Humpjones

Posted Jan 03, 2008 69 comments

How can any self-respecting, honest and proud American patriot hate on a Faith-Based Free Market Solution? That’s my question to you, the overwhelmingly weak liberal readers of Hump Jones dot com.  It’s been stated clearly and repeatedly since the beginning of the Global War on Terror (aka The GWOT) this this is Jehovah vs. Allah: Smackdown in the Desert, but that’s a gross over-simplification.  It’s obviously way more complex than that, including overtones of Jerry Bruckheimer Presents World War Three, Starring Will Smith and Kiefer Sutherland.  But I don’t want to get too political or theoretical, here.

Hump Jones Police Report Remix

This is all from an actual report, I just re-arranged it for narrative clarity:

According to the police report, Varemond had asked his girlfriend and his mother, Anne Marie Saget, to pray with him.

When they started to pray, Lagrandeur noticed Varemond “change,” she told police. He locked the doors and jumped on Lagrandeur and started biting her on her back and beating her head with the iron.

Varemond says he hit his sister in the head with an iron so he could release the demons that he said were inside of her. When his 80-year-old mother intervened and tried to stop him, he allegedly bit off her fingertip and started pulling his own teeth out, a police report said.

On Sunday, police kicked down a bedroom door to find Varemond, 44, straddling his girlfriend, Yolette Lagrandeur, 33, a Haitian recording artist and AIDS activist. A Delray Beach police officer drew his gun and ordered Varemond to put his hands in the air, and officers tried to stun him three times with a Taser, only to have the device malfunction each time.

He was taken to the Palm Beach County Jail on charges of attempted homicide, battery, false imprisonment and resisting arrest with violence…

All bounty hunters get caught, eventually.  All pirates get busted at least once.  The Key Question for 2008 is twofold:

1) How much have they already fucked us?

I walk up to you in a bar, visibly drunk.  You know, vithiblee drunkh. I say to you: “The Roman Catholic Church has vowed to ‘fight the Devil head-on’ by training hundreds of priests as exorcists.” Do you think I’m channeling some visionary bullshit, or quoting from a recent newpaper article? Like I have to keep reminding myself: we live in post-reality now, so get used to weirdness. Increase your signal tolerance.

2) How much can we get away with?

As I’ve already mentioned in “Making Money off the War on Sex”, the Vatican has really a lot of money.  It’s important to define a business plan, and you base a business plan on PAIN RELIEF.  You identify the PAIN, and you provide the RELIEF.  Here’s the suffering:

“Too many bishops are not taking this seriously and are not delegating their priests in the fight against the Devil. You have to hunt high and low for a proper, trained exorcist.”

Can you feel the pain or what?

Easy Entry, Huge Opportunity

Check out how low the standards are and tell me you can’t round up just three friends to put in a solid week of amateur exorcism!  This is not just an investment, this is a vacation! This is definitely the most promising career opportunity of 2008, as economic stress increases exponentially and perfectly normal people go completely insane.  This is a growth market, and not everyone is sleeping on it: check out Joel Osteen, who’s doing mainstream positioning for a fundamentalist publicity stunt he’s going to pull in 2008. 

“Fr Amorth added that Pope Benedict XVI wanted to reinstate use of the prayer said to St Michael the Archangel, believed to be the prime protector against evil.

He said: “The prayer is useful not only for priests but for lay people. For example if a lay person knows someone who is possessed and there is no exorcist available they can intervene by saying this prayer, commanding the demon to leave that person.”

That’s right, you read it—THIS MEANS YOU. Jump in on behalf of Lord Jesus, and the Vatican has got your back. Yeah, The Vatican, who control trillions in assets, have their own embassies, and make decisions for one sixth of the the world’s population.

So hey, the Prayer to St. Micheal the Archangel?  Yeah, I got it right here.  This is all you need. Memorize this, get a large bible (hint: save money, go to a church) and some cool-looking blunt objects.  You can find crazy poor people anywhere.  If they kill you, you probably deserved it.  Welcome to the Kali Yuga!

Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle.
Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray; and do Thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host -
by the Divine Power of God -
cast into hell, satan and all the evil spirits, who roam throughout the world seeking the ruin of souls.
Amen.

As a paranoid subtext, are you aware of military psychedelic weapons like BZ? Do you think that elements within the US government could be targeting people in the counterculture and driving them completely insane?  Who the fuck bites off his mom’s finger?  Who starts pulling out his own teeth?  Was there more to Twelve Monkeys than I give it credit for?  Are you healthy enough to survive a virus epidemic, this week?  Can you visualize the steps it will take to get there?

