Josh Stern's Blog, page 162

I'm so edgy, I'm beveled

What I enjoy most when doing wind sprints after a 320 year hiatus is the macro-tearing of every conceivable muscle in my groinal area, and some tenuous crotchal tingling that is anyone’s guess….so I’ve had to make some lifestyle adjustments as It’s tougher to pee while you’re doing a handstand….. and now I substitute windshield wiper fluid with bourbon, just in case I flip the car and smash the glass…it’s like an automatic upside down shot….

And while I know just when things look darkest, they offer you a blindfold and cigarette but sometimes at last call, you need beer goggles for your beer goggles- Suck it up and show some ‘sac

Like I’m totally into reducing my carbon footprint sexually like I’m totally into alternative energy, but popping a Viagra and having a painful windmill for over 4 hours… it’s time to call my Doctor and I only meet Chicks who you know play the Snow White Evil Queen ‘Mirror Mirror on the Wall’ game about their junk with their vibrators?

My Ex was such a sexual neat freak that wouldn’t tolerate a condom….So she had the walls of her vagina professionally lined in bubble-wrap, yeah the weirdness actually felt pretty good and she made me matching bubble wrap condoms

why are you single

there’s a free excerpt of the book on Amazon … you’ll get the idea

When I was 5 or 6 I used to do this thing with my 3 younger brothers while we were changing called...

When I was 5 or 6 I used to do this thing with my 3 younger brothers while we were changing called ‘Click Click Click’ where we’d be imaginarily taking pictures of each other naked, strictly for blackmail and humiliation purposes….We’d make like we were holding a Kodak Instamatic and just say click click click click as fast as we could.  Looking back, it’s easy to see the evolution into the sick, twisted fucks we’ve all graduated into.  

Frankly, it's much more fun to be part of the problem than the solution

When I was 5 or 6 I used to do this thing with my 3 younger brothers while we were changing called ‘Click Click Click’ where we’d be imaginarily taking pictures of each other naked, strictly for blackmail and humiliation purposes….We’d make like we were holding a Kodak Instamatic and just say click click click click as fast as we could.  Looking back, it’s easy to see the evolution into the sick, twisted fucks we’ve all graduated into.  

Yeah there was this time where we could all stand up in the back of the Ford station wagon, and all be dressed in navy shetland crew neck sweaters, white turtlenecks and dress stuart plaid corduroys for building mud walls to the sandcastles …we’d get the garden hose and bring it down to the beach and as it was on an incline we’d build these byzantine ziggurat empires… and my Dad would causally complain to no one in particular, that we were eroding the sand…a notion lost on us as the dump truck could magically drop another load as it invariably did at the start of each summer… How I wish I could still hold the worthlessness of money in such high disdain…It was paradise…could a burger and hot-dog and baked beans and corn-on-the-cob and homemade chocolate chip cookies  be far away? 

Bathroom time was a precarious time… as no one was safe as we’d all assume our positions around the toilet bowl…it was no contest, and a license to pee on each other.  The question was: could you get away without having to fully change?

And Bath time, increasingly infrequent as we got older and ‘stubborner’ was always the scene of some tragedy…not that anything was premeditated, but in the land that time forgot to invent bath mats, someone would lose their grip and slid under the 6 inches of bathwater and come up choking…tragic…

I’ve pretty much eliminated the responsibility obstacles that plague grown ups, but I’ve yet to reattain that mythical obliviousness where money, clothes, food, friends and weather are just tertiary nuisances to the pursuit of pure pleasure.  But I am undaunted

were can I buy a hard copy of your book in new Zealand ? I think your very funny =) thanks and kind regards zarah

Hey Zarah- it’s only online at amazon, ibooks etc…I’m sorry but you still have the coolest mane ;D Best to you

