After my shift at Black Sheets, where I swiped a pair of gloves, I arrived at Harry’s house right on time. We shook hands, he invited me in, and I was discretely looking the situation over, but everything appeared on the level.
He seemed uncomfortable, and I told him not to be.
On the living room carpet, he had already spread out some newspapers. “I figured I’d be on the floor, on all fours,” he said, “and you can sit on this chair.”
I nodded, and put on the gloves while he went into the bathroom. He came back with a Bic disposable razor, a can of shaving cream, and a towel.
“Ready when you are,” I said.
He took off his shoes and socks, then his pants and underwear, and assumed the position, naked from the waist down. His ass gaped open at me, but what really startled me was the hair — man, that man’s butt was almost as hairy as my face, and I have a short beard. His backside was hairy like Esau. Hairy like an Angora sweater. Hairy everywhere. With a comb, I could’ve parted it.
As promised, he’d obviously showered; everything was clean. So I sat behind his behind, lathered him up, and gently sheared him.
This being San Francisco, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d gotten off on it, but apparently it wasn’t a turn-on. And wow, he needed the service I was providing. It isn’t often you know you’re truly making someone’s life better. Harry probably wakes up every day with yesterday’s shit stuck to the hair in his crack, but tomorrow he won’t.
At one point, everything I was looking at sorta tightened up for a few seconds, contracted just a bit. I didn’t ask, but I think the guy was holding back a fart, and I appreciated the effort.
Didn’t want to shave all of both cheeks, because I figured that would leave his entire bottom itchy and scratchy for a few weeks whenever he sat down. Instead I left a bald circle extending several inches around his sphincter; beyond this, the almost ape-like hairiness remained.
I gently toweled him dry, and said, “I’ll let you tell me whether it’s a close enough shave.”
Still on his hands and knees, he tentatively fingered the inches around his anus, shook his head yes, and quietly stood up and got dressed. “Smooth as a baby’s butt” is the cliché I was waiting to hear.
Thought of asking if he had some aftershave to slap on, but he still seemed ill at ease, so I didn’t make any jokes, only discarded the gloves and washed my hands in the bathroom.
At the front door, Harry thanked me, gave me three tens and said to keep the change. Thirty bucks for about 15 minutes work made me a happy man, so I decided to make him a happy customer. “I hope you’re not embarrassed,” I said. “I’ve done this before, you know.”
“You have?” His face brightened.
Of course I haven’t. “Of course I have,” I said. “It’s not that unusual.” That’s what every weirdo wants to hear, I suppose — that he’s not so weird after all.
“I just,” he stammered. “I really appreciate this.”
“Happy to be a help,” I said. “Call me if the stubble starts to itch.”
This is an entry retyped from an on-paper zine I wrote many years ago, called Pathetic Life. The opinions stated were my opinions then, but might not be my opinions now. Also, I said and did some disgusting things, so parental guidance is advised.
Figured I’d start this page with the good news, before delving into all the bad. The Star Trek cartoon show (original cast, not Lower Decks) hired quality writers and turned out quite good. There’s no reason an animated Firefly couldn’t kick Reavers’ ass.
Excerpt: Nathan Fillion has announced that an animated continuation of the 2002 sci-fi Western series Firefly is now in development.
Fillion announced the news on Sunday, March 15, at Awesome Con in Washington, D.C., and Firefly costars Gina Torres, Alan Tudyk, Morena Baccarin, Jewel Staite, Sean Maher, and Summer Glau reunited to discuss the one-season wonder, as Deadline reported.
Development on the animated project is “advanced,” with one script already completed. Fillion, Maher, Glau, Torres, Staite, Tudyk, and costar Adam Baldwin are all expected to voice their Firefly characters, per Deadline.
Excerpt: Brandon Sigaran Cruz was only 9 when his parents brought him and his brother to the United States, far away from the gangs recruiting young boys in the elementary schools of El Salvador.
