Let’s have a mind and raise flowers.

I’ve been a man all my life. (The surgery only clarified that.)

And because I know all things testicular, I can navigate life with a little more ease than most. Take marketing for example: I know when and how I’m being manipulated. El Pollo Loco commercials always get my attention because that guy with the strange Antonio Banderas accent is beautiful, but not in an intimidating way. Mexican food always gets my mouth and anus watering and it’s not as though I need a lot of prompting to eat sour cream-ed fried things, but a sexy gent never hurt.

There are all kinds of ways to get a man to buy things and I have boiled them all down and put them in my online advertisement for my new “Swimmin’ Kitties” McGivern Brand of cat infanticide buckets. I also know exactly how to get men interested in dating and marriage. You know those out-dated relationship advice books “He’s Just Not That Into You” and “Women Are From Venus, Men Are From Mars”? I wrote two new books last week:

• “You’re Just 15 Pounds Over Do-Able”
• “Women Are From Venus, Men Like Their Taints Nibbled”

I know more about men and their intimate workings than Lindsay Lohan. How did I glean my expertise you ask? Science. There is no mystery that science can’t unravel. Although, even I must admit that there are some horrible consequences of science gone awry. Take genetic engineering for example: ‘Hybrid’ is just a fancy word for “mix something awesome with something stupid’.

That’s how we ended up with electric cars and the WNBA. Science has also brought things back to life that should have been left dead like Frankenstein and John Travolta’s career. The Olympic Games are where men shine the brightest.

Just look at Jackie Joyner Kersee for Chrissakes! Another man who is taking Manhood seriously is George W. Bush. When you want a job done quickly, or at least not slowed down by thought-he’s your man.

He is definitely a ‘One Wipe & Forget To Flush’ kind of guy. Who else could have brought us the Olympic spirit to governance like him? “EXTREME Rendition”. “ADVANCED Interrogation Techniques.” What have other Presidents done for us? William Howard Taft- “Gettin’ Stuck In A Bathtub.” William Henry Harrison- “Dying.”

I know men like the palm of my hand. So, the next time you’re in a Bally’s Fitness Men’s Locker Room and you want to know what that Weird Guy Who’s Always In The Sauna
is doing in the toilet stall… ask me.
Ryan McGivern

You know the scene in Goonies where Sloth rips open his shirt revealing a Superman shirt underneath? That’s how I feel right now because I have viable sperm.

I went to Encino Reproductive Services Inc. today for another donation and a report on my sperm count.

As I gave today’s collection to the very kind and discreet nurse/sperm wrangler, she held it up to the lights and gave the same look someone might if they were to sample a surprisingly good clam chowder at Red Lobster.

“Great!” She said. “Ryan, we have the results from the first donation. And it came back very good.”

This was the best feedback I ‘ve got since my mother told me I did a good job “making a ka-ka all by my myself like a big boy”.

“Your volume was well over normal and usually with high volume, the actual sperm counts will come back lower. But yours stayed quite high so it was a great sample and we froze it.”

I was later told that freezing the sperm is like putting Snickers bars in the freezer. I was beaming. I did a couple of victory laps around the lobby, nearly knocking over the coffee table.

“I did it! In your FACE! In yo face!” I punched a hole in the dry wall.

“I feel such power. Yesssss. Yes. I am God here! In the place of a Dark Lord you would have a Queen! Not dark but beautiful and terrible as the Morn! Treacherous as the Seas! Stronger than the foundations of the Earth! All shall love me and despair!” My head revolved 180 degrees and then I puked green pea soup in the nurse’s
face.

Well ladies, if you’ve doubted my ability to give you an abundant Irish brood, think again. Ryan McGivern’s got the sweet, sweet magic in spades, baby.

It’s too bad women are only fertile once a month.

Ryan McGivern

There exists a Creation Museum near Cincinnati, a $26 million dollar institution of truth that explores a literal translation of the Bible. The Creation Museum is a Disneyland for Creationists, where lucky visitors can picnic in the Garden of Eden, play voyeur to a three dimensional life-size replica of the Last Supper (make sure you throw your dinner roll at Judas), whistle at Noah at his ark’s construction site, and let your kids play with mechanical sculpted dinosaurs, because, as is common creationist knowledge, the world is only 6000 years old and humans and dinosaurs coexisted. And as if all this wasn’t enough, an official pastor is on staff to answer to your brainwashing needs!

Did you know unicorns are in the King James bible six times, including Job 39:9-10…

9 Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib?

10 Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow? or will he harrow the valleys after thee?

Unicorns must be true! The Unicorn Museum is collecting donations to place a billboard near the Creation Museum.

I’ve always liked masturbating into a cup and showing it to people, so you can imagine my excitement when I found out I could get paid to do so!

I had Google searched “cum thirsty karl rove”and on the 8th page of results was a page for the Encino Reproductive Services Inc. describing how to get involved with the burgeoning sperm market.

I am now on the ground-floor of the ejaculate industry and I hope that my fortune lies in wait like a ripe passive ovum.

