12.10.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:43 pm by Kathy Barthway
There are a few people and issues I’d like to address while I sit here on my Lapis Lazuli throne, idly caressing the SHOVELARM™:
- You really can’t call yourself a pedant if you don’t know what you’re talking about most of the time. That’s just called being an annoying idiot.
- Guys: you seriously don’t need to air your balls out on the subway at rush hour. Close your fucking legs and give me some room to sit down. I’m wearing heels here.
- Ladies (and by “ladies” I mean “filthy, disgusting ditch-hogs”): why must you piss on the toilet seat? The firm provides these lovely, effective paper barriers in every bathroom for sitting. If you wish to squat like a Neanderthal instead, fine. But for Christ’s sake, clean up your spray afterwards.
- People visiting New York City from out of town: YOU ARE NOT IN A MOVIE. Everything and everyone here is just as real as they are back in Iowa. So if you saunter out into oncoming traffic, and a taxi hits you, YOU WILL DIE. Continuing to tempt fate, cause near-accidents, and fuck up traffic, all while giggling madly because it’s the first risky thing you’ve done since that one time you had unprotected sex with the maintenance guy at band camp, is going to get you killed. Not that that’s such a bad ending; I like to think of it as thinning the herd. But NYC drivers are strangely reluctant to run over your ignorant asses, so in the meantime, WAIT FOR THE FUCKING WALK SIGNAL. I don’t care how many native New Yorkers are doing it; for YOU it is not permitted.
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12.07.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:49 am by Kathy Barthway
Hey everybody,
I’ve been getting blog comments from former Badgerworld lurkers (not people I know) asking me how to get access to read the forum. There have been enough at this point that I feel I should direct you all to the forum administrator: badgermonkey’s blog is here, and she has a post up that explains the sign-up process. It’s really not meant to exclude people we don’t know personally — it’s to keep out spammers, trolls and known stalkers (and that is not limited to one person, as much as certain people flatter themselves that it is all about them! YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE, MOM AND YOU STILL CAN’T JOIN MY SEKRIT KLUB!!1!).
Ahem, so anyway, go to the Welcome page on badgerworldforum, and sign up. It may take longer than you think it should at the moment, because apparently DreamHost is having Issues, but unless there’s something fishy about your IP address or email account, you should be approved pretty quickly. If your email address ends in .net, you might need to contact badger for access, since a lot of spam comes from .net addresses and many of them were banned in a string recently.
OK? GREAT. Now let’s use this blog to talk about ME.
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11.29.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:32 am by Kathy Barthway
Hey, bithez, long time no post. Thought I would catch you up on things — normally I try to be entertaining, but I’m afraid some of today’s content will be just the opposite.
First, the lighter side (yeah, THIS is the light part!). A couple of people have asked me about TWO and his stint in rehab. P3 sincerely doubted he was even telling the truth about going, but I figured he was. Historically, TWO’s lies were always about stuff like showing up to hear me sing, or buying me an apartment, or other things that would indicate attachment by making me happy. His going to rehab or not has no effect on me, so he’d have no reason to lie.
Anyway, I called his cell phone the other night, and got the “Mailbox is full” message on his voicemail, and two days ago I called his work number, and his secretary said, “Oh….he’s not in the office!” in a tone that implied everyone knows where he is. So I guess he’s really doing it — and that he spent Thanksgiving in there. Good luck, TWO.
Now to the people mentioned in my headline. As many of you know, my niece, Emily, died in police custody in Denver almost two years ago. The Denver indie paper Westword did a good telling of the story here. My sister, Sue, and Emily’s dad, Roy, have been on the trail of the hospital and jail staff since Emily’s death from untreated internal injuries suffered in a car wreck. They finally got the attention of some folks at Channel 7 in Denver, who have an “Investigators” segment, and those people have uncovered a lot of previously unnoticed information.
For example, the jailhouse security video from the day Emily died is missing 64 seconds. Emily is leaning against a wall, then the screen goes black. When the picture comes back up, 64 seconds have elapsed, and Emily is lying on the floor. You can see some of the video, along with a pretty harrowing brief interview with Sue and Roy, at Channel 7’s website here.
Emily was such a wonderful kid (she was 24, but of course she was a kid to me; she was the first baby I ever held), and Sue is being so courageous and relentless in finding the truth and obtaining justice. P3 told me last night how much he admires Sue, and that he didn’t think he could do what she’s doing. “Yes you could,” I said. “If your kid were gone forever, and the people responsible were basically laughing in your face about it, you’d make it your life’s mission to expose their lies and deceit.” You do what you have to do.
Emily bled to death over a span of 21 hours. I’d like to see the hospital and jail employees who ignored (and even mocked) her screams for help suffer more than just a settlement payment. Wouldn’t you?
She happened to be beautiful, but nobody deserved what she got. I miss you, sweetie.