The next time he set foot in his native country was more than a decade later, on March 15 of last year, when the Trump administration deported the 21-year-old alongside more than 260 migrants to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, an infamous megaprison known for human rights abuses that is completely cut off from the outside world.
Sigaran has no known criminal record in El Salvador. But for an entire year, he has remained imprisoned with no access to a lawyer, no contact with his family and no prospect of a trial before a judge, according to human rights lawyer Kelvi Zambrano. He was deported under an agreement with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele that became one of President Donald Trump’s most aggressive and attention-drawing immigration enforcement initiatives in his early months in office.
Little is known about the exact whereabouts of the deported Salvadorans who are imprisoned. Relatives and lawyers of some of the men told The Washington Post that they have had no contact with their detained loved ones and have been unable to confirm where they are being held.
The majority of the migrants sent to CECOT were Venezuelans who the Trump administration said were members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuela-based gang — often without presenting evidence or offering a chance to contest the claim. After being held for four months, the Venezuelans were released to their home country as part of a prisoner swap.
The U.S. also deported 23 Salvadorans that same day a year ago, including Kilmar Abrego García, an undocumented immigrant living in Maryland whose removal the Trump administration admitted was a mistake because an immigration judge had barred his return to El Salvador over concerns he would be persecuted. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ordered the Trump administration to bring Abrego back to the U.S., where he now faces human smuggling charges. He has pleaded not guilty.
Excerpt: The Trump administration is considering a new strategy for throttling the country’s offshore wind industry, after federal judges blocked its five previous attempts to stop wind farms under construction off the East Coast.
Senior administration officials are drafting settlement agreements that would pay nearly $1 billion to TotalEnergies, the French energy company behind two wind farms off New York State and North Carolina, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times, including copies of the agreements.
Under the terms of the proposed settlements, the Interior Department would cancel the leases in federal waters for the two projects, known as Attentive Energy and Carolina Long Bay, the documents show. The Justice Department would then pay more than $928 million to TotalEnergies, reimbursing the company for its winning bids in lease sales during the Biden administration.
In exchange, TotalEnergies would abandon its plans to begin building the wind farms. It would also commit to investing in natural gas infrastructure in Texas, as the Trump administration prioritizes the production of fossil fuels over renewables like wind and solar power.
Excerpt: When Charles Thomson and William Barton designed the Great Seal of the United States more than 200 years ago, they were unambiguous about its meaning. A bald eagle would clutch arrows in one set of talons, symbolizing war, and an olive branch in the other, symbolizing peace. In 1945, President Harry Truman officially declared that the bird’s head should always face toward the olive branch—denoting America’s preference for peace.
Now, the administration of the self-proclaimed “president of peace”—who claims to have ended eight wars, even as he starts new ones—will mint dimes without the olive branch at all. It’s part of the US Mint’s semiquincentennial line, a one-year-only redesign of US coinage commemorating America’s 250th birthday.
The new designs were unveiled in December, but the absence of the olive branch on the back of the dime came under renewed scrutiny this past week after it was highlighted by Fortune. News editor Catherina Gioino wrote that the “omission is hard to read as accidental,” calling it a “cultural signal” of our war-torn times.
Excerpt: Organizers of the upcoming “No Kings” rally in Helena say that a new state rule banning permits for weekend rallies on the Capitol grounds violates their First Amendment rights. State officials countered that the new rule, quietly instituted just last month, was intended to save money.
The update to permitting guidelines on the Montana.gov site, which has not been previously reported, states that public events requiring a permit “may only occur on weekdays and between the hours of 7 a.m. and 6 p.m., excluding holidays.”
Excerpt: Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, threatened on Saturday to revoke broadcasters’ licenses over their coverage of the war with Iran, his latest move in a campaign to stomp out what he sees as liberal bias in broadcasts.
As the war entered its third week, Mr. Carr accused broadcasters of “running hoaxes and news distortions” in a social media post and warned them to “correct course before their license renewals come up.”
“Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not,” he said.
