The Little Voices Inside My Head

I know it's safe to write here. No one visits this blog to read my words except perverts who have Googled Miley Cyrus's crotch. Yep, that post keeps bringing them in. It's my moneymaker.

Yes, I hear voices. I hear them all of the time. Mostly they're just running dialogue, and if I were any kind of established, driven writer I'd record them somehow--write them down at my scheduled time at my writing desk or record them on this little digital recorder that I have that I think is so neat but my younger friends think is so old-school. I guess because it doesn't have an i in front of it.

But there is one little voice that, if I hear it, I know I'm in trouble. It's this little disembodied voice that wonders how I'm doing. "Are you ok?" it will ask. "Are you all right?" It's a gentle voice, like caring stranger at a bus stop or a well-meaning nurse who has broken through the crust her job has layered on her and is truly worried about me.

Are you all right? The answer is always, no. She always seems to know when it's the right time to ask.

Here's the other kicker. Sometimes she--and the voice is female of undetermined age--asks, "How bad did he die?" She's not talking to me. Who? Who is she talking to? There are obviously others in the know about me and she doesn't have all the facts about me, yet still she's concerned. That somehow relieves me, gives me comfort. But it's the question that throws me.

How badly did he die?

Is she asking, what was his death like? How much did he suffer? It seems this voice and her compatriots from the beyond know about dying. It seems as if they have intimate knowledge of it.

But then, the voices and the question seem to prove that there is "something else." That dying isn't the end, just something that has degrees of badness.

Miley Cyrus's Crotch: Take Two

File this under, you can run but you can't hide. Take note, teens, tweens, and the like: If you put it on the Internet, it's there forever.

About three years ago I blogged right here on ABM about a picture of Miley Cyrus's crotch that was making the rounds on the Internet. I was writing for Gather.com at the time, a joyless, ridiculous gig that was set in a hamster wheel and fueled by SEO and Google hits. And I wrote that the people who were writing the Entertainment sections were getting huge hits, while the News and Politics writers like myself, in comparison, were getting pittance in the hit department. That meant if you were blogging about Miley Cyrus and her crotch, your family was getting fed, and if you were writing about the BP oil spill or the economy, you were starving. Such was the whims of the American public.

And just because I didn't want anyone to feel cheated, I included the picture of Miley Cyrus's crotch.

So this week, I pull up the analytics for old Action Bob, and what do I see? A huge spike. I figure it's some bot in India trying to hack into my account, which is usually what that means. But further investigation showed that all the activity came from people Googling some derivative of "miley cyrus's crotch."

Mostly, my analytics will tell me the ISP of the visitor, but sometimes it tells me the organization. Included in this round were the European Patent Office and, whoo-boy, the United States Homeland Security. So either there's someone on the first line of defense for our nation's security surfing for porn while on duty, or else I'm being watched for my un-American ways.

Anyway, I still think the whole thing--her crotch three years ago, or what she did the other night at the VMAs--is ridiculous. Poor little Miley (you read that right) was simply a sacrificial lamb for some corporation. People are criticizing and yelling at and about Miley, without realizing that that entire show the other night was given the green light by some pretty powerful MTV execs. Do people honestly think they said to Miley, Hey, just get up there and do what you want? No! That entire production was orchestrated. MTV could have pulled Miley and her handlers aside and said, Uh, we really don't think this is a very good idea.

My friend Jennifer Pierce, who is really smart and says some really smart things, yesterday said to me over Facebook, "The ancient practice of sending children and virgins into volcanoes is alive and well. Somewhere, in the back of our minds we believe that we need to feed the money machine innocence in order to keep the prosperity coming.  The beast must be fed or the wealth of the land dries up, you see."

Doesn't that seem to be the case? Starting with Britney Spears and then Amy Winehouse and who knows who else I'm missing because I really don't follow this stuff, our society seems to thirst for grand displays of public humiliation and degradation by young women in the entertainment field. Is this to make ourselves feel better about ourselves? If it it, I certainly don't. I get thoroughly depressed. 

Thank Heaven for Pictures of Miley Cyrus's Crotch

Even though I haven't blogged in ages (and the key to keeping a blog fresh is new and stimulating content daily) I still continue to get hits because people continue to search for pictures of Miley Cyrus's crotch.

I blogged all the way back in June about how pictures of her hoo-hoo were a big hit on the Internet. I was blogging for gather.com back then--another of a long line of hack writing jobs I've held over the course of my life--and as a news writer I couldn't get hits for my posts (or at least enough to make any kind of decent income) but the entertainment writers were raking them in, and at the time this was a big topic. Bigger than the BP oil spill. Bigger than the economy. And people still seem to be interested in her nether bits.

Broken vase is another search that keeps hitting Action Bob Markle. People are either looking for images of broken vases, or they want to know how to fix them. Back in January, 2009 I wrote about the breakup of my family and my responsibility in it and compared my relationship with my kids to a mended vase. I still think it's a pretty good piece of writing, and hope that people stop to read it even though it's not exactly what they were looking for.

For some crazy Neil Young's ranch is something that people search for a lot. I mean, a lot. Who'da thunk it, huh? And Libra constellation. And The Low Anthem, a group of musicians from Providence, Rhode Island.

And it's always weird to see your name as a search term. Who out there deliberately typed my name into google?

The Mad Man behind Mad Men

Frankly, I don't get it. Mad Men that is.

I watched a few clips...yawn.

Then this past summer in a Literature of the Counter Culture class we watched an episode for the stereotypical roles of men and women in that time period. After ten minutes I was so bored. It was the episode where Don Draper gets a new secretary. It was also the episode where Don Draper yells at a woman client who also happened to be Jewish and was taking over her father's business. The account was worth something like $2.5 million--that's in U.S. dollars in the early sixties. Trust me, not even Don Draper would have thrown away that much billing just on his principles. Ridiculous. But I'm generally bored with television and pop culture.

Anyway, so when I watched this animation, I still didn't get it. Chalk this up to a long list of things I just don't get. The interest in Miley Cyrus's crotch. Lindsay Lohan. Martinis and cocktails in general. (I hate the word cocktail--it's such a wuss word.) Karaoke. Zombies. Vampires. Lady Gaga. The list goes on...