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11.13.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:59 am by Kathy Barthway
I called up my old friend The Wee One (TWO) today to see if he wanted to have lunch. TWO was my boyfriend for a too-long, too-involved, too-dramatic and too-drunk period of my life while my marriage was breaking up. (His marriage never broke up, incidentally.) He’s an incredibly bright guy, one of the top ten stockbrokers at a Very Large Firm here in NYC — so bright and so accomplished, in fact, that he’s always been able to make a couple million by 2:00 or so, and then sit in the bar for the rest of the day, getting wasted and picking intellectual fights with people who are far dumber but far more sober than he, which doesn’t level the playing field as much as you might think.
Have you ever known anyone whose brain moved faster than his mouth, so that he’d tell the beginning of the story and the end, but forget to tell the middle? And then act all bewildered when people didn’t get what he was saying? …..just me, huh? Anyway, that’s TWO. I’m about the only person who can translate him to normal people. Being his girlfriend was a horrible, dumb experience, but I’ve always retained an affection for him. He’s one of those people who really should be dead by now, yet he just goes on making millions of dollars while soused and high. We work in the same neighborhood (I met him at my Work Local, from which he was barred shortly thereafter), so occasionally I still meet him for lunch.
I haven’t seen him for a few months, so now that I’m back on the day shift I thought I’d give him a call and see which bar he was currently calling home and have a little visit.
“I would love to, but I can’t. I’m going to do something that’s good for me.”
“Huh?”
“I’m checking into rehab this afternoon.”
omgwtfbbq!??!!!111!! First Amy Winehouse and now TWO? The world is full of quitters, man.
I went to the nearest Irish hole in the wall alone at lunchtime, and I half expected to see him there (since he once described “taking a break” as “going to a bar where they don’t know you”), but no. P3 (my significant other, for those of you who aren’t obsessed with me) said last night he feels the winds of change in the air, and I guess he’s right.
At least for the next 28 days, anyhow.
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11.12.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:17 am by Kathy Barthway
Welcome to my blog! I should warn you that there’s going to be lots of ALL CAPS POSTING here, as well as a great deal of bad language. Plus, I’m not reading your comments because I don’t give a shit what you think. OK, I’m going to read them, but don’t start thinking it’s like an actual dialogue or anything. Get your own blog.
I’ve been a little late getting to actually posting, as the same day Badger gave me the link, I got kinda fired from my job and wasn’t feeling terribly insouciant.
But I’ve got my souce back now, bithez! In spades! So let’s see if this passes for content:
PEOPLE WHO NEED A WHACK WITH THE SHOVELARM™
OK, for those of you who haven’t been following my every forum post with slavering hunger (you’re off the hook, Adrianne Call!), lemme explain the SHOVELARM™.
Didja see that movie Grindhouse?
OK, me neither. And we’re in the majority. BUT I did see the trailer several hundred times, and there’s this awesome scene where this girl loses her leg, and Steve Buscemi fashions a prosthetic limb for her made from a MACHINE GUN. Check it out:
And I started thinking, wouldn’t it be HIGHLY SATISFYING to have a machine gun for a leg? But you know what? It wouldn’t, really. Quite inconvenient, actually. I mean, look at her — you have to get into some kind of feral squat to take care of business, and that’s just not good for my back. Plus, once you nail somebody with that, they’re dead. No opportunity for gloating or intimidation of that person in the future. And that’s really important to me.
So I figured instead of a machine gun leg, I’d much rather have a SHOVELARM™ — that is, a prosthetic arm with a big ol’ iron shovel head at the end of it. Somebody pisses you off? CLANGGGGGGGG! They’re shutting up now. And you can do it again and again!
And so, in what I can only imagine will be a terribly regular feature of this blog, today’s list of PEOPLE WHO NEED A WHACK WITH THE SHOVELARM™:
- Total strangers (usually — oh wait, ALWAYS — men) who tell you to “Smile!” A security guard in the building where I work actually said this to me the day I was going upstairs to write a remembrance of my dead niece. SHUT UP PEOPLE I’M NOT HERE TO BE AN ORNAMENT IN YOUR WORLD
- Able-bodied people who sit in the Handicapped seats on the bus. And then sit there looking oblivious when some old lady with a cane gets on and has to fucking stand. When I’m that old lady with the cane….well, you know what I’ll do.
- In the same vein, people who make a huge fuss about being inconvenienced when a wheelchair-bound person gets on the bus. Yeah, it’s going to take an extra THREE MINUTES. And yeah, wherever you’re going to be late to, you get to WALK off the bus, so take your eye-rolling and your enormous, heaving sighs and cram them.
- People who spit on the subway stairs. Seriously, you couldn’t wait TEN SECONDS ’til you were on the street and could spit in the gutter? Thanks for making me drag my skirt through your mucus, dickface.
- Real Estate lawyers named Jeannie who fire me almost without pausing while walking out the door. She’s basically going to get it every day, so get used to seeing her name here.
That’s all for now. See you on the Internest!
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