Excerpt: The woman, Leqaa Kordia, 33, was freed on Monday, about a month after she said she had been chained to a hospital bed following a seizure inside the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, where she described filthy and inhumane conditions. She has not been charged with a crime.
On Friday, she appeared before an immigration judge, who ordered her released on $100,000 bond. It was the third time that the judge had ordered her release. But government lawyers had appealed the judge’s earlier decisions, forcing her to remain in detention.
On Monday, she was released after the government did not make another appeal.
Excerpt: The gap in information and a loss of figures from an office that has tracked immigration data back to the 1800s have left researchers, advocates, lawyers and journalists without important statistics to hold the Republican administration to account.
“They aren’t publishing the data,” said Mike Howell, who heads the conservative Oversight Project, an advocacy group pushing for more deportations. Instead, Howell said, the Department of Homeland Security has put out numbers in news releases “that purport to be statistics with no statistical backup and the numbers have jumped all over the place.”
Excerpt: Senate Republicans released an online ad this week in which a real-looking but fake version of a Democratic candidate, fabricated with artificial intelligence, appears to speak directly into the camera for more than a minute.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee’s deepfake of James Talarico, the Democratic nominee in the US Senate race in Texas, is only the latest in a series of AI-generated creations from the national GOP campaign organization in the past year. But it’s the first featuring a phony version of a candidate talking in a lifelike manner for so long – an example of how far AI technology has come in a short time and an indicator of the direction attack ads may be heading.
“The face and voice are very good. There is a slight misalignment between audio and video, but otherwise this is hyper-realistic and I don’t think that most people would immediately know it is fake,” Hany Farid, a University of California, Berkeley professor specializing in digital forensics, said in an email.
Excerpt: A Democratic candidate for a key House race in Maine oversaw a political action committee that donated thousands of dollars to Republican candidates across the country, Federal Election Commission records show.
Jordan Wood, who is running for the Democratic nomination in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, is the former executive director of democracyFirst PAC, a group that — despite its left-of-center orientation — donated to at least one Republican PAC, in addition to giving thousands of dollars to at least six GOP campaigns for House and Senate seats during the 2024 election cycle, according to the records.
In total, the group donated $75,000 to various House and Senate races, including Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah; Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb.; and Rep. David Valadao, R-Calif., with contributions ranging from $1,000 to $3,000.
Excerpt: Kat Abughazaleh started off a recent debate in her Illinois Democratic primary with a correction for the moderator: She sees herself as a researcher and journalist, not an “influencer.”
“My specialty was actually fighting the far right,” she said of her previous work. “Everyone that runs our country now – Stephen Miller, Elon Musk, Tom Homan – they are the people I used to report on and win against, and they know that.”
While she rejects the influencer label, there’s a reason it’s stuck. A clip of the moment went viral on her YouTube and TikTok accounts, receiving far more views than the debate itself did on YouTube.
That ability to generate attention online has allowed Abughazaleh to upend the traditional political playbook in her bid to win a House seat in the state’s 9th Congressional District. The question now is whether her unorthodox campaign can break through in a crowded field packed with more established Democrats with deeper ties to the community.
The winner of the March 17 primary will be heavily favored to win the seat held by Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who is retiring at the end of her current term.
Excerpt: If recent events have not compelled you to cancel your Washington Post subscription, then you might have been in for sticker shock at the dawn of your latest billing cycle. Many readers have been notified via email that their subscription rates are set to increase. Nestled at the bottom of these emails, you’ll find an asterisk and the following: “This price was set by an algorithm using your personal data.”
Excerpt: The memo says that Stars and Stripes will continue to “operate with editorial independence.” However, it also says that the newspaper must immediately begin implementing the Defense Department’s new interim policies and stop publishing several types of content.
Excerpt: NewsGuard made an enemy of the Trump-friendly television network Newsmax, giving its website a 20 on a scale where 100 is the best score. NewsGuard says “this website is unreliable because it severely violates basic journalism standards.” Newsmax has since repeatedly urged Republican lawmakers or regulators to do what they can to silence NewsGuard, the company said in its lawsuit.