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Filed in: The War on Sex

Posted Jan 01, 2008 2 comments

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Filed in:

Posted Dec 30, 2007 4 comments

Carl Jung was fond of pulling out a “random” book from his shelves, opening said book to a “random” page, and seeking advice from what he happened to find there.  He was tapping the fearsome power of synchronicity, and he called this whole procedure “Bibliomancy.” Of course, the power weirdo of today has much more impressive tools at their disposal, and some of them are even useful.  The Internets are an endless (literally infinite) cascade of information getting connected, re-formatted, stripped of context and meaning, and processed into...well, pointless bullshit on Humpjones.com, for instance.

It’s a brave new something, for sure.  On Sundays, I like to pretend I’m not a total failure and act like I deserve to relax.  It’s fun to play pretend. I was dicking around with the computer and I wound up looking at two “random” articles I found on two “random” websites.  Of course, as any real mutant knows, there’s visible structure and invisible structure, but nothing anywhere is ever random. 

Do Monkeys Fake It, Too?

Here’s the greatest lines of 2007:

Female monkeys often utter loud, distinctive calls before, during or after sex. Their exact function, if any, has remained heavily debated.

That works on every concievable level of interpretation.  The study found a huge correlation between women—I mean, female primates—making noise and male primates blowing loads.  I mean, ejaculating.  Man, I’m getting rusty on my sexologist routine.  Spasmodic and rhythmic muscular contractions indicating the presence of ejaculatory orgasm.

Sorry, just clearing my throat.

There’s no causality here, though...which came first, the screams or the pumping jizz?  Do females adapt to males or vice versa?  When you think about it, this is very similar to posing the question of why the penis is shaped to fit into a vagina.  Or is a cunt designed to accomodate dick? This is, of course, the classic stuff of philosophy, and familiar to grade school students everywhere in the USA.  I leave the reader to their own intepretations, assumptions and other such handicaps.

The Dark Side of NASA

Here’s the second greatest paragraph of 2007:

“The issue of sex in space is a serious one,” he says. “The experiments carried out so far relate to missions planned for married couples on the future International Space Station, the successor to Mir. Scientists need to know how far sexual relations are possible without gravity.”

As any trained cosmonaut could tell you, the only answer to that question is: how cute is he, and how drunk am I? It’s a sausage fest up there, we can only guess why someone would think to emphasize “married couples” since that reduces the total field of candidates to....oh, right, these guys:

Jan Davis and Mark Lee met each other during astronaut training and got married before they took off for STS-47, and it’s probably rude to refer to them as “NASA’s guinea pigs of full penetration love”, for instance.  If I was Mark Lee, I wouldn’t want some random sex rapper referring to me as a “Lab Stud” on some damn fool website.  Good think I’m not Mark Lee, though—I wouldn’t want to deal with the creeping paranoia and claustrophobic jealously of being The Only Guy in Space Who’s Getting Laid.  I’ve got a lot of questions for him—did you have to wear sensors?  Did they fill up the whole shuttle with cameras?  Did your fellow crew memebers get to watch or did you just bang in the bathroom?

More importantly, why hasn’t NASA designed a space suit for two?  Instead of dealing with cramped quarters and metal walls that actually amplify your moans and grunts, why not step outside and bang in the total vacuum privacy of outer space?  These are the kind of insights that will be making me the Big Money someday.

Mark and Jan, as near as I can figure out when I’m this high, are the only people who’ve had sex in space without making Jehovah angry.  (Oh yeah...why hasn’t NASA found Heaven? Why do I talk to Christians like they’re adults?) I have no way of knowing if Sex Testing Out of Wedlock has taken place on any NASA voyages, but given my operational knowledge of human nature, the answer is OF COURSE THEY FUCKING HAVE. 

Russian weirdo Yuri Malenchenko got married while he was onboard the space station Mir—and his wife was on the surface, thousands of miles away.  (Oddly enough, the dude got married in Texas at the Johnson Space Center.) That was in 2003, and he’s currently back up in the ISS for a six-month tour of duty, once again.  He touches back down in April 2008, just in time for the solar flares that wipe out Asia.

In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream

Was Marshall McLuhan just a crazy fucking stoner? When he talked about “acoustic space”—what did he really mean?  Do still think in terms of “up” and “down” even though you know better?  Down is inward, towards the center of our spherical earth.  Up is outward, towards the infinite Nothing Much that we float through.  And yet we all still live our lives on a 2-dimensional stage.  Force of habit, I guess.

In the next Sex Science 3030 article, I promise to address how our bodies (and privates) will evolve in space...but I what I can’t wrap my head around is how our minds will evolve.  Once you’re in space, free of earth-based interference and the electromagnetic noise of our shitty human appliances, I suspect that our clairivoyant and psychic abilities will develop to an unthinkable degree.  This is an article I’ve held off on writing for a long time—mostly since it’s going to involve actual research and work.

