The Twin Peaks season three release date is here, and it's not April 30 like that calendar supposedly hinted or whatever. The long-awaited revival is scheduled to premiere on Sunday, May 21, at 9 PM on Showtime, according to an announcement Monday.
Showtime CEO and president David Nevins said that the premiere will be two hours long, with the next two episodes available On Demand immediately after—meaning we'll be in for four new hours of Twin Peaks when May 21 rolls around.
The third season will be a total of "18 unforgettable hours," Nevins said, which we already basically guessed thanks to some IMDb sleuthing, but now we know for sure.
We also know infuriatingly little about the new season, besides the fact that it's going to pick up years after the second season left off and will feature a bunch of the original actors as well as a bizarre variety of new faces. Those include Eddie Vedder, Michael Cera, Trent Reznor, the bad guy from Scream, and Sharon Van Etten, who has already proved herself as an actress with her supporting role on The OA.
There still isn't an official trailer or any actual footage from the new season floating around yet, so feel free to watch David Lynch quietly eat a donut in character as Gordon Cole a few more times while we wait for spring.
Over the course of the recent election cycle, the so-called "alt-right" was heavily engaged in what might be deemed meme warfare, in which previous innocuous phrases and images were appropriated for the group's political ends. The most famous instance of this is Pepe the Frog, but chances are you also saw an increasing number of references to cuckoldry, which the white supremacist group used to describe people or groups it found weak or morally reprehensible.
This led to the rise of neologisms like 'cuckservative' to describe members of the GOP whose views fell short of the alt-right's positions, a barrage of articles explaining just what it means to be a cuck, and even a counter-movement by cuckolds who wanted to reclaim the term.
Despite the alt-right's attempt to mold this term into a politicized diss, many people still proudly fly their cuck flags, including Jimmy Broadway, the stage name for a pornstar who might be said to "specialize" in cuckoldry. Broadway has played a cuckold in well-over 400 porn films, and when I called him to ask what he thought about the alt-right's use of the term, he said the group isn't seeing the whole picture.
It's axiomatic that if you really want to keep people from buying something you just tax the shit out of it. Cigarettes would be one example where an acutely dangerous product underlying an vast public health emergency was progressively made expensive enough to make its consumption financially painful if not prohibitive.
Climate change is an emergency, too, albeit one that's felt rather more collectively. It's often remarked that the only way we're really going to get control over it is through taxation, essentially. Carbon taxes. Make climate change personally expensive.
One example of this is directly taxing gasoline, something that's common across much of the Western world, including the United States. In many nations, gas taxes have been rising, but, according to a paper published today in Nature Energy, many other governments subsidize gasoline consumption instead. In fact, the gas tax global mean fell 13.3 percent between 2003 and 2015 as gas consumption has shifted toward countries that maintain gasoline subsidies or that have very low taxes.
The current paper, which comes courtesy of political scientist Michael Ross and colleagues at the University of California Los Angeles, is concerned with a fundamental problem that extends beyond gas taxes themselves. This is the inherent murkiness of assessing and verifying energy taxes, generally.
Yesterday was "No Trousers On the Tube Day" – a day that is very much what you think it is. You'll know about it already, of course; it's the eighth year it's happened in London, having started in New York in 2002, and now takes place in 60 countries around the world, generating the exact same coverage year on year: look, some people took their trousers off on the underground for a bit – here's a grown man proudly wearing some fun underwear.
But what I've never seen anybody ask any of the participants is "Why?" Why do you want to take your trousers off on public transport? Who is this for? Are you not cold? Is it fair to expose tourists just trying to have a nice time to the vivid outline of your cock and balls?
Here: some answers.
VICE: Why? Tony: I saw it on Facebook and I was like, "Why the fuck not?" It was a break in my day, y'know? It takes two hours.
How does it feel to be trouser-less on the tube? Pretty good, to be honest. I can't really complain at this.
Why? Helena: This is my first year and I've just wanted to do it for forever. I think it's just a really fun thing to do. I think too many people just sit on the tube – with delays, all crammed in, fighting and jostling to get in, having no fun. This is a good way to cheer people up.
How does it feel to be trouser-less on the tube? It's good. I'm really enjoying it.
Why? Eva: Just for fun.
How does it feel to be trouser-less on the tube? It feels like freedom. I don't know – liberating, I guess.
Why? Ivan: Because we want to make a scene. We're part of the no trousers on the tube or no pants on the subway event that runs worldwide in the first weekend of every year. People just have some fun – they go on the tube or the subway or the metro with no trousers on for a couple of hours. Y'know, it's been fun; we've had some lovely reactions from people.
Are you not cold? Everyone goes on about how cold it is, but actually in here it's about 15 degrees. It's 15 degrees here and we're in an open station. On the tube it's 19 to 20 degrees – it's fine! It's absolutely fine.
OK!
Helen and Steph
Why? Helen: Why not. Steph: This is actually my fourth time, and I just love it. Randomness for randomness.
How does it feel to be trouser-less on the tube? Helen: Liberating. Steph: Very liberating – and it's warm today, so it's very good.
Why? Jonny: Because it's fun.
How does it feel to be trouser-less on the tube? Liberating. You should try it.
Why? Nicholas: Just for fun, really.
How does it feel to be trouser-less on the tube? A slight adrenaline rush. It's also pretty cold.
Why? Clint: I had a bit of washing to do so I decided to come out like this in London. Anything goes, right?
Fair enough. And how do you feel? Warmer than I thought it would be. There is a point to the madness.
Why? Billy: It just seemed fun. I've been wanting to do it for a few years and I finally convinced my girlfriend to do it.
Was it everything you hoped for? How do you feel? Completely normal, to be honest. It doesn't even feel that different. I find it's nice – a bit refreshing. I just took my coat off as it's too hot.
Why? Crystal: To challenge the social norms and see how people react.
And how are you feeling? Cooled down and breezy. It's quite nice.
As an exercise, top ten lists useful and fun; it forces me to critically examine what I've played and justify my reactions to games over the past year. But it's painful to cut games you loved because you've just run out of room, not because they're bad!
For a week or so, I thought my list was done, but as I was standing in the shower one day, I came to the realization that I'd played it too safe, and I'd left some games off that I was passionate about. Thus, three games needed to get the axe. I don't have great reasons for cutting some of these; ultimately, it's all kind of arbitrary. We've given ourselves ten slots, so it can only be ten games.
Managing Editor Danielle Riendeau shared the games she cut from her list last week, and now I'm doing the same. What follows are some of my favorite games from 2016, even if they didn't make the "list." I mean, c'mon, we're talking The Witcher 3 here! Gah! (The reason some writeups are shorter than others is because the longer ones were once part of my proper top ten list.)
Brexit is a crisis of interpretation. Six months after the referendum, this is all we know. Although "Brexit means Brexit" became such a beg-the-question tautology that the Prime Minister stopped using it, speculative Brexits continue to be fleshed out in increasingly experimental forms – soft, hard, red white and blue, ambitious, protracted, sincere, sarcastic, solid, gelatinous – all of which disclose little about its content. Brexit is everything and nothing; it's the reason you won't get a pay rise; it's the reason you haven't been sleeping properly; it's the essential condition of the British state's disintegration and it feels like there's nothing we can do but interpret it.
