Within the pages of Lisa Crystal Carver’s incomparably passionate and fantastic Rollerderby lie many hilarious and shocking secrets, but the greatest one of all is the secret to life itself.

Carver says, and I am paraphrasing here from memory, that the whole point inf life is to be excited. Like, the kind of excited where you just can’t shut up about something, where it filters into your dreams to the point where you think you’re dreaming but you’re actually just lying awake thinking about whatever it is that gets you excited.

People keep asking me “so, what’s your blog about?” Until now, I’ve said something like “well, it’s politics, and sometimes it’s rock music, or travel stories, or stuff from my friend the prison history teacher, you know, just whatever.” But now I’ve got some sort of sloppy focus. This blog is about things that are (or were) Carver’s type of exciting.

The giant octopus at the National Zoo had my synapses humming at high symphony this weekend. The zoo is right down the street, so twice this weekend I rolled out of my apartment with a championship hangover to watch this fantastic sensual beast do his thing. This 25-ish pound invertebrate spends about 23 hours a day all balled up in the corner of his tank like this here:

That’s me in the reflection…

However, the zoo conducts public feedings daily at 11 AM and 3 PM and I just knew that ball of suckers was going to erupt off the tank wall into an explosive psychedelic ballet. It was all I could talk about Saturday night and the first thing on my mind Sunday morning. And man, that thing did not disappoint…

You might be able to see the feedings on the webcam here, but I have also made my own film of this undulating muscular mollusk that you can see here.

You should know that unless you are looking at the webcam during or shortly after feeding time, it is stunningly boring. My film, on the other hand, features a soundtrack by Ween, and totally rocks.

When the volunteer dropped a crab into the water, the beast slithered off of the wall and tranformed itself into a living parachute, enveloping the crustacean and pinning it to the wall of the tank. The octopus’s head grew all sorts of spiky ridges and his entire body changed colors to reflect his gustatory excitement. Underneath this living parachute, hundreds of suction cups busily rotated the crab’s body as the beast’s powerful beak nibbled meat out of every tiny crevice in that crab’s crispy hide. Here’s a closeup:

This is a better photo of the octupus’s underside in that it is of a more professional quality, but a worse photo because I did not take it myself. It’s by Jesse Cohen…

You absolutely cannot watch this creature move and maintain any adult sense of detachment or cynicism. It was all I could do not to knock all the little kids at the tank aside like a bunch of whimpering bowling pins and just flatten my nose against the tank wall myself.

This creature moves with involuntary dignified grace, like eight cats’ tails attached to an extremely intelligent head. According to zoo staff, octopi are extremely curious, playful, and intelligent. Octopi are the intellectual colossi of the order mollusca, in that they can actually learn from another creature’s experience. One zoo volunteer told me that an octopus with no experience opening a jar can actually watch another octopus open a jar, and then do it himself.

Here is a portrait of the serene creature, heading up to his corner of the tank to munch on that crab…

Lisa Carver is right. Just writing about the experience has got me all charged up, and I am constantly checking another window with the Zoo’s webcam for any activity. Even though it’s impossible to sustain excited wonderment at a stretch, the pursuit of those jaw-dropping moments is what makes life worth living. I’m sitting here in my office in the middle of cold, grey D.C. and an impending snowstorm feeling warm and alive. I’m thrilled to know that raw beauty in action is right down the street…not just because the zoo is next door, but because life is thrilling once you start paying attention.

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In case you don’t read anything online but And I Am Not Lying, For Real…

Hunter S. Thompson may have planned his suicide, according to a family spokesperson. He will be “buried” by having his remains blasted from a cannon and strewn across the sky in a tremendous fireball in accordance with his last wishes.

What an incredible final stunt…

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The phrase “dysfunctional love-hate” accurately describes both my relationship with Vice Magazine and the magazine itself. I’ve got to hand it to them, though–they’re freaking hilarious, and they rip into every belief with equal rancor.

One thing’s guaranteed, though: regardless of party affiliation, this month’s Do’s and Don’ts column is as pants-wettingly hilarious as it is unsafe for work. Make sure you’re a) at home or b) blessed with a cool boss, and c)not reading with stuff in your mouth. It’s totally gonna end up on your keyboard.