The Patron Saint of Suicide Missions

Back when I was a kid, I was a shitty skier…actually shitty is too kind a word…special needs approaches the kind of shitty skier I was.  I had to wear a helmet decades before anyone else did..it was a used West German job; black with a thick red stripe on it and it was black leather up until you got to the ears where it became full fledged helmet…it also was pretty cool when we’d pile onto our wagon and go down the steep elevator shaft of a hill our house was on…. and stop only by the grace of the piles of leaves the City workers would amass before hauling them away by truck….the same way we were told not to accept candy from strangers, we were told not to go into the piles of leaves because evil dog shit lay there in wait…but the jolly ranchers weren’t laced with anything and the candy apples never did have razor blades…

Getting back to being a shitty skier, I just couldn’t graduate from stem christie and most of the time just snowplowed for all I was worth…this really cut my self-esteem as younger guys and even girls would laugh as the snow plow king would go straight down everything, his spindly legs stuttering from the bumps on the hill while the other kids would be doing parallel or even gasp  ’wedeln’ A snow skiing style in which the skier executes a series of short quick parallel turns by moving the backs of the skis from side to side at a constant speed.  My Dad was a super expert at this….in fact he had taken it a whole new level- I was super proud that my Dad was so cool and it must have been a great source of embarrassment to have a kid who just couldn’t get the basics with a Dad like him to give pointers.

So I just laughed it off, being the clown I was developing into, it just wasn’t that important.  What made matters way worse was that at the age of 6 my Dad had got me metal skis…Yes metal skis!!!  At age 6!!!  There were 70 year olds who went through their lives with wood skis and only in the past few decads had metal edges on the sides of their skis….So here was this little spoiled rich kid…a pimple of a brat with Head Competition metal skis…They were black…Beyond Cool!!!!!  Seriously, I think Bobby Kennedy was skiing on them at that time…and Jackie!!!  It was seriously over the top.. off the hook egregious for a kid to have a pair…Maybe the Crown Prince of the Shah of Iran, but this was a little suburban Jewish Pisher…I would get stares of WTF years before it was an acronym.

It was also the first time I really had to contend with jealousy of my friends and cousins ‘Why does he have such great skis, when all he does is a snowplow?” I was still sort of oblivious to it but my Dad was sure smarting from those assholes.  One extenuating circumstance to my lack of prowess, was these metal skis didn’t come in kid’s sizes…that would be years in the making so I got the smallest size which was 160cms…now I can’t tell you what that is in inches as I only use the metric system to lose weight, but they towered over me…the equivalent of a six year old on downhill competition skis ….And they were stiff mutherfuckers, you couldn’t bend them for anything…so to try an arch a stem christie was a suicide mission, and parallel was for the afterlife. In retrospect it would have been fun to see all those little shits trying to do any better….. that would have taken a few monkeys off my back

So from age 6-12, I was known as the ‘hairless wonder’ - I was taken on more than one occasion to be tested for mental retardation, which worked out kinda cool as the constant stream of tutors they got me would do my homework ,and I was never docked any TV time…which is where I think my memory developed, and I really got a thorough education from Bugs Bunny the Flintstones and sitcoms…the world is based on get rich quick schemes and flying anvils…

So at age 12 finally in a fit of desperation came up with an ingenious plan.  It was those blasted rusted edge skis or me…and I had the convictions to carry out my scheme without the reward of 77 virgins…Yes, by all accounts it had to be a convincing suicide mission and it had to be timed perfectly…So at the bottom of Devil’s River at Mont Tremblant, with my Parents and Grandparents in attendance…I beelined for a rather large rock that should not have been on the ski hill….I made sure I was going at an out of control clip because I’d only have one shot at this before it would look premeditated…so there I was careening for the rock…I made one of those lightning quick decisions to only hit one of the Head skis on the rock, as they hadn’t perfected quick release bindings yet, and the red leather safety straps could easily windmill around and  hit my jugular as happened to my Dad ( but that’s another story)

So the moment of truth…Impact!….Ouch!…. My leg was throbbing from the shin down and I was about 30 feet from the rock… and of course everyone thought I was nuts.  But it just added to the legend…But what about the ski?  On any wood ski, it would have violently ripped the tip off. but on this mutherfucking piece of steel there was only a slight ripple about 4 inches down…but enough to say I had slain the dreaded Head Competition metal ski..Oh Happy Day!!!