I went over to Encino the next week for my first sample to be taken. The collection rooms are like a small doctor’s room with a sink and some Sani-Naps to clean your penis, a chair, a bin of condoms to take for the road (keeping your sperm healthy is key in the sperm business), and a bed.

A bed! I couldn’t believe it. Are they expecting men to lay down in the missionary position? Is it to take a nap afterwards? I dunno. This seemed incredible to me. What guy masturbates lying down? Masturbation should be done quickly and covertly standing up, and preferably in a corner! I think I’ll ask them about this phenomenon next time I go in.

Of course, there was a rack of pornography made available on the wall. There is a stack of straight porn and a stack of gay porn. I think that the two stacks are too close together.
In my frenzy, I kept accidentally flipping through “Rough Rider” and “Latin Inches”.

The nurse/sperm wrangler also had given me a “spill sheet” which was a folded up napkin that was really a highly absorbent picnic blanket. “How much semen are you expecting from me if this is the SPILL sheet?” I thought. I looked at my cup which I assumed held 8 ounces and again felt overwhelmed.

When she left me alone to ‘collect’, I felt another pang of anxiety: “How long should this take me?” I thought. I imagined that if I came out of the room 1 minute later (a possibility), she’d silently judge me.

I decided to go into it with the same spirit that I approach sex. Here’s the standard inner dialogue that ran through my head as it usually does… “Try really hard to last longer than 2 minutes! But, don’t be too long about it, now. Don’t want to hold things up and have people getting bored and frustrated. Just don’t be too quick. Don’t think too hard about it though! Be smooth about it, man. Don’t enjoy it too much though, or it’ll be over embarrassingly quick. Just act natural! Pretend that this is a normal thing you do and don’t be so weird about it! God! What is your problem? Try to look at a clock before hand so that you can pace yourself. God only knows that what feels like a long time to you is really 45 seconds!

You freak! You’re doing it wrong! You sick weirdo! Slow down! You think that’s a good technique? Hmmpf. Whatever. Keanu Reeves’ acting is more inventive and exciting than this. You horrible wreck. Slow down! Think about baseball or something. Oh God, you’re about to orgasm! You pitiful moron! Don’t to do it! Stop, slow down, switch positions, something! This is it! You’re gonna blow it! You worthless, infantile piss-ant!”

So, two minutes later I was all finished up and sleepy.

I got to thinking about the pornography that they had chosen and left for me. It was strange to think about the process by which someone shopped for what mags to leave in the room: “Let’s see, Barely Legal. That’s a crowdpleaser. And Playboy for the
classicists….Oh yes, Hustler of course, that’s a nice starter.”

I felt like a dupe.

I felt horribly predictable and pandered to. It was like watching a dog food commercial that makes you feel sentimental, or whistling a catchy radio ad for soap.

So the next step is to donate once more to confirm that I have an”above average” amount of active viable sperm in my ejaculate.

Above average?

Oh no! I’ve never been above average in anything except the Body Mass Index. Damn. It will take a miracle of God himself to pass this test. I’ve been told that you can’t do anything to effect your sperm count which doesn’t make sense to me. It seems that by eating steak, watching more hetero-normative internet porn, or lifting weights would help me amp up my levels a bit, but no.

I am really excited about this new venture of sperm donation. I wonder what they do with the sperm.

Ryan McGivern

I have an eating problem. There, I said it, and admitting you have a problem is the first and only step, yes? I am a fine eater when I cook myself, when I plan ahead, when I venture to restaurants and order with my own free will. Within my design, I consume enough broccoli and spinach to construct a solid green bridge across Minneapolis, enough quinoa to fill your bathtub each morning, and enough beets to have a decent career as a professional boxer.

The problem arises with the seductive concept of free food — perhaps at a Super Bowl party, an employee staff meeting, a hotel continental breakfast. Those unguarded coffee cakes, muffins, potato chips, croissants, cookies, cereal, pasta — a thousand shades of empty brown carbs, sawdust disguised as food. I stuff my face and belly galaxies beyond their capacities on my way to feeling heavy, bloated, and exhausted. Inside my binges, I don’t actually taste or enjoy the food so much as shovel it repetitiously inside me. And my only stopping points are when the food is gone or when someone provides me that sexy look of disgust.

If you are what you eat, I’m over-refined, baked and superficial. Link

The Goodwill Outlet in Seattle store sells copious masses of materialistic scatology by the pound. Quality and style can be discovered in this haystack, but the disorienting fluorescent lighting design, the windowless warehouse container of a building, and the mothball stuffiness make extended shopping trips a bit unbearable. I shop mostly for encyclopedia, reference and children’s lit books, for collage projects.

A fascinating anthropological phenomenon occurs whenever the staff bring out a new bin of items. A pack of people gather around in rabid red-eyed anticipation, mouths watering, a saliva puddle gathers on the floor below. “Now”, mumbles the employee, who skillfully hops out of the way just in time as swarms of violent arms grab blindly for that pair of Reebok Pumps, the purple tutu, or whatever “treasures” happen to lie within. This bloodthirsty pack mentality makes me slightly ashamed to be both human and American. But shame is an idiotic emotion, judgmental, arrogant and not often helpful, so I should get over myself. I’ve read that more than 1.5 million people make their entire living off of Ebay. I imagine some of them shop here.