To introduce some clarity and purpose to events, the Prime Minister gave her first broadcast interview of the year on Sunday on Sky News. The country's political and media class – not to mention a panicked judiciary – awaited her words. 'She'll transform the constitutional and political chaos into order,' they thought, 'outlining the government's strategy to make Britain's exit of the European Union a meaningful proposition. All using her mythical brand of competent, hard-nosed, Dunkirk-spirit spunk.'
This is what she said in response to a question on staying in the single market:
"This is where it's important for us to look at this issue in the right way. Often people talk in terms as if we are somehow leaving the EU but still want to kind of keep bits of membership of the EU. We're leaving. We're coming out. We're not going to be a member of the EU any longer. So the question is, the question is, what is the right relationship for the UK to have with the European Union when we're outside."
Once you're done picturing Theresa May practising the phrase, "kind of keep bits of" in a mirror for 30 minutes – an overwrought simulation of how normal people are said to speak – try to work out what, if anything, she actually said. The evasions even generated a hashtag, #speaklikemay. She found a new way to say "Brexit means Brexit" – "We're leaving. We're coming out." – which, although sounding clear, obscures whether access to the single market comes under the category of "keeping bits of membership" of the EU. The press were left to decide for themselves and concluded it did. Maybe.
By Sunday evening, the implication of a Britain without any "bits of membership" was being reported by BBC Radio 4 as a coded suggestion that May wanted Britain to leave the single market. On Monday, Bloomberg picked up on May's subliminal "hints" at leaving too (adding that the value of the pound weakened as a result). But it takes a decent level of confidence in your interpretation abilities to find anything conclusive in what she said: single market access isn't exclusively a "bit of membership of the EU"; Norway isn't a member of the EU and has access to the single market through the EEA.
The government's rhetorical paralysis faced by a challenge this immense is to be expected. Most British politicians haven't had to think politically their entire careers – at least since the end of the Cold War and decimation of the organised working-class, when politics entailed, at least superficially, a struggle over radically different values. Their efforts at resolving contradiction through policies and ideas – "The Strategic State", "The Big Society", "Alarm clock Britain", etc. – are created as soundbites, on the assumption they won't really matter in a few months. Their intellectual formation at Oxford Union debates were premised on the eternal, unchanging foundation of British statecraft and capitalism.
Brexit has generated, among others, a constitutional crisis; it is an existential, as well as technical, event. Expect more prevarication; expect the evacuation of meaning from words you once understood. It's going to be a hard – or soft – 2017.
I remember overhearing a few black friends joke late in 2008 that Barack Obama was being set up the way up-and-coming black college football coaches too often have been. After a talented black coach shows promise, he is often given the opportunity to take over a program that would be nearly impossible to turn around. Pass up the offer, he may never get another chance. Take it and fail, his bright future is instantly diminished.
That light-hearted, if morbid, joke is built upon an old saw in the black community, that black people must work twice as hard to get half as far. Considering this country's history, and that white Americans with high school diplomas or less often have more wealth and income than black Americans with four-year degrees, it's fair to say that this belief is grounded in reality. Still, I've been teaching my two kids to ignore it. I want them to work hard and smart and let the chips fall where they may. Besides, there are plenty of examples of black people overcoming incredible odds to live out their dreams.
In some ways, Obama's tenure as president reinforces what I've been teaching my kids—but also undercuts my message.
Obama is a two-term president, the only modern Democrat to have garnered more than 51 percent of the vote twice, and is leaving office with an approval rating hovering in Ronald Reagan territory. Because of those markers alone, no matter how hard he worked, it would be insane to claim he was only allowed to get half as far as a white person.
Yet when you compare the way Obama has been treated to the reception Donald Trump has received in the weeks since the election, it's hard to ignore the plain truth that all of Obama's efforts didn't stop his critics from disrespecting him and minimizing his achievements.
Let's look at the area where Obama had the most tangible success: the economy. Obama took over a country whose economy had just experienced an 8.9 percent contraction; the US lost roughly 800,000 jobs the month he was sworn in after losing more than 2.5 million the prior year. By his first full month in office, the jobless rate would hit a 25-year high—and would only get higher.
Though the recovery has not lifted all Americans equally, a recovery undeniably has occurred. The unemployment rate was 8.1 percent during Obama's first full month in office, and stands at 4.7 percent now. The national deficit has shrunk, the Dow has risen, more than 20 million people gained health insurance thanks to the Affordable Care Act, and median household income jumped 5.2 percent in 2015 alone.
And yet, the people who spent most of the past eight years denying any Obama accomplishments are among the first to credit Trump's election with the recent rise in the stock market, even though the markets surged under Obama. They praise his personal intervention that saved maybe 800 jobs from being moved by the Carrier corporation, though they never acknowledged that policies enacted by the Obama administration likely saved the domestic auto industry.
The hypocrisy of many Obama critics who supported Trump is evident in other areas, too. Christian conservatives who say they support marriage and fidelity backed a man who publicly cheated on his wife and bragged about being able to grab women "by the pussy"; Republicans who previously condemned Obama for being soft on Russia fell in line behind a candidate who continues to praise Russian President Vladimir Putin.
There was nothing Obama could have done to satisfy such critics, no achievement that would have earned even their grudging respect. Instead, he was falsely branded a Muslim and the place of his birth was questioned by the man who has become his successor.
If nothing else, at least the black men and women who will follow Obama's path to the White House in the future will be freed from trying to please the people who would deny them credit no matter what. The lesson from the Obama presidency is that it's fruitless to appease the people who will hate you anyway—and that you don't need their approval to succeed anyway. And that is going to be what I tell my kids. I've already begun applying that lesson to my own life.
Have you ever looked at the taxidermied bear looming behind Desus and Mero and thought, Wow, that would make for a great bong? We're guessing that's a hard no—until Monday night's Desus & Mero, that is.
During the show's first episode of the new year, the late night VICELAND hosts brought Abdullah Saeed, the host of Bong Appetitand VICE Does America, to talk about Trump's America, getting stoned as hell off of some roasted chicken, and turning the show's grizzly Timbs-wearing mascot into a bong.
Be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11:30 PM ET/PT on VICELAND.
Turkey's Grand National Assembly on Monday approved the first stage of plans to reform its constitution and introduce an executive presidency, significantly increasing the powers of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
The ruling Justice and Development Party's (AKP) amendment package, which looks likely to go to a binding national referendum in the spring, seeks to abolish the post of prime minister, naming the president the official head of the executive with the power to directly appoint cabinet members and senior judges.
Under the new plans, Erdoğan, who has assumed what is currently a largely ceremonial position since 2014, could potentially remain in office as president until 2029. The new constitution would mean Erdoğan would hold executive powers until the next elections in November 2019, before officially beginning the maximum two terms.