It was worth every ounce of pain…Now for some fiberglass skis

HOTDOG

So I got me a pair of Dynastar Fiberglass skis…sure they were used, sure they already had some old lady’s binding holes drilled into them…BUT THEY WERE ORANGE!!! Groovy cool…those blasted Heads were black with tasteful yellow Head on it…so dam square AND they were my size…how novel…but it did present a new problem as now certain demands and expectations about my abilities were about to be put to the test, and I had a good 6 years to make up fast…

It was pretty simple to eschew the snowplow and graduate to a solid stem christie but parallel was a different story, as it was the early 70s was all about style and the knees had to be stuck together which ran counter to my mentality that you had more stability with a wider stance because I could wipe out standing still. So I was ridiculed for my sloppy technique as the other pretty skiers garnered praise while my style was as frizzy as my afro…Still my doting Dad got me neoprene ski pants and wet look ski jackets in spite of it being totally undeserved…which set a template for the rest of my life.

Another extenuating circumstance was I only got one day a week to ski because we were Sabbath observers…’Geez you missed huge snow today’ …I must’ve heard this 10,000 times by the kids whose Parents were Sabbath breaking sinners and would’ve spend eternity burning in Hell if we as a religion believed in that concept…sigh….

Did I mention I hated skiing??  Yeah I loathed it, getting up early Sunday to put on my red union suit longjohns and brave the absolute zero temperatures, and frostbites, and stingily hot, hot chocolates and for why?  To be humiliated by others and myself…what a spoiled kid to have all this and complain miserably….but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get the trick…

Then one night a nice old coot from the adult side of the ski club we belonged to brought over this newfangled thing…it was a precursor to a video machine…sort of a TV that ran tapes…which was mindbogglingly cool for the time…and it had this ski video…also mind-blowing as theonly ski movies I’d seen is when my Dad would take me to Universite de Montreal to see John Jay and Warren Miller movies… and  once back in ‘69, Jean-Claude Killy was there, and I got this cool psychedelic Peter Max poster of Killy and he signed it….I wish I still had it dammit….In any case the film was called the Performers and it was about the K2 performance ski team. Performance ski team?  What the hell was that? Jay Stelling, Bob Griswold, John Clendening  It was a bunch a ski bums just skiing big epic powder snow in slow-motion - How fucking cool was that? I was losing it!! This is what it was all about!!!!!- all the idiocy of the sport explained in a 45 minute video….they sped up the guys wedeln but it was different- all of a sudden I could relate!!  It made perfect sense- go the fuck as fast as you can and whip those skis back and forth until they blur and that’ll keep you in control! Brilliant!!!  Whoa!! Armed with this secret weapon there was no end to the possibilities.  I was so super confident of my theory that it was a simple reality…all that I had to do now was to try it out on snow…

My head had this vision of those guys turning so super fast it was like dual eggbeaters insread of standard issue legs boots skis and bindings and style was an unnecessary afterthought; it was turning or better explained as sliding like a windsheild wiper as using edges would just slow it down….So with this completely unrealistic, totally moronic vision in my head I attacked the mountain as never before, and with a confidence of an idiot who hasn’t thought the whole thing through and just does it by will alone. So once again it was a head first/ brain last situation to be met and crapped out

Damn if it didn’t work.  I remember my Dad being so totally dumbfounded - seriously he was ecstatic, but where did this come from?  So he got into coaching mode- but all I could do is try to turn those damn skis faster..faster…it was ridiculous trying to make 3 turns on each bump- if I got two I’d be lucky, but that didn’t deter me …So I finally got it.  But the guys were still way, way ahead of me……. 