Excerpt: In the report, the authors propose creating a diagnostic category specifically for Covid vaccine injuries, new diagnostic guidelines and a network of research centers to study long-term harms from Covid vaccines and the illness itself.
Its opening paragraph cites two polls, one of them the “Killer Jab?” an online and telephone survey of 1,110 American adults conducted in 2023 by Rasmussen Reports, a conservative-leaning polling firm, which asked “Do you know someone personally who died from side effects of the COVID-19 vaccine?”
Thousands of people believe that they were harmed by Covid vaccines, citing a wide variety of neurological, cardiovascular and immune symptoms they say were caused by the shots. But many say that their complaints have been dismissed by federal agencies as psychosomatic and that they have been unfairly branded as being anti-vaccine.
Me again: People claiming to know someone who’s died from the COVID vaccine is, at best, word of mouth, and more likely paranoia or bullshit, but it sure ain’t science. And it’s flabbergasting and embarrassing that the New York Frickin’ Times seems to treat these wingnutty claims as serious.
This is week-old news, and the article adds nothing much, but the headline is a remarkable work of propaganda:
Nurul Amin Shah Alam was a blind man, who was beaten by local cops because he became lost and couldn’t answer their questions or follow their instructions because he didn’t speak English. After the beating, cops jailed him for a year without a trial, then gifted him to America’s immigration gestapo, which took him to a closed doughnut shop and left him outside there, without a heavy jacket in freezing winter weather, and soon he was dead.
Describing that as “agents left him at a cafe” should earn the Times some kind of Reverse Pulitzer.
As with the above, this link has no news value, and is presented only for mockery and critique. It’s the same media bullshit seen everywhere — the pretense that Trump is a serious politician with serious thoughts and a serious agenda. He’s not. He’s just a madman full of shit, and this pretense that he’s an ordinary leader making ordinary decisions and mistakes only makes things worse.
Excerpt: A federal judge on Monday blocked key parts of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s effort to reshape U.S. vaccine policy, including a move to reduce the number of shots routinely recommended for children, and revamp a federal advisory committee on inoculations.
U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy in Boston sided with the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical groups, which said health regulators had acted unlawfully to carry out Kennedy’s agenda of upending immunization policies and warned the changes will reduce vaccination rates and harm public health.
Murphy’s ruling forced the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to postpone a meeting set to begin on Wednesday, after he concluded it was not lawfully constituted and blocked Kennedy’s 13 appointees to it.
Excerpt: Cuba’s electrical grid suffered a total collapse across the entire island on Monday, the country’s power operator said, marking the latest nationwide blackout in recent years, and the first since the US effectively shut off the flow of oil to the island of roughly 10 million people.
… Nationwide power outages have been reported frequently over the past few years. Cuban officials have previously attributed them to US economic sanctions, though critics have also faulted a lack of investment in the island’s ailing generation system.
Cuba heavily relies on oil for electricity generation. Washington’s effective blockade of fuel shipments has worsened the country’s energy crisis, causing intermittent power cuts, a rationing of medical supplies and a decrease in tourism, officials have said. Fuel prices have skyrocketed so much that gas can be as much as $9 a liter on the unofficial market, meaning it costs more than $300 to fill up a car’s gas tank, which is more than most Cubans earn in a year.
Excerpt: With the Trump administration’s oil blockade cutting off fuel to Cuba, the country’s electrical grid collapsed Monday, causing an island-wide blackout. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, threatened again to topple the country’s communist government.
“I do believe I’ll [have] the honor of taking Cuba,” Trump told reporters Monday afternoon. Asked whether this meant diplomacy or military action, he said: “Taking Cuba in some form, whether I free it, take it, I can do anything I want.”
… Since capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro in January and asserting new influence in Caracas, Trump has hinted repeatedly that Cuba would be next.
Special thanks to Linden Arden, Becky Jo, Joey Jo Jo & John the Basketemeritus, Jeff Meyer, Dave S, Name Withheld, and always extra special thanks to my lovely late Stephanie, who gave me 21 years and proved that the world isn’t always shitty.