Muharrem Erkek, Çanakkale province deputy for the Republican People's Party (CHP)—the main opposition party—and a member of the constitutional committee, told Vice News: "I want to express that it is not a presidential system. It is not related to the US presidential system, which is a great example of a democratic presidential system. They [the AKP] want to change the parliamentary regime of Turkey to a 'one-man regime'. It could eventually create a dictator."
Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.
US News
US Senator Cory Booker to Testify Against Trump's AG Pick Cory Booker has vowed to testify against fellow senator Jeff Sessions this week as Sessions seeks to become the next attorney general. Booker said he would break with tradition—no sitting senator is believed to have ever testified against a fellow senator seeking cabinet confirmation—because, he says, Sessions's regressive record on voting rights and criminal justice represents "a real danger to our country."—NBC News
Trump Son-in-Law to Be Senior Advisor President-elect Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, a real estate developer, will be a "senior advisor" in the new White House, according to transition officials. Kushner's lawyer, Jamie Gorelick, said they've been consulting with the Office of Government Ethics to prevent any conflicts of interest over Kushner's myriad business interests. Gorelick also claimed a federal anti-nepotism law "does not apply to the White House."—VICE/NBC News/AP
US Special Forces Launch Ground Operation in Syria Troops from US Special Operations conducted a ground raid against ISIS in the Deir al Zour area of eastern Syria Sunday. At least 25 ISIS fighters were killed, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, but the US military has not confirmed the number of deaths. US defense officials said Monday that fighting broke out when special forces tried to capture a wanted ISIS militant.—The Washington Post / Al Jazeera
Florida Police Conduct Manhunt for Shooting Suspect Florida police were searching Tuesday for a man suspected of shooting a police officer dead outside a Walmart in Orlando. A second police officer was killed when his motorcycle crashed into another vehicle during the hunt for 41-year-old suspect, Markeith Loyd. "We will track him down to the ends of the Earth to find him," said Orlando police chief John Mina.—CNN
International News
Thousands Line the Streets to Mourn Former Iranian President Hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets in Tehran on Tuesday to mourn the death of former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. The country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was present at the funeral ceremony for Rafsanjani, something of a political moderate who died over the weekend at age 82.—AP
Thousands of Rohingya Leave Myanmar in a Week More than 20,000 people from the Rohingya minority group have fled Myanmar in the past week alone, according to a UN report. It brings the number of Rohingya now living in refugee camps in Bangladesh to about 65,000. A UN envoy has begun a 12-day visit to Myanmar to investigate reports of human rights abuses by the Myanmar army against the Rohingya in the northern state of Rakhine.—Al Jazeera
Norway to Appeal Anders Breivik Human Rights Decision The Norwegian government is appealing a court ruling that the human rights of killer Anders Behring Breivik, who murdered 77 people in 2011, were violated when he was kept in isolation. Government lawyers will argue keeping Breivik locked in a cell for 22 to 23 hours a day was justified and did not break the European Convention on Human Rights.—Reuters
Families in Pakistan Fear for Four Missing Activists Several left-wing social media activists have gone missing in the past week in Pakistan, raising the specter of some kind of crackdown on dissent. Asim Saeed, for one, was taken "forcefully" from his home in Lahore, according to his father. A group of opposition MPs called the disappearances "highly concerning" in a parliamentary resolution.—The Guardian
Everything Else
'Hollyweed' Sign Prankster Turns Himself In Zachary Cole Fernandez, a 30-year-old artist, has been arrested in LA on suspicion of trespassing and changing the "Hollywood" sign to read "Hollyweed" on New Year's Day. Fernandez previously revealed to VICE that he was responsible for the pran and has now reportedly turned himself in.—Los Angeles Times
Moby Turns Down Chance to DJ at Trump Inauguration Moby has revealed on Instagram that he apparently rejected a booking agent who approached him about playing a Donald Trump inauguration ball. "I'm still laughing," he wrote. "So #trump what do you think, I DJ for you and you release your tax returns?"—Rolling Stone
Japanese Scientists Claim to Find Earth's 'Missing' Element Experiments by Japanese scientists point toward silicon being the previously unknown element in the Earth's innermost core. Lead researcher Eiji Ohtani from the University of Tohoku believes silicon makes up 5 percent of the core alongside iron and nickel.—BBC News
Frank Ocean and Solange to Headline Panorama Frank Ocean, Solange, Tame Impala, and A Tribe Called Quest will headline the second annual Panorama festival at Randall's Island Park in New York. Other top performers for the three-day June festival include Alt-J, Nine Inch Nails, and MGMT.—Noisey
Yahoo Would Change Name Under Verizon Deal Yahoo will change its name to Altaba Inc. if the proposed $4.8 billion sale of its digital services to Verizon is approved. Verizon wants to buy Yahoo's websites, apps, email, and advertising services.—Motherboard
'Twin Peaks' Season Premiere Announced for May The new Twin Peaks season will debut on Showtime on Sunday, May 21, the network has announced. The third season will begin with a two-hour special followed by two more episodes made available On Demand immediately after.—VICE
In 2001 there was an entire evening of BBC One primetime television dedicated to texting. It was called The Joy of Text, obviously, and Ulrika Jonsson presented it, because that is what 2001 was like. I remember watching this, when I was 13, and asking for a mobile for my birthday the following month so I could play Snake on it and text literally my two other friends who had phones. But also in the intervening years I have become more and more convinced that this whole night never happened and the whole thing was some fantastical product of my dying mind. BBC One – really? An entire night of programming about texting? I half remember Vanessa Feltz dancing in front of a brick wall and telling us what "LOL" meant. Did that actually happen, or did I, for some reason, dream it?
Astonishingly, it happened. I can't believe this year happened. I can't believe I lived through this year. What an absurd era the turn of the millennium really was:
Related: here, in the year of our lord 2k17, there is an "explainer for parents" text message primer doing the rounds on Facebook, originally from The Kim Komando Show in America, but now doing heavy numbers on the PSNI Newry & Mourne page in Northern Ireland. Here it is:
I always like these. Obviously this is a good thing because it's good for parents to be kept abreast of the activity their kids are getting up to on their phones and online, in that murky dark grey space just one step away from reality – a gloomy and dangerous space in the wrong hands. Because obviously we like to pretend teens are dwelling just somewhere between Club Penguin and sincere Tumblrs, but the internet is way, way shadier than that sometimes, and let's be real about that for a moment.
But also:
RUMORF – Are You Male OR Female?
Ah, no. Sadly, nobody has ever asked that. No teen in history has ever typed that acronym out. What's happened here is someone has stumbled upon a list of rejected song titles from Zayn's last album and put it online as a genuine PSA. And now we have to go through it, together.
GOING THROUGH THIS LIST OF NOT ACTUALLY REAL ACRONYMS THAT TEENS SUPPOSEDLY USE – BUT DEFINITELY, DEFINITELY DON'T – IN ORDER OF WORST TO ABSOLUTE WORST, TOGETHER: AN ARTICLE
I mean, teens definitely do use the aubergine emoji to mean penis – everyone does; it is because the aubergine means "penis" – but I want to meet the one person alive who didn't, until this PSA went viral, know that. A pipe and slippers dad just yelling "Margaret? MARGARET? THE AUBERGINE EMOJI MEANS 'DINKLE'!" furiously up a set of stairs. Proper Daily Mail comment section stuff. What else don't you know, my dude? What marvels do you discover about the world, each and every day? In a way, it must be beautiful to live a life not knowing that the aubergine emoji means penis. Everything is new to you and you are constantly in wonder.
