Happy Port Tuesday.

In honor of Port Tuesday I am posting this banner that were used as event reminders via social media outlets. For the uninitiated, Port Tueday is a celebration that originated as the brain child of the storied A-Team (also referred to as "the seven madmen") at Jon's Pipe Shop in Champaign, Illinois. This local tradition was meant as homage to the spirit of generousity and the culture of sharing that had been long cultivated in the shop. However, it is also well-know amonst the regulars that the tradition also began as a joke. The very first Port Tuesday was held to spite shop employee, Michael LaDue, by enjoying his favorite adult beverage and having a good time while he was away and unable to partake.

Beginning in 2004, every Tuesday by 5pm a bottle of port would be shared amongst the Jon's Pipe Shop patrons and from that gesture a grand celebration would develop. In the years that followed, the Port Tuesday celebration would grow to include: food, events sponsored by tobacco companies, events held at local bars, etc. The original members of the A-Team may only rarely make appearances at Port Tuesday, but the recognition of the day and ensuing tribute goes on regardless. This day is the lasting legacy of Jon's A-Team and the culture specific to that shop. No matter where we go, every Tuesday is Port Tuesday. Starting in 2004, Tuesdays in Champaign have made Saturday look like just another day of the week.

Salute to all who can't be here with us to celebrate today. For some reason today I was thinking about the time when Family (aka Panda, aka Fruit, aka The Big Homie) so graciously passed me my first Lusitania (or "loosies" as we so affectionately call them). I will never forget that day he "traded" me for a La Aroura 100 Anos (possibly my hands down favorite cigar) in order to give me the opportunity to smoke what would become one of the best sticks I have ever experienced. It was only a trade on face value though. He had received a package containing an exquisite selection of cigars and let me choose the one I wanted. In return, I gave him what I had.

I remember taking my time with it and accompanying the flavor of the aged tobacco with a strong cup of coffee. I smoked it like it would be my last. It strattles two worlds as it is both a delightfully complex cuban and truely full-bodied. Family is a true friend not just for that but for many years of trust, compassion, and loyalty. On this Port Tuesday I raise my glass to you homie, to the seven madmen, and to our institution that seems to have taken on a life of it's own, ching-ching.

DSK Prefers Golden Showers Over Golden Parachutes

Dominique is another monster worth noting. He lothes poverty, loves money, and loves taking scattered ass more. Puffed up on power and influence, he allegedly ambushed and raped an unsuspecting housekeeper at a posh NY hotel. Please note the use of the word, "ambushed" in the previous sentence. What would make a man with so much influence, status, and money strip down bucked-naked (bucked naked?!?), surprise the housekeeper, and assault her with his pale-wrinkled penis (allegedly)? Well surprise, surprise. I just told you, he was "puffed up on power and influence” (i.e: full of ego and that new flavor of kool-aid we all know and love, homoeconomicus). He is a motherfucking monster.
Key point of interest here: it was in. his. own. room. No one decides to rape a housekeeper in a hotel on a whim (particularly in the room that you bought and paid for). Talk about being charged for incidentals. So, did he raid the minibar and decide that having spent so much money in his room he should get some complimentary pussy? Where do they do that at (no, really. so I can mapquest it)? Only an individual drunk on power or the sweet nectar of insanity would be capable to conjure up such a scenario, or maybe she’s lying. Or, maybe he’s done this before and believed that once he told her exactly who he was and what he could do (or pay) that she would clam up.
Me and one of my monster friends upon hearing of the situation instantly knew how that conversation went. It sounded something like this:
DSK: Bitch, do you know who I am?

DSK: Bitch, I bring entire nations to their knees! What makes your knees so special?

DSK: With the stroke of my pen I make or break economies for cities, regions, nations, entire CONTINENTS! So how could my stroke not be good enough for you?