However, the Universe has spoken, and it’s time.  Like it or not, Uncle Hump is back and I’m going to make the Internets into a much, much weirder place in the next few weeks.  Tell your friends.

PLEASE SEND US PORNO AND BOOZE ASAP

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Filed in: Sex Science

Posted Dec 25, 2007 6 comments

It’s been a long weird month and I won’t even address it here.  I found this article sitting in the scrap pile and I don’t remember writing it.  It’s very appropriate for a Christmas Day spent alone with coffee and my thoughts.  I’m back, and I will be writing a lot in the next few weeks.  Meanwhile, enjoy this and enjoy your “free time.”

Real Winners Know They’re Really Just Losers

I used to agonize over the irony of my wiring.  It drove me a little crazy, between you and me.  Why is it that the second I accomplish something—anything—it’s immediately not good enough? I happen to know the answer—no big deal, it’s just a combination of my mother and father and the people I look up to being mostly liars.  More importantly, the answer doesn’t matter to me anymore.  I see myself for who I am and now that I’m in a position to heal, find closure, and change my darn life....I don’t really want to.

I’m interested to see how far I can take this.  (Apparently a lot of other people are wondering the same thing.) We all have parasite voices in our heads—sick, abusive and paranoid scripts that just loop over and over and make us feel like shit.  It’s so common and so pervasive I can’t even exaggerate.  We’re all possessed by demons that we just kinda put up with while they drive us to exhaustion and numb acceptance of defeat.  We’re all having constant inner conversations with disembodied, repeating language viruses that fucking hate us.

The funniest part is that anyone who thinks I’m exaggerating is lying to themselves. 

And kids think being a magician is fun.

Here’s a handy shortcut I discovered this year.  It’s just a sentence, but when I use it on myself it’s very effective.  It’s gotten great results with other people, too.  It makes them very, very angry—but when I talk through the anger we both discover the sentence was also very, very true.  It’s about depression, which is the most common brain virus in our culture, and there’s a very good reason for that.

If you’re depressed, it’s because you accepted defeat. Giving up on your hopes and dreams leads to depression.  Rationalizing why you’ve given up and allowed yourself to be caged leads to depression.  Remember the caged monkeys: we know this from rigorous observation of animals in captivity.  First symptom: depression.  Caged animals get depressed.  Free animals get happy, healthy and horny.  If you’re depressed, it’s because you accepted defeat.  Grow a spine, sharpen up your teeth, get back to work.  And please, shut the fuck up.

10,000 Days of Thunder

So what’s the source of these demons?  Castenada wrote up a metric ton of lies that wound up becoming true, and he called it The Predator.  I’ve speculated about Toxoplasmosis, but I’m not too attached to my own theories.  We’re all fond of our own ideas, but eventually you gotta wash your socks and throw out the kleenex, folks.  I try to do that as soon as possible, your approach may vary.

I’m not gonna pretend I’ve got any solutions, either.  Still working on my self, myself.  As Jay Levinson advises—and it’s some of the best business advice you’ll ever find anywhere—“Engage in no expansion until you have eliminated all of the mistakes in your current operation.” In other words, I’ll tell you how to live when I can get a reliable mechanism for steak dinners and fresh grapefruits.  Meanwhile, I’ll eat whatever I can, whenever I can, and continue perfecting my personal system. 

Peace Out, Don Juan

If there’s anything I desperately want to get through to anyone and everyone reading this....here it is.

I am not fucking kidding.

I dress up in silk shirts and rap about sex because the core issue here is all too real.  I’m going to pass the mic to Carlos Castenada and his fictional-but-real creation, don Juan, because that ventriloquist act was a big influence on Humpasaur Jones.  If you’re interested in exploring this hilarious nightmare further, start with John Keel.  Me, I’m going to stop contemplating pretty much anything until after Christmas.  Too much living to do. Stay warm and stay crazy, I will be back with a hangover after New Years Eve, unless I get some truly depraved photos while I’m on the road.

“I want to appeal to your analytical mind,” don Juan said. “Think for a moment, and tell me how you would explain the contradiction between man the engineer and the stupidity of his systems of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behavior. Sorcerers believe that the predators have given us our systems of beliefs, our ideas of good and evil, our social mores. They are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success and failure. They have given us covetousness, greed, and cowardice. It is the predators who make us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal.”

“But how can they do this, don Juan?” I asked. “Do they whisper all that in our ears while we sleep?”

“No, they don’t do it that way. That’s idiotic!” don Juan said, smiling. “They are infinitely more efficient and organized than that. In order to keep us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous maneuver - stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting strategist. A horrendous maneuver from the point of view of those who suffer it. They gave us their mind! Do you hear me! The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind. The predators mind is baroque, contradictory, morose, filled with fear of being discovered any minute now.”