DOC – Drug of Choice
The only drug of choice for anyone whose parents still care about what they are texting is extremely weak little weed joints smoked on park benches on Friday nights after school. No other drug even comes close to the picture until you're old enough to have a phone contract under your own name. Nobody who does drugs has ever said "drug of choice", just like people who genuinely drink don't say, "What's your tipple?"
MPFB – My Personal F**k Buddy
Two things: why do you need to qualify "fuck buddy" with "my personal"? Like, do you have timeshare on your fuck buddy? Do you need to book appointments? And I find it quite amusing that a list for parents about what teens are saying to each other censors out the word "fuck" just four lines beneath the word "cum". Cum? Cum is fine. Love cum. Love 2 cum. But the word "f**k" is a little too rich for my blood, thank you Lynn.
PRON – Porn
Pretty sure the last time I saw the word "PRON" in place of "porn" was on a b3ta messageboard accessed during a GCSE IT lesson when I was supposed to be making a PowerPoint presentation about the Kennedy assassination. This does not exist. Teens do not use this.
SUGARPIC – Suggestive or erotic photograph
No. Teens do not use the word "sugarpic". "Sugarpic" is what your dad searches for when he wants to quietly look for porn but doesn't dare search the word "porn" because he's convinced, somehow, that the laptop is wired to start emitting a red flashing siren and an alarm sound if he does, and he'll be put immediately on a register. This is how he ended up accidentally buying you that 40-person customised cake for your birthday that year. It's because he was innocently looking for bra photos.
AF – As Fuck
Just really amused by the idea of two parents just suddenly finding out what "AF" means and having to bollock their kid for it. "IS THIS WHAT YOU MEANT WHEN YOU SAID AUNTIE HELEN'S SECOND WEDDING PHOTOS WERE 'GOALS AF'? DO I LOOK LIKE I'M LAUGHING, AARON?"
Q2C – Quick 2 Cum
Who is cumming so much and so quickly that they need a go-to acronym to cover it all, please. How much time are they saving by not typing out the full cum-phrase. How much cum can one human rapidly emit?
MOOS – Member of the Opposite Sex
Linguistics is, on the whole, a slow-moving iceberg, with most of the big, continent-sized changes to it – grammar, nouns, the official documentation of each – coming slowly, across many generations. Apart from teens having words for members of the opposite sex, a facet of the language which regenerates like a snake shedding its skin once every year like clockwork. So everything is piff this and buff that and bad and boujie this, and nobody alive says "MOOS" to mean "Member of the Opposite Sex", because it makes them sound like a retired army general offering to chaperone the local high school dance without anyone even telling him the dance was happening.
RUH – Are You Horny?
It is feasible that teens could say "RUH" – saying "horny" is about the least horny-making thing you can do, so any attempts to disguise and avoid the full impact of the word "horny" could and should be encouraged – but it's also not beyond the realms of possibility that a dog could say it too. Just imagine a little grey dog, all muscle and bustle, grey collar. A happy little fellow. Makes a little skipping noise when he runs on pavement. Real panter. And then he waddles up to you, fixes you with a little dog gaze and goes: ruh. Hahahahaha. Oh, teens.
1174 – Nude Club
1174 AND WELCOME TO THE NUDE CLUB, A PLACE WHERE POWERFUL DANCE MUSIC PLAYS EVERY SECOND OF EVERY DAY, AND EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE IS BATHED IN A MAUVE AND RED LIGHT, AND EVERYONE IS NUDE AT THE NUDE CLUB, NIPPLES ABOUND, GYRATING, 1174 GET YOURSELF DOWN HERE AND DON'T BRING A BRA AT ALL! NUDE CLUB: WE WANNA SEE EVERY ONE OF YOUR PUBES!
1337 or L337 – Leet, a coded alphabet
Nobody who says "1337" is sexting because they are too busy watching streams of emotionless Japanese teenagers playing League of Legends and saving up the money from their Saturday job at Costa to buy a realistic Game of Thrones replica sword. If you're a parent and you catch your kid saying "1337" online, take a deep breath and stop worrying, because they are the least in-danger-of-catching-chlamydia human in existence.
NALOPKT – Not a Lot of People Know That
This one probably does actually get used quite a lot – I only put it in because I like the idea of Michael Caine aggressively narrating teens' sext sessions. Try it, in his voice, right now: "AND TELL ME, STEWART, WOULD YOU LIKE TO GET ME WET?"
GNOC – Get Nude On Cam
I refuse to believe anyone born after 1998 has ever used the word "cam". Anyone who came to and acknowledged reality in 2003 has only known a world with cameras embedded in every surface of it. They have never had to get a special splitter because their massive, creaking desktop PC doesn't have a USB port yet. They've never had to Blu-Tack a small plastic orb to the top of their monitor to take their first, formative selfie with it. They don't even know what MSN Messenger is. They have never said "cam".
KYS – Kill Yourself
If you're a parent whose teen is saying "kill yourself" so often that they need an easily accessible acronym for it then I think you got a bigger problem than whether they are sexting or not, and that problem is that they are starring as the villain in a teen movie where a coven of legitimate witches are bullying whatever the modern equivalent of Lindsay Lohan is.
IN WHICH WE'VE GONE OFF PISTE, A LITTLE BIT, AND I DON'T THINK THE RANKING OF THIS LIST WAS ESPECIALLY SCIENTIFIC, AND DIDN'T REALLY GO FROM WORST TO VERY WORST ANYWAY, SO LET'S JUST CLOSE IT OUT WITH THE ABSOLUTE WORST AND WASH OUR STICKY HANDS AND BE DONE WITH IT:
53X – Sex
53X isn't really a code, though, is it? Like: it clearly still just says "SEX". I absolutely, 1,000 percent guarantee that Fred Durst owns a skateboard that has this printed along it.
If there was ever a good argument for how millennials have a fucked-up perception of sex, love, and dating—Tinder is it. Don't judge a book by its cover? Good joke. The world's most popular dating platform takes that quote and throws it into a burning trash compactor.
Regardless, if you're a millennial, you likely have Tinder on your phone. While I have had some great interactions on there, I'm also a dude. Women—by and large—have it the roughest in the dating world. Stalkers, racists, rapey vibes, and degrading comments are just a few off the long list of things ladies face online. With a 9/10 chance that the person on the other side of the phone is a sketchy bro who they would never meet in person, most of my female friends tell me that the app ends up being a disappointment for them.
But that doesn't mean it should be that way, or that it has to be. Because I am clearly an expert in being a man, I've put together a guide on how women can make the most of their Tinder experience.
Meet Somewhere Safe.
There is a saying that goes, "A gentleman is just a patient wolf." If a dude tells you to come to his house to link up for the first date, you can be 101 percent sure that his goal is to smash. While this is the end goal of many people of any gender on Tinder, that doesn't mean our methods are the same.