Notice how in our scenario, she didn’t say anything. That’s the point. He never heard her say anything (such as, “no”, “stop”, “fuck you, I’m going to the police” (allegedly). Again, is it surprising that married men are the most monstrous of all? Ha. Don't answer that.

Green and White is the Color Of My Parachute

I guess I’m having what some would call a mid-life crisis. Yes, this summer I’ll be forty. No, I’m not looking to buy a sports car, or fuck a platinum blonde who’s half my age. Not that there’s anything wrong with those two things. But I’m having a mid-life crisis because at 39 and ¾ years, I’ve discovered that the philosophy that I’ve been living by is just, well, flat fuck wrong.

Let me tell you what I mean.

I grew up poor. Not ‘working class’. Not ‘at risk’. Fucking poor. Now that’s not to say I grew up in poverty. I had a big-wheel when I was little. And a bike when I was older. My clothes were never threadbare, nor dated. And when I was nine, my mother nagged the shit out of my father until he went in with her on a house. But being poor isn’t only about deprivation. For me, being poor wasn’t just a condition, it was a state of being. It was a continuous experience that I could never be free from. Being poor was going to your best friend’s house after school and keeping an eye out for cockroaches so that you didn’t bring any home with you in your backpack. Being poor meant knowing what store the poor people frequented when they were feeling particularly poor, and knowing by your mother’s pace through that store whether it was worth it to try to ask for an extra candy bar, or pack of gum. Poverty is a living, breathing thing. Like a virus, it has its own scent on a body, and whenever I smell it today on a person I avoid them like they have the fucking plague. The most ironic thing about being poor for me was that it didn’t limit my socio-economic aspirations (as theorized by so many social scientists) as much as it tamped down my material desires. For me, being poor was about learning not to want those $115.00 Air Jordan hi-tops, no matter how badly my father wanted to buy them for me to show everyone on the block that we weren’t poor. Those red and black masterpieces would have looked as out of place on my feet as bowling shoes on a fucking groom. And since I knew that I couldn’t sustain the discourse of the Air Jordan-ness throughout my whole wardrobe, I simply learned to un-want them. I know what you’re thinking; there’s nothing revolutionary in not wanting something you can’t have, or what’s more, feel you don’t deserve. But you have to understand, I made an art form out of the kinds of rationalizations necessary to remain spiritually intact through the process of rejecting nearly everything that one desires. Music lessons? Those were for my sister; I got the gift of a full set of World Book Encyclopedias instead. Cool clothes in high school? “Polo is WAY overpriced bro’, and that Bennetton…who wants that shit!”  Study abroad in Europe? “Why would I pay a bunch of fucking money to go see MORE fucking white people… you talk about a RIP-OFF!” Again and again and again, I found a way to make the repudiation of the trappings of wealth and privilege cool. Like I said, nothing new there. Poor kids have been doing that shit for ages, and some of them have even made a pretty good living telling jokes about their experiences. But here comes the turn: here and now, at age 39 and 3/4 , I fucking love money. FUCKING LOVE IT! When I go to sleep I think about money. When I wake up, I think about moving the shit around, about how I can get more money, or make my money go further. Hell, I’d even consider blowing a hundred dollar bill if the sonofabitch came in tens and twenties. And if I stop and think about it, I’ve always been this way. Always wanted those Air Jordans. I just was never able to face how much I hated poverty because I knew somehow that it would mean acknowledging how much I hated myself, my mother and father, my impoverished grandparents on both sides, my poor ass aunts and uncles, those broke motherfucking neighbors who lived up the street and would come to our house once a month for dinner. And I especially hated the way all of us would come together on this holiday or that holiday to cheerfully celebrate our poverty through "good food, fellowship, and song". FUCK THAT BULLSHIT! Today for the first time I understood that the cure for poverty isn’t the material aestheticism that I’ve been strictly practicing since the third grade; not logotherapy it’s simply NOT BEING FUCKING POOR!