There was this mythical time, that I missed because I was about 7 years too young…it was called Hotdog skiing…the free for all before freestyle skiing.  It was amazing to watch because it was the wild west set to snow…You just went down the hill and could fall as much as you wanted as long as you could semi-recover and make it down…in fact the recoveries were bonus points…it was a glorious celebration of mess that captured the times of change without rules.

So I had been infected with this new school kind of skiing that the old people just shook their heads at…they had this technique of avalement which was this way of leaning back at the end of the turn all fancy and pretty-like, but the hotdoggers would take it and set it to epilepsy 

And they’d set the competitions to surf music and ‘let there be drums’ by Duane Eddy which used to make me certifiably insane with a fire to quit school and just compete against these snow hippies ..

Subsequently it got more uniform and they made silly rules like no inverted aerials during the bump run and no kissing the judges to sway them…It was still crazy exciting, but the highlight would always be a masked avenger who would blow away the competition in bumping, and then at the end of the run, he’d pull some sort of flip and the crowd would go ballistic, wild ass crazy at the balls on this guy…. and then the boos of the crowd for being disqualified as he totally upstaged and outclassed everyone else. But he’d be laughing and enjoying the local chicks and beer and it just really didn’t matter.

These latter day Don Quixotes became my heroes… the guys who just did their own things for the sheer pleasure of it.  The reason I went to French Law School not speaking a word of French beforehand…or getting into Women’s fashions not knowing sizing or ‘what this goes back to’ … or starting writing out of the blue….if you don’t know your limitations you can really fuck yourself up.

35 years later, I’m in the Hotel Portillo in Chile over Labor Day…I had just checked in after 3 days holed up at the bottom of the Andes because the road was taken out by avalanches…it’s 10,000 ft up the switchback road that connects to Argentina and preferably try not to eat before…In any case, I was airlifted by a Korean war surplus helicopter that had a ripped canvas as an outer shell and I finally got there…so I’m in my ski stuff and fresh from visiting the little cabelleros room, now going up the staircase to the second floor to grab a sandwich at the second floor restaurant; when I pass this older guy and he looks a bit familiar.  So incredulously, I run down the stairs in my ski boots and accost him.

I say ‘You’re John Clendening.  You changed my life”                              

This guy looks at me wide-eyed                                                                      

So I continue ” You were in the K2 Performers and been my hero since ‘72- if it weren’t for you, I’d never have learned to ski. Seriously, you are an Icon!’                                                                                                          

All he says is ‘I just can’t believe you recognize me!’

Yeah, I guess you had to be there…

A tattoo of a name tag is better than a name tag

My whole life has been one big dirty win..that is, more than I ever deserved; and while I’ll gladly take it, I yearn for the days when I really took it all for granted and my expectations were so high that I fully thought a coronation at westminster abbey was definitely in the cards…

Nowadays, I view it more as a miracle and something to be very thankful for…which bugs me to no end.  I hate being appreciative and owing anybody…whether a heavenly body or body of water…regardless the body of proof conclusive points to me being a lucky so and so; and so much so that I now just wait around for things to fall onto my lap which bugs me in a proactive way.

‘Counting your blessings’ is an optimist’s scorecard, and deep down under this jaded hardshell there must be a spoiled optimist scurrying about thinking “life owes me something, so it’d better be good”. 

I don't hate anyone, I'm just indifferent to the point of loathing

If you felt the Fuzz’s billy club, handcuffs, or jail time for being a harmless long-haired demonstrator for the causes of love and freedom, you’re now most likely a pointless gray ponytailed relic wearing ‘no ass’ old fart jeans.  Death be near.