I could fill an article with the amount of gross, disgusting shit I have heard men say about women behind closed doors. Alternatively, I don't think I could even count women saying the same things about men on one hand. There's, like, 3 billion of us on Earth: Avoid tool bags who want you to come to their strange man-den to break the ice.
Try to Avoid Ghosting on People You're Actually Interested in, but Don't Be Afraid to Ghost.
We all check Tinder infrequently, so it's understandable when messages go unanswered for a bit. Still, it's probably wise to determine early on if the person you're messaging is someone you want to actually chat with or somebody you should probably unmatch.
If someone gives you a sleazy vibe or makes you uncomfortable, just unmatch or block them (then block them on all forms of social media if you deem it necessary). Don't waste time clogging your feed up with endless messages from mans who are giving you stranger vibes.
Stop Putting Preferred Height, Income, Type of Date, Temperature in Room, etc.
Arguably, the most annoying thing about Tinder (an app that encourages being a petty, superficial fuckbag by validating the first photo in front of our eyeballs) is the amount of both guys and girls who have a laundry list of stipulations in their bio regarding who they will and will not entertain.
If it's not obvious why this is a red flag, I'll simplify: Regardless of sex, most decent human beings using this app will never read your bio before swiping right on you (because the point of the application is to spend as little time as possible matching with people). If you truly believe that "men below 6'1" can swipe left," or that you're only looking for friends and will block anybody who tries to flirt, then maybe you should join a dating site that encourages discrimination based on compatibility.
Same thing goes for dudes who say they "like Asian girls." Seriously, fuck yourself to the moon.
Beware: Unreasonably Attractive People
If you aren't a catfish, beware that some men may think you are. The concept that women are the only ones proficient at online lurking is actually a patriarchal lie—as men, we're just as suspicious and adept at figuring out the life story of people we haven't yet met by spying on their Twitter feed and tags on Instagram. Don't believe the lie that women are "crazy" when it comes to this stuff.
Also, not to bust the balls of dudes everywhere reading this, but let's be real: Most supermodels are not on Tinder, and if they are, it's 90 percent likely that they didn't match with you. In either case, if you end up matching with somebody you know is way out of your league, it's a good policy to screenshot their photo and run it through Google reverse image search. Chances are, the photo is ripped from an Instagram model's feed or ends up linking back to the social media page of a person in Arkansas—a long shot from the five-kilometre radar you have blasting from your East Toronto condo.
(PS. If you happen to actually be super attractive—lol. You now know you've probably been reverse image searched.)
Group Photos
If you have a group photo as your lead image, what kind of person do you think you're attracting? If you believe it's somebody who thinks, "Wow, this person is sociable, friendly, and seems to be enjoying themselves with the company of others," you're very wrong and should find more reasons to distrust men.
Unless everyone in that group photo is equally as hot as each other, nine times out of ten, dudes will swipe left. Again, let me just be frank: men are shallow pieces of trash and don't have the mental patience to bother looking deeper on your profile. Get the honest answer from the get-go and skip bullshit messages asking whether you're the "hot friend" or not.
The Type of Drugs You Do Clearly Displayed in Your Bio
Look, I've never dated or been with a girl who consumed a strict diet of matcha tea and had never smoked a cigarette in her life. In fact, I usually date people equally as fucked up as I am.
With that said, most of us want to be a little surprised, or at least have to do a bit of detective work to figure out whether you're downwith the sus life or not. Just like you wouldn't go for a photo of a dude ripping a popper from a bong or a manchild in a fedora staring intently at the camera while smoking a cigar, it is not exciting to hear your blood is "90 percent liquor, 10 percent sugar."
Really, just save the surprise for the date. Unless doing drugs are an ultimatum for dating you. Then maybe tell us via DM.
Mentioning a Love for Netflix, Dogs, and Weed
This is the Holy Trinity of basic Tinder descriptions. You enjoy the idea of being a living, breathing Pinterest post. The thing is—these are markers of a boring existence, and I'm saying this as someone who has been a billboard for depression and isolation in the past. You're basically saying, "Let's stay home, get high, fuck, and watch movies. I have little else to offer you."
Don't Attract Shitty People with Deceiving Photos
Think about the guy who was good-looking on his profile but shows up to the date without a beard and looks like Martin Shkreli. Now try and flip the sexist equivalent on women. Guys will likely match you regardless, but that doesn't mean they'll be good matches. Trust me and take this as a textbook note in honesty and healthy relationships—you deserve better than a fuck-bag who will insult you when you arrive with less makeup than in your display picture.
"UNIVERSITY YEAR/SORORITY ACRONYM"
If graduating in 2018 with 15,000 other students is the highlight of your life, I am sad. Truly. I may be a bit biased here, but going to school for a business or arts degree is like the vanilla ice cream flavour of boring. Also, you would probably hate or be insulted by the fact that I think universities are a Ponzi scheme, so I'll just stop while I'm at it.
If you have your sorority listed—you are flashing the turncoat of female bros. Being involved in "Greek Life" is like the diet version of saying "Make America Great Again." I sense bad political opinions and scuzzy male friends.
"Hey"
Please, please send us a corny pickup line or show some sort of engagement past a simple greeting. Men love attention as much as women—we want you to make the first move sometimes, and it's really hard when your idea of taking the lead is "Hi." You're giving us a smorgasbord of mixed signals, and we'll probably respond with something stupid.
"I love babies (no I don't have one but I wish I did)"
No. Just don't.
Looking for Something Serious
It might work for some people, but wow, you're probably on the wrong app if that's your main goal.
On this episode of VICE's 'Autobiographies' series we sit down with boxing sensation Eric Kelly to talk about his childhood and the moment his career took an unexpected turn. Growing up on the crack-riddled streets of Brooklyn in the 80s, Eric's father pushed him to get in the gym and box from an early age. Eventually he rose to the top of the amateur boxing world.
While preparing for the 2000 Olympics, Eric's career took an unexpected blow when his father was diagnosed with HIV. Shortly after, Eric got in a bar fight and caused muscle damage to his left eye leaving him unable to box again. Years later, after becoming a father himself, Eric refocused to become one of the most notorious boxing trainers in New York City.
The story about Todd Nickerson, a non-offending pedophile who lives near Savannah, Tennessee, seemed to particularly strike a chord—several people emailed and tweeted at me to express "disgust" that I was offering a platform to Nickerson, who says he has never abused a child despite being attracted to young girls.
On Facebook, many of the thousands of commenters suggested that Nickerson and anyone like him be killed or locked up for life, regardless of whether or not they had actually committed a crime.
But Rhea Martinez, who was raped and repeatedly molested by a male family friend as a child, feels differently. Martinez, 28, told VICE she believes society should be more empathetic towards pedophiles before they offend—and that they should have more options for getting help.
"I feel like if he would have had a place to go, maybe it would have never happened to me," Martinez said.
Martinez grew up in Niles, Michigan, a child of divorce. When she was around eight years old, her dad remarried and was granted full custody of her and her brother. Martinez said her stepmother owned a creditor's business with her ex-husband—they were still friends. Her stepmom's ex had a daughter, whom Martinez befriended.