And herein lies the underpinnings of the crisis. Because if I could just have acknowledged that fact when I was younger, faced up to the reality of the sum total of what I wanted even back in high school, I could have set myself on a different path and not ended up where I am today, someone with the spirit of Alex P. Keaton trapped within the life of Kwai Chang Caine. I want a new job. I want a new life. one with a whole lot of fucking money in it. So I’m here reading the latest version of ‘What Color is Your Parachute’ hoping that it tells me how to get more of that green and white, or travel back in time, or something….

...Worth a thousand words

Part white-supremacist, part misogynist, part narcissist…100% Gotdammed Monster. By now we all know that Arnold cheated on his wife. We know that Arnold had a kid with his mistress and that he employed her in his household for over a decade. We also know that this guy has always been out of control. Of course there's also a lot that we don't know, as the devil tends to be in the details (or so I've heard). It's hard to wrap your mind around the implications of these actions or his mindstate, which allowed him to orchestrate these events over the last decade (and change). The average person (by this I mean non-monster) could not begin to conceptualize the coldness and emotional vacancy that the man has to possess in order to sleep at night. Arnold is not to be idolized. He is not to be celebrated. Here at Monsters' Inq we don't have any intintions of aligning ourselves with him or making him the posterboy for our continued campaign into grown monsterhood. However, that does not mean that there isn't a lot to be learned from the spectacle that this man has made of his life. This guy makes my monster look like elmo. There's a lot I can do with that last sentence in reference to his past but I'm going excercise some restraint and leave it right there. Surely we'll pick this up in a more well thought out fashion in the near future.

The Weeknd - What You Need (Official Music Video)

Wicked Girls & Glass Table Games

There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think about posting a couple of paragraphs up here about something that I read or a discussion that I had. However, that rarely happens, but I am not the only one to blame. That is neither here nor there, it's family business.

Evidently, today is special. Today, I wish to play a little game of show & tell. I shared a musical interest with someone special this morning and during the course of our conversation about it, I realized how selfish the two of us were being by keeping this our little secret. So, with no further ado I present to you the music on my mind: The Weekend's 'House of Balloons'.

This groups' 9 track mixtape just simply appeared on music blogs all over the place a little over a month ago. Much of their notoriety and legitimacy is due to their project being linked to a certain mainstream emo-rap hipster that shares a hometown and penchant for moody soundscapes with them. A quick listen to any track off of "House of Balloons" should quickly remind the listener of the tone to songs like "Bria's Interlude", "Cece's Interlude", and/or "Paris Morton Music". But that isn't to say that the HOB mixtape is overly emotional or sensitive about anything. It doesn't make a grown man want to go shave his legs and slip into a pair of skinny jeans. It also doesn't inspire whining about social privilege to some other overly sensitive bastard who is too afraid of hurting your feelings to tell you, "do yourself a favor, go kill yourself." No, this is Monster music.

That is the very reason that I am posting about this music here. We're quite the musical bunch, though you wouldn't know it by reading our past blog entries. The music offered here declares itself deviant and embraces alienation in a way that I found particularly refreshing. In a market-driven medium that leaves little choice for artists other than to pride themselves on being in the "in" crowd, this group walks a fine line without ever crossing over it. The main vocalist sounds at times like the Dream, or Trey Songs, or maybe Frank Ocean;but he doesn't talk or behave has they would. Over sparse, electro pop and r&b melodies, The Weekend's songs embrace scandalous sex acts, and drug culture. Their songs sound of the deliberate act of throwing caution to the wind, without rage, angst, or regret.

This is the soundtrack to my scotch-soaked Port Tuesday after party. When played continuously it creates a soundscape to lusting after someone you shouldn't, and yet you remain undeterred. This is Monster music to creep to (*do you see what I did right there? nice). So start with track #1 "High for this" and let it ride. I'm not going to post links or anything for it. Simply google "House of Ballons" + mediafire and a link will magically appear for you to download the album & enjoy just in time for the Monster's ball.