FANZINE

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY JEWISHNESS 2011 FROM THE THOMPSON FAMILY

What a shitty, shitty year. Like not just a regularly shitty year. I mean like you’re wearing Docksiders and you step in wet grass and warm dog shit every morning for 365 days.

Only one member of my family is on speaking terms with me. I just emailed and asked her for some money. I have $5 left for the next two weeks.

I still have a pretty serious substance abuse problem.

And I still live in Northern Nevada.

Ho, ho. Season’s greetings.

So what did I do all year? Not a whole hell of a lot. Honestly, time flies when you’re trying to escape so much deeply ingrained self-hatred that you try to stay high all the time just so you don’t kill yourself. Luckily, having a couple habits means you never have any money to actually buy a firearm. And if I did buy one, I’d pawn it. I pawned my laptop three times this year. I wrote a bunch of porno stories for HIGH SOCIETY. I was dope sick about 100 days. I babysat some. I’ve got nowhere to go for Thanksgiving but that’s okay because I hate everything. Ditto, Christmas. New Year’s.  Easter. Whatever. I should be fucking camping out on these OCCUPY fucker’s front yards. Christ.

That’s pretty much it. I think I went about 10 places all year aside from scoring, and read maybe a book and a half. This time last year I was living in sunny Cocoa Beach, Florida with a girl. But she got mad because she was fucking crazy as a three-winged bat, so I had to move. Good choice, Nevada, asshole.

First: Kourtney Kardashian just tweeted “What should I have for dinner.” Honestly, I don’t know what she has in the house or if she’s in a restaurant looking at a menu or is stuck in the bottom of a well in Calabasas or even how many Kardashians she needs to cook for so I really can be of very little help to her right now. I feel bad offering up something lame like “Mac and cheese” or “Why don’t you go start your car up and sit in your garage and count to 100,000 until you’re not hungry anymore because you’re dead of carbon monoxide poisoning?” Or maybe California Pizza Kitchen? What pisses me off the most about that family is that I actually had that family during college. And my girlfriend was even Armenian. They spent about $250k a year going out to eat. Lived in Pacific Palisades. I could’ve been Bruce Jenner. Or, whoever freeloads off of Bruce Jenner. I had a series of richer and richer girlfriends, all who believed in me and wanted to get married and I just wanted to get drunk and masturbate in the car, that’s where my mind was. Now the girls get poorer and poorer. And uglier and uglier, quite frankly.

I’ve only been tweeting for a few weeks. And I must say, I find it very unsatisfying. I don’t have a clue who I follow. I signed up and it gave me suggestions, like Britney Spears and Ke$ha and Grandpa from The Munsters, who was actually quite a pervert in real life, if you must know the truth. When I worked in porn, he was at every damn event, along with Kid Rock and of course Ron Jeremy and the guy from that band. Blanking. Oh! Korn. I don’t remember his name. But we had fun writing cover lines for those magazines. I have no idea what any of them meant, i.e. “KID ROCK SADDLES 100 NAKED COWGIRLS” and  “GANGBANG CUM LUNCH.” No idea. I don’t remember seeing a GANGBANG CUM LUNCH anywhere in the magazine, or, as we called it, the “book.” What the hell is a “GANGBANG CUM LUNCH?” What isn’t, right? Hold on, I must tweet Kourtney Kardashian her dinner plans…

So the excitement here started about 12:10 a.m. yesterday morning. And by excitement I mean loss of life and property. A huge fire broke out in the rich area of town, up on top of the hills that overlook the beautiful city of Reno. The winds were clocked at 80 mph. That surely didn’t help. Anyhow, there is a point. As with most cities, Reno has an OCCUPY RENO movement. Except, unlike most other cities, the Reno faction went right to the mayor and city council to get a permit to OCCUPY. Fine. Sure. But the permit would’ve cost something like $30 a day. I mean, we’re committed, but $30 is enough to buy $10 worth of meth for those kids. Pricey. Finally, the city came up with the idea of waiving the fee (one councilman even paid for the residual amount right from his wallet!) if the protestors would agree to go where the city told them. So, instead of being anywhere near the power structure of Reno, they are in an old city pool, some 4.5 miles from downtown, near absolutely nothing. I’ve told them that they’ve been co-opted before they even started, etc. but they are solid with OWS. I told them that they’re not occupying anything––in fact, they’re doing what the 1% does and lounging by a pool all day. And they have free wi-fi. People bring them free food.