"We went over there for a playdate, and that's how it all got started," Martinez told VICE.
Rhea Martinez says she was raped as a child. Photo via Facebook
The first time she slept over, her friend's dad had her sleep on the living room couch, instead of in his daughter's bedroom. While she was asleep, she said he came out to the couch and started molesting her, removing her underwear.
"There was a few other times that stuff like that happened, it got more intense the more he did it," Martinez told VICE.
On a camping trip, the summer between fourth and fifth grade, Martinez said he raped her repeatedly while she was inside their tent.
"It hurt so bad I couldn't pretend to be asleep any longer," she said. When she acted as if she was waking up, he stopped.
Martinez kept silent about the assaults for years. As a teenager, she said she had social anxiety. Terrified that someone would find out how she lost her virginity, she started having sex at age 14.
Finally, after she graduated high school, she decided to report the assaults to police.
"That's how I learned that he had done this multiple times. He was already on the (sex offender) registry."
VICE has viewed the profile of the man Martinez said raped her on the Michigan sex offender registry. He is 61 years old, and has been convicted of two counts of criminal sexual conduct with a person under 13, as well as one count of criminal sexual conduct with intent to commit sexual penetration. The latter conviction, which took place in 2009, relates to Martinez, she said. VICE is not naming Martinez's abuser because Martinez said she doesn't currently have unredacted court records showing she was the complainant in that trial.
On the witness stand, Martinez said she was grilled by a "ruthless" defence lawyer, who asked her everything from the colour of pyjamas she'd been wearing to the positioning of furniture in her abuser's home. She was asked how she could identify her perpetrator if she'd been pretending to be asleep.
"I would peek once in a while," she told VICE. "Plus, it was an adult man's hands."
Eventually, he pleaded guilty to sexual assault with intent to commit sexual penetration on a minor.
"Our prosecutor said I should take what I could get."
Martinez, who now works as an ophthalmic technician near Detroit, believes her offender was a serial pedophile.
"Vigilante justice has never been the logical answer."
She said if pedophiles were less stigmatized, they might be able to get counselling before acting on their urges.
"How are we going to understand these sorts of people if we don't talk to them?... If they're too scared to speak up and say anything, how is it going to be prevented?"
As for vigilante predator hunters, like Creep Catchers, Martinez told VICE she thinks publicly shaming people like her abuser will only push them further underground—a theory that's been echoed by police and experts in pedophilia.
"Vigilante justice has never been the logical answer," she said. "You can take all of them and shoot them in the head, and that's not going to change my life."
Amond Paul is a single father of two young girls who describes his parenting style as reminiscent of those 90s television, go-with-the-flow-type of dads like Tony Micelli and Danny Tanner. He cooks meals for his family from the vegetable garden that blooms behind the fence that he built with his ex-husband. The last time I interviewed Amond was 2011 when I worked for an arts-based nonprofit and he taught creative workshops for kids. We both had long hair and deep secrets back then.
Today, we sit together in his house on the Northside of Fredericton, New Brunswick. Fredericton is not exactly rural, but the city with a population hovering just over 55,000 is still struggling with LGBTQ rights. The floor of Amond's family room is decorated with baskets, stuffed animals, puzzles, and an assortment of toys. He is a textile artist, and I admire the half-human, half-unicorn doll that sits, in progress, on a nearby bookshelf. As I press record on my phone for the interview, Amond excuses himself to heat up a bottle for his youngest daughter, River, who is 18 months old. She is teething—a painful experience for any baby, but made especially so, in her case, due to a recent cleft palate repair surgery. River has Down syndrome and was born with a cleft lip and palate and heart defects. Although she can't walk, due to hypotonia, River's eyes follow her Pops everywhere. That's what his daughters call Amond: Pops. Periodically, River crawls toward the fountain that is concealed by plants. She rocks back and forth to the soothing waterfall sounds.
Amond returns and scoops up River for her feeding. I start to ask him about being a trans parent of two young kids when his other daughter, L., age 6, tiptoes into the room.
"Pops?" she asks. "Can you get Angry Birds playing on the computer?"
The interruptions are so incredibly regular that I forget that I'm here to tell a story about difference. Maybe that's not the real reason I'm here. As a trans person, I often feel like I'm living in two worlds at once. To the people who meet me for the first time I'm free to be myself. This self. For those who knew me before transitioning, their memory of my old form haunts our interactions. It's easier to learn than unlearn, I remind myself to justify insensitivities. But when you come out as trans with young kids—not babies or adult children—the unlearning and learning blend together. New memories eventually outpace old knowing, or at least that's a hunch I have. That's why I put myself at the centre of Amond's safe circle with his kids.
River's bottle has a slender tube attached to the nipple; it makes drinking easier. As Amond dotes about his kitchen, apologizing for dirty dishes while heating up her second bottle, he tells me about his own childhood. He was born and raised in rural southwest Ontario, on the Thames River. As a child, Amond attended a Catholic school, although he mentions that only his father was a devout Roman Catholic. Given the recent statements from Pope Francis about trans people, I imagine his relationship with his family is strained.
"They love me, they just don't understand what to do about [my transition]."
Amond says he's always felt male from a young age despite having identified as agender or gender fluid for most of his adult life. In the 90s, when Amond was coming of age, the plethora of terms for gender identities and sexualities didn't exist. Nevertheless, his relationship to gender was complex.
"I've been out as queer forever, I feel like I've never ever been in. What I mean is anyone who has known me for years has seen my man come out. In 2010, when I was pregnant the first time, my doula was sitting there and she remembers me saying: 'I understand I'm growing this baby and everything, but I'm a man.' Sometimes you blurt out truths when you're pregnant."
Amond places River in a cloth carrier, snug to his chest, and reclines over a bolster on the floor. As the bottle cools on the coffee table, he explains how painful it's been to experience distance from his otherwise supportive family. Over the past six months, he's asked his family to use male pronouns. They haven't yet. Just this week, he changed his name. They've also made it known that they're not ready to use that. He chose the name Amond because that's what his mother had intended to call him if he was assigned male at birth.
"I thought the name choice might help her tune into the place where she was talking to that baby, Amond Paul, inside of her. I thought it would help my father flashback to how he'd lovingly place me on the bathroom counter, as a young child, and I'd pretend to shave my face alongside him."
I wonder: Is it still unlearning if that's how it's always been?
About two years ago, when he was pregnant with River, Amond asked people to use gender-neutral pronouns (they/them/theirs) when addressing him.
"This was an easier way for me to step into transition. After she was born, I was on a plane every week, for five months, travelling to the hospital. I wanted the attention to be on my child who needed assistance, not on me, or the fact that my ID didn't line up. I was androgynous and I was fine with the passing privilege that came along with being a cis, white woman during that time."
After months of care, River was finally ready for her cleft palate repair surgery. Amond was also ready to transition into his forever identity as a trans man. He recalls the hospital staff having a difficult time adapting. Every morning, he'd take a sharpie marker to the whiteboard in his daughter's hospital room. In careful print, he'd scrawl his name, pronouns, and parenting name: Pops.