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I am totally lifting this post from Metafilter, just to help get the awareness out.

It may be possible to pick up a virus via blogspot blogs. You’re all safe from me, but have a read of these links: 1, 2, 3, and discussion here.

Ten-second Cliffs Notes: stay away from that “Next Blog” button on the upper right…

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From the Denver Post:

Hunter S. Thompson died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Woody Creek on Sunday night. He was 67.

this photo comes from the Denver Post as well…

I think about Hunter S. Thompson every day. I don’t know him personally, but my concept of him speaks to me out loud. Whenever I’m tired and I want to sleepwalk through my own life, Hunter S. Thompson’ blows some smoke in my ear and growls “get moving, you lazy little bastard.”

Thompson was a hissing, spitting cobra to the life’s mongoose of mediocrity–sometimes the mongoose attacked, but he always bit back like a motherfucker. His sad and sudden death leaves a terrifying vacuum in the annals of American discourse. At a time when relentless charismatic status quo-style mediocrity has the hearts and minds of the American public thumping in its greedy fists, we need a loud, profane voice to stab it to death…or at least ventilate some steam out of its suit.

Although I am not sure if he ever said it publicly, the blogging phenomenon must have tickled him to no end. Blogs are nothing more than pure Gonzo journalism at its finest: raw, ripped straight from the fingers of the writer and seared across public consciousness in a matter of seconds. The actual reality of a slavering pack of hungry journalistic pirahna-dogs, set to tear down any and all half-truths and phonies deeply rooted in any establishment anywhere…he must have seen some sort of beauty in that.

I learned to appreciate whiskey long before I could drink it, thanks to Thompson. Through Thompson’s tremendous and prolific career I took my first baby steps towards throwing myself into any and all experiences I could find, and I learned to trust my guts with my writing through Thompson’s ballsy prose. He might have had substance abuse problems and an ego bigger than a Colorado snowfall, but Doctor Gonzo had brass cojones the size of watermelons channeling straight through his heart and onto the page. To read any of his pages is to know the power of balls and soul working in tandem and at maximum efficiency.

Reading between Thompson’s brilliant lines paints a different portrait, however. You’ll see real paranoia, terror, and a fragile, nervous personality frayed by life lived too hard and too long on the fringes of sanity. Hunter S. Thompson is an exciting anti-hero in print, but the man behind the legend must have felt crushingly lonely, sad, and alienated from everyone on earth.

I’m going to part here with a bit of wisdom from Thompson’s pages, but not from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas…let the “mainstream” media quote that to death all week. This passage from a letter to a friend in 1958, crystallizes what it is about Thompson that resonates most deeply within me:

“…a man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choices made for him by circumstance.

So if you now number yourself among the disenchanted, then you have no choice but to accept things as they are, or to seriously seek something else. But beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and the see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life.

But you say, ‘I don’t know where to look; I don’t know what to look for.’ And there’s the crux. Is it worth giving up what I have to look for something better? I don’t know–is it? Who can make that decision but you? But even by DECIDING TO LOOK, you go a long way toward making the choice…

There is more to it than that– no one HAS to do something he doesn’t want to do for the rest of his life. But then again, if that’s what you end up doing, by all means convince youself that you HAD to do it. You’ll have lots of company.”

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I always saw Marcus Gilmore in the boys’ room in middle school, and almost never anywhere else. He was always dreamily gazing out the bathroom window, one foot resting on a pipe as he allowed the breeze to gently ruffle his mullet. We might have had gym class together, but barely knew one another. Sometimes I wonder what he got up to since high school.

I found out, and it wasn’t through Classmates.com, either.

Terminators are real, real cool in the movies. In real life, maybe not.

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What Clarence tells me is presented as an entertaining form of the gospel truth. What is not specifically reality as we know it is nevertheless “the realness,” and carries serious weight in my book.

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We had just gotten a new couch from the thrift store, a real one that you could sit on like a grownup instead of lying on the mattress on the floor in front of the television set. It was a gorgeous spring day in Richmond’s early March, sort of like Nature’s teaser trailer for the full-on blockbuster spring due in about a month’s time. The sun was shining and our mattress-couch was in the alley for good. Everything felt great and it was time to party—we put the word out and threw a party that very night.

