Hello Sluggo:

When I first went to Japan in March 2002, I was passed on a street in Shinjuku by what I thought was some lowered, blacked-out Yakuzamobile. I was pretty blown away by the box-like styling, seemingly putting a foot in the ass of the aerodynamic turds on the road at the time. A few days later I saw another Toyota bB (this one was not so bosozoku looking) parked along Kappabashi and snapped this photo.

What goes around comes around, and after returning to the states and telling everyone about this strange Japanese car, I read that it would soon be available in the US. And as we later found, in the rather dumbed-down form of the Scion xB. Alas,the honeymoon was over, as they say.

During my second visit to Japan in November 2004, I spotted another oddball Japanese creation that set my heart aflutter yet again: The Nissan Cube. Standing before Ginza’s Wako department store one day, a Cube drove by and made the corner, just the angle for me to catch sight of the asymmetric rear window, wrapping around one side of the car like a middle finger in the wind of conventional design.

Just like the first time around, I spotted another one a few days later in Asakusa. this time, Sharon snapped a photo of me with the car, in a pose I learned many years earlier from my friend, Rodrigo Peréz Nebel: Standing next to the car as if I were unlocking the door and preparing to drive away. A photo of two starry-eyed lovers, enjoying the sheer novelty of first touch.

Time-warp forward to 2009, and we see how history repeats itself. Nissan has released the Cube in the US, but radically redesigned. My former lover is not the same—She has given way to fake tits and Botox injection. I do not recognize her. Only the rear window remains untouched, but in concept alone. Her formerly angular lines have been rounded. Me no like.

A client brought in his new Cube this week, wishing to have his advertising graphics applied. I explained to him that I first saw the Cube in Japan in ’04, and in his best all-knowing manner (after all, he did just pay good green money for this car, so he oughtta know, right?), he looked me in the eye and said:

“No, this one is new. You’re thinking of the Scion.”

I politely explained to him that Nissan was producing the Cube in Japan as far back as 1998. He looked confused, as if the local Nissan dealer hadn’t divulged the whole history to him. Or maybe he was shocked that the design was not of good old ’merican bloodlines. At any rate, when we were back inside later, I dropped the photo of myself and my former love on him. His response (like seeing his new bride happily posing with an old boyfriend): “Oh.”

I’ve been getting slammed from all over the world with searches for “guy castrating himself video” (and all variations possible) and “elastrator video.” Perhaps you should all stop living vicariously through the misadventures of a handful of lost souls true adventurers and start the nut cuttin’ yourselves?

Looking over my massive stats for the past month, it appears that about 15% of my viewership were return visitors… You guys need to register and leave some comments so I don’t feel so alone in here! Yeah, I’m talking to you there in Sikeston, you guys in Saudi Arabia, San Francisco (well, I know who you are…), you big goober there in Singapore who hits me every other day, the crackhead in Michigan, the otaku in Tokyo who regularly searches my site for porn, the crazy flasher guy from Skype, you there in Plainsboro, New Jersey who hangs on my site for hours at a time even though there’s just not that much to read here… I’m talking to all of you! Throw me a fucking bone, why dontcha?

I’ve been meaning to look up Klonopin recently after hearing reference made to it… Also known outside the US as Rivotril, it seems to be a heavy downer prescribed for everything from Epilepsy to Restless Leg Disorder to Schizophrenia. Common side effects include impaired motor function, dizziness and amnesia. Woot! Party drug!

I’ve also been listening to Air America during the day lately, and they constantly run this ID bumper featuring Fischerspooner which is annoying as all hell. I don’t know anything about these guys, but in that bumper they sound like a couple of weenies. Kind of like the guys in the Alltel Wireless commercials who portray the competing cell phone carriers, but emo’d out and full of caffeine, trying to kick some 10-year-old’s ass for his lunch money. I give them the benefit of the doubt, though, and link to them… But they should consider re-recording their Air America thing, lest they impress folks who are unfamiliar with them as a whiney emo shoegazer mallpunk band…

Speaking of Alltel, how in the hell can they say in good conscience that they are “America’s largest network” and not even offer service in Austin?

Perhaps this should have been a new Pet Peeve post…

If you’ve visited my blog before, you may now notice the absence of pregnancy-related stuff that was here before… Just so you know, we lost that one. A miscarriage that our obstetrician says was probably due to chromosome issues, so we’re not out of the game. Nature rights itself, and in this case it was probably better this way than to give birth to a troglodyte child with a hand growing from the bottom of his or her left foot or something like that. Still, it stings.

My wife had a manual vacuum aspiration performed on Monday. Though she said it was more painful than she expected, even more painful than giving birth to our daughter two years ago even, she seems to be doing very well.

Perhaps the pain was closure for her, and for that I’m glad. But being that this is my blog, and my space to blow off steam, I’m going to totter off on the proverbial limb and confess here that I don’t think I’ve had my closure yet.

I can’t stop thinking about it: The month I spent thinking I would be a new father again. The moment that the doctor said “Well, I have bad news…” The whole experience of shifting gears from trying to hire a landscaper to fix our current shitty backyard for one child to looking into buying a new house with an extra bedroom and larger space for two children, and now back again…

I feel like I have all this shit on my shoulders and I don’t know now what to do with any of it. Last night and this morning things just kind of fell into place. All the little things were climbing up my ass at once to become one festering sore… Holding a coworker’s week-old son… An unintentionally somewhat cruel comment by a relative… Selling a piece of baby furniture we no longer use… Kei’s post-birthday spoils littering the house… I don’t know what I’m leading up to, I just know that shit still stings. Maybe I’m angry, but I don’t know who I’m angry at. Maybe I’m just sad.