River's doctor rolled with Amond's transition and kept an open mind, but despite Amond's efforts, most of the hospital staff misgendered him intentionally. They asked inappropriate questions about his ability to birth more kids. They refused to use his name, instead citing a nonexistent hospital policy about having to address people by the name on their birth certificate. Amond wanted to fight back, but more than that he wanted to be present and energized for River.
"I was dealing with enough at the hospital with my sick child. As soon as someone threw in transphobia it was like they lopped off a limb as I was trying to carry my child to safety."
In addition to ignorance and transphobia, Amond believes a lot of the reticence to accept his gender identity from the hospital staff, and world at large, exists because of how we view fathers' roles.
"When I'm by myself, I often pass [as male]. When my children are with me, I'm mommed and ma'amed. This means society doesn't see men as capable of physically nurturing their kids. It's true, in my travels, I don't see a lot of men carrying their kids."
Parenting small children is a physical task, especially for Amond because of River's inability to walk. At any moment, he may need to carry her. As a result, Amond must put his desire for both top and bottom surgeries on hold for at least two years. Gender dysphoria is a daily struggle for Amond but he doesn't have many safe places to express this pain. Given the stigma attached the mental health diagnoses, he doesn't want people to use his dysphoria against him to question his ability to parent.
"I stopped researching gender-confirming surgeries. I'm shocked every single time when I get out of the shower and realize I don't have a penis. It's like phantom limb syndrome. When I go to bed and my kids are sleeping the wave of dysphoria just takes over. I feel like I don't have a place in society. Those are the times when I remember the hatred directed toward me and the futility kicks in."
L. is Amond's six year old child. She dressed as the red Power Ranger for Halloween and slides into her Batman suit when inspired. Flipping upside down to let her younger sister play and pull at her long brown hair is a regular activity for L. She also spends a lot of time inventing her own language and drawing rainbows and unicorns.
"There was no shift from being a mom to a dad with L. I was never really a mom. When she was only two or three years old, she'd draw pictures of me with a beard. I'm Pops but I also never took Mama away from her. She knows she can use that name for me if she needs to, if her heart is hurting. She seems to understand that Mama is still a man and has always been."
When Amond first moved into his new house with his children, he invited the neighbours to cook outs and campfires. Like every parent, he wanted his children to face as little resistance as possible. Whenever neighbours misgendered Amond in conversation, L. would unapologetically correct them and explain: Pops is a man. After L. explained to a persistent neighbour that men can have babies because gender identity is on the inside, the neighbour approached Amond and volunteered to take L. with their family to a Christian summer camp. At that point, Amond realized that their social time with the neighbours would be limited.
"Ninety percent of our family's experiences are with allies. The other ten per cent is a crapshoot. Sure, I worry: Who are we going to run into? Is the R word going to get flung out around River? Is someone going to call me a faggot? Is someone going to attack my child or tell her that she doesn't know what she's talking about because men can't birth? But the bulk of our day is so silly, so sweet, so fun, and that's what I want the world to take away from my parenting experience."
Amond told me he started transitioning later in life, in his mid-thirties, because that's when the time was right. He has a job waiting for him in his field, a house, and support from his children's other parent. He worries that many young trans people feel the pressure to come out, but he wants them to know there is no shame in staying in too. Recently, he's begun sharing his family life on Instagram.
"I want to remind people, if and when they're ready, it's okay to transition with alongside their kids. It doesn't harm or confuse children the way you are told it does. They love you and work with you."
At the close of our interview, L. pops her head into the room again. Above her, on the white wall, hangs a poster with bursts of colour and the words: Share Joy. Spread Hope. I realize that more than learning or unlearning, that's what we need to start doing for ourselves and each other.
"Pops, did you mean I could have two more marshmallows for dessert or two in total?" L. asks with a slight grin like a cool negotiator.
Amond returns the same grin in her direction. "Two, altogether."
Andrea does it for three hours every day, rolling from side to side on her bed to music. It makes her feel "safe, warm, excited, happy, content and balanced," but she also suspects it is the reason she has never married. She's a police detective. She would be horrified if anyone knew.
Bill's sessions can last eight hours. The facility manager does it in the dark in his bedroom or on long solitary walks as he listens to the same playlist on repeat. He once walked five hours straight without realising; when he finally stopped he looked down and saw his heels were bleeding.
For Julia, a job is out of the question because "triggers are everywhere." Instead she laughs, cries, sings, talks out loud, then re-emerges from the fog hours later, drained. It swallows up to seventy percent of her time. She thinks her friends might have noticed something's up.
In 2002, Dr Eli Somer, a professor of clinical psychology from the University of Haifa in Israel, noticed that six of the 24 child abuse survivors he was treating at the time "occasionally alluded to this secretive, internal fantasy life that they lived."
This wasn't the stuff of everyday mind wandering. These were hyper real, minutely detailed scripts that played on the walls of their minds for great chunks of their waking hours. They dreamed of idealized versions of themselves. Of close friendships, fame, romance, rescue and escape. Famous actors and singers dotted their dreamscapes.
They engaged in repetitive movements—pacing, rocking, spinning, throwing a ball up in the air. And they played emotionally charged music, explaining that it helped trigger and prolong their favorite scenarios.
There's a common misconception that if you combine two drugs you'll get the best of both worlds. It's the same thinking that gave us the vodka & Red Bull, the spliff, or the club kids special known as XECK (xanax, ecstasy, crystal-meth and ketamine, ground up together and snorted). Fixing yourself a drug salad, however, typically results in an unpredictable, synergistic effect that is often greater than the sum of its parts.
This is likely the case with mixing coffee and cannabis, an increasingly popular trend for marijuana companies in legalized states.
In my home city of Denver, there are intense prohibitions against alcohol being combined with cannabis, either in products sold at dispensaries or any bar allowing pot to be consumed on their property, the idea being mixing the two can make you a danger to yourself and others. But there is no regulation for marijuana products infused with caffeine.
2016 wasn't quite The Year of Virtual Reality despite what the starry-eyed press mused. It was, perhaps, more the year of taking photos of bewildered people wearing headsets and making asses out of themselves. VR promos nearly vibrate off the screen with the sheer force of their earnest aspiration, leveraging your desperation for a more meaningful digital experience with enough buzzwords to get any tech blog editor rock hard in seconds. Ads tend to show excited newcomers donning headsets and generally losing their shit while their friends stare at them bemusedly. This actually demonstrates one of the inherent weaknesses of the VR format right now: we haven't quite figured out how to make it a social experience. Beyond providing fodder for Snapchat, what form is VR really going to take as it wriggles further into our daily lives?
VR has the potential to be a game-changing tool for expression and communication. But it is also part of a self-inflating hype cycle of emergent tech tools that require enough people to buy into the developers' (and investors') vision of the future. It is therefore the solemn duty of digital artists like myself to wade through the bullshit, and determine VR's actual capacity to be a revolutionary creative medium—along with the hurdles in the way of implementing those lofty ideas.
