telling one of them he shouldn’t be ashamed of being gay even though I knew he wasn’t gay.

My roommate Phil said he was going to a party and wanted to know if any of us wanted to join him.

I jumped out of my seat. “I’m coming to the party,” I insisted.

“That’s not a good idea,” Phil told me. “Let’s hang out another time when you’re not so out of it.”

“I’M COMING TO THE PARTY,” I shouted. “AND IF ANYBODY HAS A PROBLEM WITH ME, I’M TELLING THEM PHIL BROUGHT ME.”

Phil went white with fear. I repeated my plan to cause mayhem and blame him publicly for it, all while grabbing his shirt so he couldn’t leave. Eventually, my roommate Dan grabbed my phone and ran away. Phil took this as an opportunity to sprint out of the house. I was passing out by this point, so Dan helped me to my room in the attic, made sure I got undressed, and put me to bed.

The next thing I remember is standing in the middle of a street in New Brunswick, New Jersey, while a group of people cheered me on. I don’t know what I was doing to warrant their cheers.

I did not know that I was wearing a Batman mask.

I did not know where I got the Batman mask.

I blacked out again, and the next thing I remember is being on the front porch of a house where a party was going on.

“You can’t come in!” someone shouted. Then, someone pushed me down a set of steps. A group of people laughed and threw cigarettes at me. I blacked out again.

The next thing I remember is jumping up and down on top of a parked car. A group of people surrounded the car and chanted the word “BATMAN!” I blacked out again.

I have a vague recollection of being inside a laundromat and being escorted to a secret door in the back that lead to a staircase. I have no idea where that staircase went. I blacked out again.

My final memory of the evening is coming to in my own bedroom. A tape was playing on my stereo. My vision was hazy, and as I focused I realized that two gentleman from my hometown were sitting on the couch across from me. They were smoking a huge blunt. They were both a few years younger than me. I was not friends with either of them. From what I remembered, they were low-level drug dealers.  I bolted upright.

“Get out of my house!” I yelled.

They’d been laughing, then stopped.

“What?” one of them said. He was the one with the rat tail. The other had a Jew-fro.

“You gotta get out of my house,” I insisted. Based on their reaction, it was clear I had been in mid-sentence, speaking about something else, and had stopped on a dime to kick them out of my house.

“Bro,” Jew-fro said. “We want to hear the end of the story.”

“I don’t know what story I was telling,” I said. “Now get the fuck out of my house!”

They stood, definitely not pleased, and headed out into the New Brunswick night. I sat down on my bed and tugged at the Batman mask. I was too fucked up to get it all the way off of my head.

I woke up in the morning. The Batman mask was gone and I was now naked. It was the last time I’ve ever been drunk. I drank one time after that, a single beer at a bar. I realized that if I wasn’t looking to get plastered it was a moot point, as I hated the taste of booze.

I had no idea what happened to the Batman mask. About seven years later, I was cleaning out some boxes I had stored in my parents’ basement and found it at the bottom of a box. The only other things in there were the top half of a karate uniform and my high school yearbook. I have no idea how any of them got there.

@ChrisGethard

Previously:

Remembering the 2003 Blackout, My Most Shameful Night

I am a Dummy from New Jersey