News always and only from reliable sources, and I decide what’s reliable — no right-wing bullshit, no Substack because fuck Nazis, and no RawStory, Newsweek, or other clickbait sites. Written news is preferred; video links will be rare, and damned near never to videos where a reporter or podcaster simply reads a script or does improv — that’s show biz, not news.
If you can’t access an article linked here, due to a paywall, forced registration for spam, or any website’s anti-reading layout, please let me know. I’ll reply with the article’s complete text.
Today I worked between Umberto and Hilda, a vendor I’d never met before. She’s young, pretty, and she was wearing a low-cut blouse a little too big, and no brassiere. She sells art, and did a booming business.
From Pathetic Life #22 Sunday, March 17, 1996
Whenever she bent over, a view of her cleavage was provided, and she bent over a lot. A few times she leaned way over to pick something up, and her breasts were visible all the way to the nipples and below. So yeah, it was a pretty good day on the Ave.
When she was facing to the side, suddenly my fish display needed adjusting as I angled for another unobstructed view. When she was facing away and bent over just right, her untucked shirt was so loose I could sometimes see the bottom of her boobs from underneath. I’ve had sex with women without seeing so much tit.
All day long, I saw as much as could be seen, which was plenty, while also trying to be nonchalant, so she wouldn’t feel self-conscious. We even talked a little, but I can’t remember about what.
♦ ♦ ♦
On the other side of Umberto’s table was Jacque the Green, and the three of us discussed our assorted wacko politics for a while. We’re all happy to talk politics but none of us are much interested in listening, so that conversation didn’t last long.
After a few laughs, Jacque invited me to his house sometime, for pizza and videos — so friendship rears its ugly head. Why anyone, especially someone who knows me, would invite me over for anything, I’ll never know. It ought to be obvious that I’m not the outgoing and sociable sort.
We’d talked about noir a while back, though, and Jacque said he had a collection of old and noir movies on Betamax, which got my attention.I asked if there’d be any talk of Amway, Shaklee, or Jesus, and he said no, so I said yes. I’m too poor to pass up a pizza and a movie if it’s free. He gave me an address, and told me to show up Thursday night at 5-ish.
♦ ♦ ♦
Again, we didn’t see a single officer of the law today, and the effect is probably the opposite of what the cops expected. The drug dealers have temporarily relocated to different neighborhoods, and most of the vendors who aren’t American citizens have taken the weekend off.
You can still buy marijuana brownies at the pot table, though, because those guys are willing to go to jail for what they smoke and believe.
♦ ♦ ♦
When my day selling fish was over, I came home and called the guy with the hairy ass — let’s call him Harry — to clarify a few things.
“First off,” I said, “my rate is $5 an hour, but this sounds like it won’t take 10 minutes. There’s a 4-hour minimum, so my fee is 20 bucks, OK?”
“That’s reasonable,” he said.
“I’ll be in the city tomorrow night. Is that good for you?”
He said it was, gave his address and some brief bus instructions, and we agreed that I’d be there at 6:00.
“Now, either you provide the shaving necessities and rubber gloves, or I’ll buy them and bill you.”
“I’ve got shaving stuff,” he said, “but I don’t have any rubber gloves.”
“I’ll bring the gloves, then,” I said. “Four bucks extra.”
He agreed, which is four bucks more profit, because there are rubber gloves everywhere at Black Sheets, where I work on Mondays. They host orgies, once monthly, so there’s a closet stuffed with rubber gloves. I’ll just ask Bill and take a pair.
“I’d also appreciate it if you’d shower just before I get there.”
“I’m planning to,” he said.
“All righty then,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”
Yeah, I’ll see more of you tomorrow then I really want to.
This is an entry retyped from an on-paper zine I wrote many years ago, called Pathetic Life. The opinions stated were my opinions then, but might not be my opinions now. Also, I said and did some disgusting things, so parental guidance is advised.