Apparently Monica Crowley, Donald Trump's pick for senior director of strategic communications for the National Security Council, not only plagiarized more than 50 sections of her 2012 book, What The (Bleep) Just Happened, as CNN Money reported last weekend—she was beefing up her writing with other people's work back at Columbia University, where she was completing her PhD.
After reviewing her 2000 dissertation, Politico found more than 12 instances where the conservative author and commentator lifted directly from scholarly texts, without using quotation marks or providing the correct attribution. The paper appears to violate the university's rules on both unintentional and intentional plagiarism, as defined by its policies.
Both Crowley's thesis advisor and Columbia University have declined to comment about her dissertation. However, Trump—a noted plagiarism denier—defended his pick even after Crowley was first accused of lifting work from other columnists, news articles, think tanks, and Wikipedia, word-for-word, for her 2012 book.
"Monica's exceptional insight and thoughtful work on how to turn this country around is exactly why she will be serving in the administration," Trump's transition team told CNN, as Crowley's position does not require confirmation from the Senate. "Any attempt to discredit Monica is nothing more than a politically motivated attack that seeks to distract from the real issues facing this country."
Crowley has also been accused of plagiarizing a column she wrote for the Wall Street Journal in 1999 that very closely resembled a 1988 article from a neoconservative magazine. Although she denied the charge, the Journal later issued an editor's note, saying it would not have published the column had it "known of the parallels."
I'm in Great Salt Lake State Park, 3:03 AM on a Wednesday, and the fireworks are lit. Blue smoke billows out over the dead shore as the sizzle turns into a screech and then a star explodes. The show was earlier in a bar that did not turn off the TVs. These other comics never smoke pot, but tonight they did. We are trespassing and drinking Coors, and I have to pee again. I drop to both knees to dodge a bottle rocket, and the bones of a million extinct fish lacerate my shins. I light a Roman candle with my Pall Mall and aim it toward the laughter.
I'm in Tama, Iowa, 2:12 AM on a Saturday, and the two old women say they are princesses. They wear their coarse gray hair in woven braids that hangs like earrings over their strong shoulders. The other comic is wide-eyed in the doorway sipping Ten High from the bottle.
After the show, on the walk to their compound, they said they'd have to cleanse the trailer because their brother killed himself in there last winter.
One princess repeats the name Eugene over and over as her sister stacks feathers. The younger princess takes the bottle from my friend and pours whiskey into a copper cup. The older princess pulls a feather from the bottom of the pile and dips it in the whiskey. She lights it and tosses it on the feather pile. They kneel next to the fire and blow across the flame to drive the smoke out into the night.
That night, I sleep like I am dead.
I'm in San Francisco, California, 9:17 PM on a Sunday, and Dana Carvey just told me good set. I tell him thank you, that means a lot, and that my mom and I used to watch his special where he did the bit about his son's penis. He laughs and says, "I love that joke, but it'd be creepy if I did it now. He's all grown up." Later, I call my father.
I'm in Los Angeles, California, anytime, and no one remembers my name.
I'm in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, showtime on a Friday, and I am hollow and burnt. I have done 29 shows in 27 days. I have drank too much and slept too little. I reek like Greyhound. I don't feel funny. Don't feel human. I need to lie down. Instead I keep bumming smokes.
The flyers say "THE UNDERGROUND KING RETURNS." I am 29. I am not a legend. I am a fraud. A huckster—my jokes are snake oil. These people don't need me. No one does. I should have stayed in school.
"This guy is honestly the funniest guy I have ever seen live. We've had him twice before here in Tuscaloosa, and you are in for a real goddamn treat."
Eight years ago, this is all I wanted. Me then would have been so proud. But me then doesn't know me now. Eight years, and I still have no idea what I'm doing. I need to call my wife and apologize for being gone so long. I miss the smell of her and our bed and our dog burrowing between. I shouldn't be out here. I am just a voracious ego masturbating for strangers: I trade my sanity for money in 45-minute chunks. I don't feel good.
"Here he is, y'all." I want to cry or scream or disappear. I ask the bartender for another High Life. "Sam Tallent!"
The mic is as cold as a dead snake. "Keep it going for my good friend Brian everyone."
A stranger in the darkness yells, "His name is Ryan." I have never been so alone.
I'm in Brooklyn, New York, after hours on a Monday, and the agent says I am so funny. She represents a famous comic and says I should be on Mad TV. I smile and nod and put another drink on her tab. My shoes are hot-glued together. Vodka preference? Whatever is expensive I say, and she laughs and I look out the window at the garbage men emptying the curbed plastic cans. I bet they, unlike me, can afford to drink in here.
I'm somewhere in Missouri, just after show time on a Saturday, and the envelope is light. I am in the booker's office trying to stay cool as he talks about immigrants through caustic teeth. He speaks in the practiced dialect of closet bigots. He carries a pistol on his hip and opines on the plight of hardworking Americans. He says Obama is robbing this country blind and that Trump will give the working man another shot at prosperity. He owes me one hundred more dollars. I did 58 minutes, and I am cold with stale sweat, and he is talking about Benghazi and Jill Stein and the free market.
I'm in Dickinson, North Dakota, 12:32 AM on a Thursday, and she is beautiful, but I tell her I can't and show her my wedding ring. I thank her for the joint and get out of her car.
I'm in Sydney, Nebraska, 7:27 PM on a Saturday, and no one is here. Gary, the Exalted Ruler of this Elk's Lodge, is trying to be reassuring. The Cornhuskers are playing Kansas. People will come after the game. I say I have no where else to go, and he laughs. I'm not kidding.
We watch the game with his family and other members of the Lodge. I am funny and the Leinenkugel is so cold it stings my teeth. When she laughs, Gary's wife squeezes his thigh.
At halftime, Gary says to follow him.
The lodge has a thin galley kitchen with racks of hanging pots. Gary lights a gas burner and puts a cast iron pan on the flame. He leans against the counter and lights a cigarette. He says that when he was a young man, he played guitar in a band that opened for Cheap Trick at the Nebraska State Fair. Says he met Duane Allman once in Kansas City. I ask if he still played, and he says he does every night.
The steaks are thicker than my palm, and when they hit the pan, they hiss. Gary tells me that the key is to get the pan as hot as you can. Then he pulls out his wallet and gives me $300 bills, says not to worry about the show, that it's his fault for not checking the schedule, and he apologizes I had to drive so far for nothing. I don't know what to say besides thank you.
In the future, I want to believe. I'm in America, and I ride shotgun in a rented Chrysler Sebring convertible, paid for by the theater. My wife drives me to the airport, and I sleep on the flight. The hotel provided is four stars. It's all in my rider.
Ticket sales are good because of all the podcasts, and the special. If we sell out all 2,500 seats, I'll get a bonus that will pay for our tickets to Milan—second honeymoon to celebrate Emily's residency. Marrying her was the best decision I ever made.
My agent tells me the new novel is moving well, and she wants to talk about what's next. She gives me a new drum set after the positive review in the New York Times. I give my old kit to my son, and I come home to him bashing along to Live at Leeds. He is better than me. I hope he is better than me.