I can’t wait for the next 10 years when I will never again have to hear the idiotic catchall phrase ‘it was the 60s man’…it’s like the Feminist cry ‘I’m having Women’s problems” or the insane full body Sunday Shavedown of the muscle heads ‘It’s a bodybuilding thing”

The 60s was a laughably impotent period full of self-absorbed, pompously bombastic, hypocrites in war paint and flowered vests, pathetic losers who are way worse then their reviled Parents ever were for upholding the values these rabid chipmunks now horde.

The only thing the 60s had was music- that much I’ll give them and stretch ski pants that went inside the boot and would get your feet totally wet.  And great cigarette commercials…but that’s it…to hold on to that infantile poppycock - well when I see an ex hippy, if I can’t run him over, bash his head in with a rock or spit on him…I’ll try for his old lady in the long jean granny skirt 

My vengeance is swift and horribly inaccurate...apologies beforehand...

 

On the hammock of life, I’ve come to rest my head in indifference, between the comfy pillows of love & hate

Forgiveness is the fragrance that febrezes betrayal, but darn if its anti-microbials just mask the smell of revenge….At one point you get tired of holding a grudge, it’s like the poster from the 70s of the cat hanging on to the wire with the caption ‘Hang on Baby’…. I’m just tired, now I nestea plunge my feelings of vengeance into a pool of ‘whatever’; and trust karma to dole out the endless series of bitchslaps they so richly deserve….in spite of hearing about it way later, when the poignancy of just desserts has no meaning…not even numbness….who cares. It’s worse than indifference, it’s a cringe of ‘Really?’


It’s not even a rewriting the past, as revision takes effort…it’s like a project that lost it’s funding or a gold town that ran dry…or anything that runs dry…not that being sweaty is so ideal either…

I was dropped as a baby...on purpose

The greatest humiliation being back where you started from in a violently involuntary manner, is the suffering from the social functions you cannot  beg out of.  To spending your sleeping hours awake in a semi-panic of making a scene that’ll get back to your Mom…. precipitating an earlier than expected intervention time than later on next month.  How long can I steadfastly refuse group therapy and claiming I’m a latent nail biter?

So I go to this amalgamation of social functions: a funeral and bat-mitzvah both on the same day as fate would have it, as Luck was no where to be found…probably rolled in some alleyway when trying to be a good Samaritan, because that’s the way Luck rolls…

So goes the parade of people I’d sooner get a twice baked abortion before kissing them on the cheek, and start making excuses for my current lifestyle…to their condescendingly sniffs of disdain…FUCK OFFF …Time for target practice out by the hearses…that’s such a cool vehicle …if it were painted in chartreuse and some pimpin’chrome rims

My Aunt Stink Thighs pops up from nowhere…and what I’ve learned from years of living in a small town and despising everybody is, if you try to run and hide you’re burnt toast…so hide in plain sight…a goofy smile is the best camouflage…leg twitches and murmuring helps too…so I’m doing my best Sammy Davis Jr. humming the ‘Candy Man’ and the cloak of invisibility starts…I feel brazen enough to unzip my fly and let the windmilling begin but it was cold today and she might get frostbite poor dear….

I ex-cape

My sphincter is twitchy but basically unscathed, so I wait at the bus stop resplendently dressed in a bespoke Neapolitan suit I had made years ago when flush with cash- looking a bit out of place with a foreign greasy type next to me, whose nicotined fingers and yellowish smile that looked like he ate lots of vitamins and stored his urine in his teeth

Greasy Foreigner: ‘What time did you say it is?”                                           Me ‘I didn’t’

Try to get the better of me will you!!!! ???  Uneducated upstart!! At a bus stop no less!!!  …There something about that suit…it possesses me.  I’m the arrogant wiseass asshole beloved by my friends and serfs alike… I miss him, he was fun- I gotta get back to being him…the legend 

So I get to the bat-mitzvah and not a moment too soon…it was many moments too soon…I scan the place with my faux cyborg scanning device embedded into my imaginary brain and realize this place is just rife with undesirables and people that make me squirm a if the meth bugs had crawled up my arms and made me itchy