“I know that even though you have never experienced hunger,” he went on, “you have food anxiety, which is none other than the anxiety of the predator who fears that any minute now its maneuver is going to be uncovered and food is going to be denied. Through the mind, which, after all, is their mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings whatever is convenient for them. And they ensure, in this manner, a degree of security to act as a buffer against their fear.”

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Filed in: Zeitgeist

Posted Dec 01, 2007 12 comments

I run about 10,000 websites at this point, but here’s another one: it’s called Audible Hype, and it’s all about a DIY music career.  I’m currently running Wombaticus Rex, Algorhythms and Humpasaur Jones, as well as starting the label World-Around Records, so the site is basically a running journal of everything I’m learning.  I try to keep things professional over there, but I’m also pretty upfront about being a broke hick rapper with no fucking clue what I’m doing.

I do know enough to know when I’m doing it wrong, though, and let me tell you, this December tour I’m leaving for in about 12 hours is a textbook case of Disaster by Design.  I just so happen to be looking forward to it for that precise reason.  I also realize that most humans are not wired for that kind of insanity, so let’s frame this whole adventure as a Cautionary Tale, complete with lessons and good advice.  Ready?

Never Do a Tour Without Confirmed Gigs

I have exactly one.  It’s in Buffalo, New York, on Sunday, December 2nd at Broadway Joe’s.  The folks in Constant Climax, and their management at Deepthinka Records, were kind enough to put me on the bill.  After that?  I honestly have no idea what’s going on, and that’s probably not a good thing.  It means I can’t promote a single gig I’m doing, it means I can’t do research on the areas I’m headed into, and it means I can’t keep anyone back home informed about where I am and what I’m doing.

My biggest chunk of advice to broke rappers and DIY musicians: be polite, but don’t fucking be nice. Being polite is 100% nesecessary, be professional, be courteous, be honest.  But being nice is when you give someone more credit than they have earned.  Being nice is trusting people when you know damn well there is exactly one person you can trust.  You need to have access and control to every detail of your tour—or guess what?  It’s not your tour.

This means: contact information for every venue you’re playing at, contact info for the local artists you’ll be playing with, and contact info for anyone and everyone you know in the area.  This means multiple copies of a written schedule that includes all of the info, plus the addresses of all your gigs and the agreed amount of payment for each stop on the tour.  For more common-sense, good advice, check out Jeri Goldstein.

Never Do a Tour Without Money and Merchandise

I set up a hectic and ambitious schedule for getting two albums done in a single week: recorded, mixed, mastered, out the door and into the hands of the manufacturing plant.  I didn’t get that done.  Shocker, I know.

Of course, I don’t exactly have a job, either, so that places me with about $0 in funds as I pack my bags today.  Not complaining, just explaining.  This is, remember, merely an instructional video on What Not To Do. 

Despite coming off as the Dirtiest Old Uncle on Earth, I’m actually burdened—nay, handicapped—by several core principles which have complicated my life a great deal in the past few years.  For instance: no, I’m not going to sell people a burned CD with a permanent marker cover.  Sure, I think my music is worth money, but that doesn’t give me an excuse to be moving shitty product.  Would you buy a pizza in a plastic bag?

Never Do a Tour Without a Support Network

....and I’d never do that.  The biggest reason I’m looking forward to all this, and none too worried, is because of my friends.  Well, my family, my tribe..."friend" is a mighty devalued word these days, after all.  I know that Louis Mackey and Uncle Duke have my back to any extent once I reach Illinois.  I got my bus tickets paid for through my friends at Fallen Arrows, and that wouldn’t have worked on short notice without Charles Blingus saving my ass.  For the record, Blingus has been pretty much continuously been saving my ass for several years now.  This site would not exist without him, and neither would any of the others.

Awhile back I did a Brainsturbator article on who I am and what I do, and it was an exercise in personal clarity and personal branding.  It also omitted the fact I wouldn’t be anything or do anything without the support of my family.  I have a cell phone now, it’s a gift from my mom.  I have a business now, it would never exist without my partners.  I have a Muse now, too, but she’s appearing courtesy of her own damn self.  We’re still trying to figure out why the Universe went so far out of It’s Way to set that one up.

Bonus Advice from an Anonymous Mentor

1. All women have STDs.
2. Never drink a drop until you get paid for your show.
3. Get contact info from EVERY other artist on stage that night.
4. If you don’t have business cards, you can’t do business.
5. Anyone who wants to smoke you down has shitty weed anyway.
6. Ignore any conversation about politics or other musicians.
7. Always grocery stores, never restaurants.
8. Never let anything you own leave your sight.
9. Give the audience what they want, but fuck what they expect.

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Filed in: The Music