But they’re inside a fucking pool, for chrissakes! It looks like a concentration camp, or a minimum security prison. So while students at UC Davis are getting sprayed in the face with pepper spray and Wall Street is getting raided at midnight and dragged off to jail, OCCUPY RENO camps at the pool and surfs the internet. Nevermind that none of them I talked to had ever heard of Saul Alinsky. As a local person of note, I’ve been twice invited to attend one of their leaderless General Assembly meetings and had to politely decline. The problem with leaderless General Assembly meetings is that they’re leaderless General Assembly meetings. Whoever has the bullhorn can talk about anything for any amount of time––who they jerked off to last night, the price of milk, how they… shit… Taylor Swift just tweeted “got really excited about Christmas and bought all the holiday flavored coffee creamers at the grocery store.”

Greedy cunt. I actually read “creamers” as “enemas” at first. I have no idea who Taylor Swift is, but I imagine she is pretty fucking worthless.

I just had to disable the Twitter feed. It’s no good unless you’re trying to topple your local power-mad Middle Eastern dictator. Not quite as good if you’re sleeping in the park for change. Homeless people have been doing that for a hundred years in New York and I’ve yet to seen much come of it.

Back to last night. This huge wildfire broke out and began burning up the swells’ homes overlooking the city. It ended up taking about two dozen of them out. Houses, not swells. One dude had a heart attack. This city is cursed. First the geezer wrecked his vintage plane into a crowd at the airshow, killed a dozen and left an entire family each missing a limb. A friend actually dared me to go to the local comedy club and do a five minute set on amateur night. So I started writing stuff. I’m not very funny, I’m just mean. My jokes were about IHOP shootings, the wildfire, the geezer’s air show crash and the death of a beloved local sportscaster who got hit jaywalking after the UNR game. I think there’s humor there. There’s nothing funny about Natalie Wood’s death, 30 years ago, except thinking of what’s-his-name on a boat. I think I would be chased out of town if I did my routine. There’s nothing funny about being crashed into by a geezer ODing on Cialis driving a plane. And the sportscaster used initials for his first name that just happen to spell out some funny (sad) not funny (slobber) things.

So most of the burnt offerings to the angry Reno gods were mansions or mansion-like. The city fathers of Reno, ever so eager to help out and maybe even make a buck, began to offer free hotel rooms at their casinos for the newly homeless. And free drinks to take your mind off your loss. And if you want to drink and sit in front of some high limit slots––have at it.

Apparently there were 500 people living in just those two dozen homes, because the casinos filled up fast. Anyhow, our OCCUPY RENO movement sent out a message offering to let any displaced persons sleep at Pool Camp, out in the 15 degree, windy cold. I had to go yell at them for that today. How stupid are these kids? So, I walked down to the city pool, OCCUPY RENO HQ, but I couldn’t find anybody to yell at. Reno is occupied by two people, at least one of whom is homeless. The other one was this really serious social crusader college girl. You could tell how serious she was because of her glasses. Not fashionable and not ironically fashionable and not trying to be unfashionable and not ugly for the sake of conversation.

So they have these “leaderless” meetings at OCCUPY RENO. I went to a hippy college––a remnant of the 60s left in the shell of a pricey Southern California private school for kids who couldn’t get into USC. It was $25k a year when I went there. Now it’s over $50k a year. I still owe them whatever $25k times four is. Anyhow, we had the same kind of GAs, except they were called “community meetings.” I went to one. They had snacks. Nothing got accomplished. Some girl said she was raped and the community voted to keep the issue inside the community and seek some kind of (fancy French phrase for diplomacy) (tete a tete?) with the said rapist. His name was Shawn. They grounded him, I think. They told him he couldn’t rape anybody anymore. You can’t tell a guy from Fontana, Calif. to stop raping people. Christ. It would’ve been like telling him he couldn’t be fat anymore.

I stopped going to the community meetings and most of my friends dropped out.

I will not attend a bullhorn roundtable about nothing. These people have done nothing and refuse to do anything. While the other city’s movements get arrested and pepper sprayed, OCCUPY RENO sits by the damn pool. They won’t even jaywalk.

Now I’m watching some bitter illiterate nobody argue with Evan Handler (from Californication) about immigrants on Facebook.

Garbage. I cheated. I turned the Twitter feed back on. Kourtney ended up going with Mexican: “Ended up going out for Mexican food! Was probably much tastier than whatever I was going to make at home. Si!”

Bitch has four million followers.