Only the underemployed can put on a party like that one. We had liquor and mixers in the kitchen, beer on the porch of the house next door and over thousand dollars worth of vintage vinyl sitting in stacks on the floor. About sixteen million people trod a shambling parade through the living room, tracking a sticky mix of spilled liquor and paint chips and splinters from our rotting front porch across our forest-green Astroturf carpet. People were abusing the inflatable furniture like mad, having ninja fights with the inflatable couch and the chair as weapons.

This one enterprising young bozo just climbed in and out of the front window all night instead of using the door. While I sort of respected his initiative, I can’t say I was completely in support of the practice, either. I certainly wasn’t the first person on the scene with a band-aid when he cut his hand on the rusty nail sticking out of the windowsill. Eric and I had seen it there for months and never cut ourselves when we broke in with credit cards after locking ourselves out.

We had to go see to a situation in the street after more than one guest complained that some dude was repeatedly body-slamming a pit bull in the road. I watched from the front porch as a typical Richmond dude (tattoos, wallet chain, cargo pants) sat on the curb working his way through a box of beers. All of a sudden a pit bull sped out of the darkness like a hair-covered bowling ball and head-butted the box, sending beers flying all over the street. The dog grabbing an errant beer between his teeth, clenching so hard his head-muscles bulged like golf balls as he shook the beer like a freshly caught rabbit. Naturally, the shaking caused huge jets of beery foam to spray all over bystanders and straight down the beast’s throat.

Before I could pick my jaw up off the porch, the beer’s owner (and presumably the dog’s as well) scrambled up out from under a car, shouting, “Motherfucker I TOLD you to leave my beer alone!” and picked the thing up over his head with BOTH hands and threw it across the street…just as the partygoers reported.

It was, without a doubt, one of the stupidest scary scenes I have ever witnessed. I still can’t tell if it is more stupid for a human to attack a sober pit bull with his bare hands or a drunken one. You be the judge.

We threatened to call the cops on our own party until that clown left, dogless. Nobody knows where the dog went.

Somebody put the Monks on the turntable real real loud, and you could hear manic shouts, banjo strumming out the windows and circus keyboards down the street. From out in the darkness, I could hear someone go “aw, NAW, you white people cannot put that shit on for a motherfuckin’ party, man…” It was 3 a.m. and the last of the partygoers were leaving.

A black man in his fifties came in, reeking of liquor, urine and mud. He wore a filthy fringe jacket, baggy jeans and had dreadlocks streaked with mud and grey hair. We couldn’t very well say “uh, everyone gets to be here but that dude with the dog and you,” but he bore watching. He went STRAIGHT for the records and proceeded to drop the best mix of funk and soul I have ever heard, even though half the collection was mine. When he saw the Rick James record, he lost his mind, thumping his cane and howling.

He played the whole album twice, dancing ecstatically, oblivious to everyone else leaving around him. By four a.m. it was just me, Eric, and Willie in the living room, dancing to Rick James’s Ghetto Life. We must have heard that song ten times that night.

It was 3 am when Willie came into out lives to flex music control, and six months before we were rid of him. During that period I heard Ghetto Life about fifty times a week…no exaggeration. He may have been incorrigible, demanding, and insane, but Willie changed something in Eric and me forever. It was at least a year before I could listen to Rick James without my blood boiling, but now whenever I hear him, I think of that old guy dancing on my porch or shouting “white honky faggot,” (Willie’s little pet name for me) through the window, and I smile.

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The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art has this really cool exhibit (online only) called NOW THEN. It features the work of a bunch of contemporary comics artists now, juxtaposed against drawings the made at the age of 12. Very cool. This link, like so many of my others, via Metafilter.

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I found this poster and accompanying graffiti in the Columbia Heights Metro Station Sunday night, and posted it here bright and early Tuesday morning.

I’ve been trying to do a bit of research online to support my fundamental belief that the concept of “protecting marriage and families” from homosexuality is completely ludicrous–but I’m drowning in so much radical right hate speech and pink flag waving that I’m just going to have to flag it.

Suffice it to say that that billboard in the Metro was hilarious. Not as hilarious as the poster for Cats that I saw in the New York City Subway, where some bored geniuses had sculpted 3-d genitalia for all the cats on the poster out of chewing gum. But you don’t always have your camera, do you.

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