My friend Courtney visited the Goodwill Outlet last year with her friend Jenny. Jenny brought along her fancy new digital camera, with a entire memory card filled to the brim with invaluable photos of family and friends. She and Courtney wandered around the Outlet shopping for clothes when Jenny realized her camera must have slipped out of her possession and into one of the bins. She and Courtney looked for it, and Jenny eventually asked about it at the front checkout. She was told that someone had just purchased a digital camera at $1.50 a pound. Jenny was distraught; at that same moment, a lucky Goodwill customer felt ecstatic; all they need is a battery charger and a usb cable.

This is a picture I did not take of a woman in fitness workout wear; running shoes, shorts and an active top; standing by herself in a deserted aisle of a flourescent-lit supermarket, her arms crossed in front of her chest, tears smearing her cheeks while she unwaveringly stared at the store’s selection of baby diapers.

A photography teacher suggested I sleep with my camera, to take it everywhere so as to photograph life as it happens. However, I found staring at life through a lens invasive, non-participatory and mechanical, and I was always worried about my equipment, so this was a difficult proposition for me. The website UNphotographable is for those non-photographed moments of beauty, humanity and impermanence, translating image into words. Link

This is a picture I did not take of a cardboard box sitting on the sidewalk in front of the Post Office, like a package that someone was so excited to receive they couldn’t wait to open it, and they walked out of the Post Office and peeled back the lid to find it was filled with nothing but brown leaves, and in sadness or bewilderment, just left it there on the sidewalk, abandoned.

Cheese contains tryptophan, an essential amino acid that aids with production of serotonin and melatonin, natural chemicals that regulate sleep and brain patterns. A study by the British Cheese Board surveyed the effects of varieties of cheeses on types of dreams. For example, it reports that of eaters of Red Leichester (nibbling an hour before bedtime), “over 60% of participants … revisited their schooldays, or long-lost childhood friends, or previous family homes and hometowns.” I’ve experimented with Stilton four times now and have been blessed with purely whimsical fantasy sequences that Roger Ebert would give three thumbs up to the moon, grasping its craters like a bowling ball, and aiming for Saturn’s moons. Cheese dreams might be a fine reason for vegans to reconsider the rigidness of their dietary belief systems and permit their lives a bit more color. Link

Three locations where I am guaranteed an existential dilemma, my mind wandering to universals, amorality and an acute sense of mortality:

• wandering on an overpass/freeway, hovering omnipotently above passing cars, drivers oblivious to me, motoring like ants to and fro mundanity, the potential of death and chaos caused by a simple unintentional stumble or intentional hop over the edge.
• at a concert venue, the performer playing at me with memorized material that I’ve probably heard before, an absolute zero of interaction between us, the faceless masses of humanity surround me, staring, laughing, snorting, ignoring and other sorts of predictable behavior, if I didn’t exist everything would be the same.
• backstroke in a pool, alone, drowning possibilities, gazing at the domed empty space above, sprays of water blurring my vision, audibly deprived, chlorinated sense of smell, a fear of proximity to the concrete edge, images of cracked skull flashes like lightning through my mind, pool water contaminated with blood, everyone has to get out of the pool while they clean me up.

More optimistically, have you heard of Ghost Riding the Whip? — a cultural phenomenon from the Bay Area wherein participants dance outside and on the hood of a driver-less automobile (the “whip”) while it rolls in neutral. Link

Hello friends! Have you ever eaten a dandelion? or dirty danced to our national anthem? or dreamt what life would be like if you were born a free-willed amoeba instead of a suffering human. Well have I got the tonic for you. It is tall and fizzy and just might knock your top off and make your nipples hard. Yesiree, with a quick swig of this warm, milky fluid you will grow two inches in every direction, you’ll be chosen by NASA to fly to the non planet of Pluto, and you’ll get to bring along the superhunk of your dreams, either Mike Tyson, Tom Petty or Alberto Gonzales.

It was invented by Ron L. Cubbard, science fiction writer and explorer. During a trip to Canada, he spoke with a farm boy who was standing next to a large goat-like short haired bison. The two entered into a sex-for-rent arrangement and also launched the now world famous “Shepherd’s Friend Health Tonic”. It tastes like your mother, it’s best served between lukewarm and boiling, and goes well with duck and veal.

In Greenland, a two ounce bottle of this gift of the gods will cost you more than an upside down Ford Taurus. But now — actually not quite now — at the sweet stroke of midnight, on this blog only, I will sell you a bottle for the cheap as ass price of your dignity. That’s right, suckers, your dignity is all we will take! We’ll take your dignity and feed it to the ducks.

I know what you’re thinking. You’ve been robbed of your dignity by your spouse, your job, your career in low grade porn, and now you feel that your battered conscience and self esteem can’t handle anymore buffeting. Well, before you make your decision, may I also add that “Shepherd’s Friend Health Tonic” is gluten, dairy, soy, sugar, molasses, yeast, toast, hair, and egg free. (These claims have not been evaluated by the FDA)

Look into the eye of the beholder. It is time to be ahead of your time. Buy it or it will buy you. That is all. Link