I’ve been avoiding writing about the experience, just hoping that I could simply delete those previous posts and move on. I haven’t wanted to write about it because I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to feel it again. But it seems that this is the only true outlet I have. Someone will read this and think I’m whining, maybe someone else will say they’ve been here too. I can’t concern myself with that. Don’t like whining? Turn the fucking channel.

Now I wish I had left everything up… Or at least saved the posts for a later decision as to whether I should delete them, but I didn’t. They’re gone,  like the prospect of seeing that child grow and prosper. Blah, blah, blah. Turn the channel.

Meet my arch nemesis, The God Damned Owl.

Early in her life, my daughter, Kei, developed a fondness for owls. I think we first noticed it at my parents’ house in Missouri, where there is a macramé owl hanging on the dining room wall. She would run in the room and point at it, shouting, “Hoo hoooo! Hooo hoooooo!” Over and over, she would invite everyone into the room to announce Mr. Owl, as if she had discovered his presence all on her own. A big accomplishment for a 16-month-old.

My wife saw The God Damned Owl at Wal-Mart while very uncharacteristically shopping there one Sunday. I say uncharacteristically because she worked for Wal-Mart for a few years while in college. As a result, she loathes Wal-Mart. I figure she has a better reason than most to feel this way, so I wholeheartedly support her in this venture. It’s just that… When you have children, you become susceptible to “Every Day Low Prices,” even if those $3 chanklas do burn holes in your skin. You just learn to be careful and save money… Maybe that should be Wal-Mart’s new slogan: Save At Your Own Risk!

Anyway, Sharon thought it would be cute to bring The God Damned Owl into our home and see how Kei would react to it. You know, maybe put it up on some high shelf, or outside a window far from the reach of her little hands. No, Kei had other ideas. She glommed onto The God Damned Owl as soon as it was placed in the shopping cart.

The God Damned Owl is a hard plastic molding with a few sharp edges; The God Damned Owl stands about 18″ tall. So you can see, this could lead to a few issues. Even if I were to file down the points, the The God Damned Owl’s ears alone are wee deadly weapons, seemingly designed to poke out the eyes of a two-year-old, or, alternately, her 42-year-old dad, which is exactly what has happened on at least one occasion of trying to wrestle The God Damned Owl from the hands of my child. Kei walked away unscathed; Daddy lost that battle with The God Damned Owl.

At times, Kei will show a waning interest in The God Damned Owl. It’s then that we try to hide it, hoping she will somehow forget about it, but she always finds The God Damned Owl and picks it up, carrying it like a dolly around the house, hugging it, sometimes even giving it a little kiss at bedtime. We have, however been successful at keeping The God Damned Owl out of her bed at night, though we have no idea if she’s made any middle-of-the-night reconnaissance to rescue The God Damned Owl or not… She has been found sleeping on the floor by her bed a few times early in the morning, and we can only surmise that she may have been trying to locate The God Damned Owl by cover of nightfall.

We’ve purchased a couple of large plush owls for her upcoming birthday in the hopes that we can swap out a far softer companion in place of The God Damned Owl, but only time will tell… The God Damned Owl might yet find his true place at our house, outside, keeping squirrels, possums and other undesirables away. We’ll see…

Following up on my recent crack pipe-themed rant, I see we have another esteemed guest!

Dude is from Fairport, New York. He’s on the hunt for someplace where he can score Used Crack Pipes.

Now, I thought purchasing used drug paraphernalia would be like second-hand dildos—who’d wanna buy that?! Apparently it takes all kinds…

Then again, I doubt crackheads are super choosy.

One of the many reasons people blog is for attention. Don’t lie. Maybe you have a lot to say, or you think your recipe for Orange and Lemon Marmalade is the best out there or you think black helicopters have flown up your ass, but the real deal is that you want attention. So in the interest of tracking how much attention I’m getting (or not getting, as the case may be), I was taking a look at my miserable stats, and this catches my eye:

Let me make sure I understand this.

Homeboy couldn’t simply Google “crack pipe.” It was even beyond him to do a Google Image Search for “crack pipe.” No, instead he’s relying on the wonder of the Internet to do the work for him, so he does a Google search for HOW+TO+DRAW+A++CRACK+PIPE, which led him to this previous Hello Sluggo posting.

Perhaps he couldn’t be bothered to look no further than the end of his arm?

Here, I figger that since you were nice enough to come to my little corner of the Web and have a little look around, I’ll return the favor by drawing your crack pipe for you.

There. I hope you get an A.

UPDATE: Cracknet madness continues with a Hello Sluggo “hit” from a slowhead in Indianapolis, Indiana searching for “hitting+a+crack+pipe.” Whatever happened to good ol’ red-blooded American male search terms like bukkake and Goatse?

Had an impromptu video conference with GinJ Mike this morning. His wife apparently busted him sneaking a beer from the fridge in the middle of the call… Anyway, he took some incriminating screenshots of me shaking a baby doll during my rant. How very Alice Cooper.

For those of you in the younger set, Alice Cooper could kick Marilyn Manson’s skinny ass. Afterward, MM would shake his hand and say, “Thank you.”

I was explaining to him about the anti-baby shaking billboard campaign seen around Texas (I guess it’s all over the US, I dunno), and how the text layout makes it read (to me, anyway), “Never, Never, Never (line break) Never Shake a Baby,” like, “Never don’t shake a baby.” Like, “Shake the shit out of a baby.” Like someone subliminally trying to thin the herd.

But don’t let me get off on a conspiracy rant, ‘cos I’m just not into that shit. Leave that to Alex Jones. Or this tall skinny white Jesus-is-a-Holy-Space-Alien guy I used to work with. Nothing worse than a white guy with dreads wearing a stinky rasta bag and a Bob Marley t-shirt. Oh, and crocs. With dirt in them. No socks.