I am a skeptic. While I dislike pigeonholing myself with such an effusive label, the true definition of the word is a fair characterization. Many people misunderstand the meaning and assume that a skeptic is someone that instantly rejects everything, and believes nothing. That is descriptive if a Nihilist, not a skeptic. The word itself comes from “skeptikos” in Greek, meaning “thoughtful or reflective.”

I think, therefore I am.

Charlene Dorcy is not a skeptic. Charlene is willing to accept anything anyone says as truth without evidence, either clinical or otherwise, to support their claims. Charlene believes in “natural medicine,” herbal cures, homeopathic treatments, reiki healing, psychic touch, “intuitive medicine” and who knows what else. Charlene is a moron, or rather, was a moron. These days, Charlene is something else.

Normally, your run of the mill moron, into tea therapy and chakra alignment and getting needles put into their skin, is not a real danger to anyone but themselves. They spend millions collectively to buy pills filled with water, pay unqualified people to jab them with steel, “crack” their bones and wave their hands around their aura going “woo-woo” and all it proves is that they’re assholes that are easily impressed and more easily relieved of their money. But Charlene is a beast of a different color.

Charlene is a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. Her doctors prescribed a cocktail of anti-psychotic and anti-depressant medications to control her violent hallucinatory tendencies, and allow her to live as close to a ”normal” life as someone with such a disability could. This was not good enough for Charlene. Charlene believed that “natural” medicine had the answer she needed. After all, the people who sell these callogen pills filled with grass, claim on their websites to cure what ails me and guarantee no side effects, right?

The “woo-woo” crowd strikes again.

Charlene stopped taking the medicine prescribed by the trained and educated healthcare professionals in favor of several “herbal cures” manufactured by Chinese kelp farmers with third grade educations. I only wish the consequences were as amusing as he stupidity.

In June of 2004, four years after abandoning the medication she’d been prescribed, Charlene took her two young daughters, Brittney and Jessica, age 2 and 4 respectively, to the bottom of the rock quarry in Pinchot National Forest in Washington State, and murdered them with a hunting rifle. Yesterday, she was convicted on two counts of first-degree murder and was sentenced to a paltry 63 years in prison for the deaths of her own children.



During the court session, Charlene delivered a rambling and unfocused speech to the courtroom, never mentioning her children, but lambasting anyone that might judge her for her crimes. In her words, “Unless you’re vegetarian, every time you eat meat, you’re a murderer.”

…
An open letter to Charlene Dorcy and the hippies of the Pacific Northwest,

You worthless, murderous, psychotic, pathetic, evil, twisted hippy fuck. Even without a scrap of faith in the myth of extra-worldy justice, I find great solace and comfort imagining you slowly roasting in hell, screaming in agonizing pain, in the company of the demonic hordes and their blunt and rusty tools of eternal torture. You should be publicly flayed, doused in salt, flayed again, tarred, feathered, toothed, drawn and quartered.

And you, you hippy fucks, this is what you have begat. A woman who feels more remorse for the death of chickens and cows than the brutal and senseless murders of her own young children, a death she herself wreaked upon them with an old rifle at the bottom of a filthy rock quarry. A woman whose acceptance of your comfortable distrust for “western medicine” and embrace of your ridiculous claims of “natural health” and “herbal purity” came at the cost of two beautiful and innocent lives.




You miserable, worthless, asinine, self-important, “can you pass the organic, non-gmo, macrobiotic, homeopathic soybeans” pieces of shit. You and your monstrous ilk care more for fish and birds than for men and women. Your quaint faith in the claims of charlatans is exposed as fashionable idiocy. Your lives are exposed as privileged hypocrisy, and you have blood on your hands.

It happens again and again, the questions comes to “what harm can it do?”

The “woo-woo” crowd strikes again, but this time they’ve shown us how dangerous they really are. They care more about your cat than they do about you. They care more about “feelings” than results.

But after all, what harm can it do?

Well, we’re gettin’ international up in this bitch!

While recently scanning the stats for On The Rocks, I noticed that not only are we achieving higher visits than ever, our international audience has nearly doubled!

That’s right, two!

Someone from Cincinatti, OH found his way here with the Yahoo search term, “hummer driving republicans.” Someone from San Francisco, CA ended up at this site while searching Google for “nude naked Malcolm in the middle reese hair.” A neighbor to the north, landed his sick, Canadian ass at On The Rocks searching Yahoo for, “frankie muniz shirtless.”



My favorite however, is the guy from York, England who logged onto the site with the search term, “anally retarded fucking idiots.” Number three on Google.

On The Rocks, a progressive blog.

My older brother used to do things to me. No, not in that “show me on the doll where he touched you,” kind of way, the sort of cruel jokes you would play on a sibling that seem way over the top at the time, but you just know you’ll remember with fondness in the coming years, as you gaze lovingly at the scars, both physical and psychological. The first thing I can remember really setting the tone for my childhood was the fishing lure. I had the top bunk; my youngest brother had the bottom, and the oldest, a.k.a. Torquemada, had his own room across the hall. While it was generally an “every man for himself” war fought on several fronts, occasionally the oldest would call a truce with one of us if he needed to accomplish a particularly devious prank. He had commissioned the malleable youngest for this endeavor.

Our summers were spent sleeping late and trying to quietly avoid yard work, and on this particular morning, I must certainly have had visions of Optimus Prime dancing in my eight-year-old head as I slept soundly, in spite of the sun blazing through the curtains. He stole into my room and placed a jelly-like fishing lure on the exposed flesh of my inner thigh, sans hook, I’m glad to report, and fastened it with a few pieces of scotch tape. Normally, if one were to awaken with a plastic worm cello-taped to your leg, you probably wouldn’t scream like you’d found a horse’s head or anything, but my brother, the devious little bastard he was, saw much more promise in the artificial leech. I was shaken into consciousness, roused by the motion and my brother’s screams of, “Wake up! You’ve got a leech on your leg!” and promptly began to scream like a little girl at a tarantula convention. In my half-asleep stupor, I began to try to kick it off with my foot, being completely unwilling to touch it with my hands, all the time huffing and squealing. I must have been kicking and jumping more than I had intended, because my gyrations promptly launched me over the retainer bar and smack on my ass, four feet below. Of course, my loving siblings are also down on the floor at this point, only they were rolling around clutching their sides and trying not to swallow their tongues.



The routine was for him to break into the bathroom as I was filling the tub, snatch me up in all my nude glory, and throw me out the front door, an act punctuated with the comically loud click of the door’s lock. Perhaps once or twice a month, I found myself naked, sitting on the front porch, waiting for my brother to get bored of my humiliation and let me back in the house, warning of the consequences should I tell our parents, shaking his fist at me, middle knuckle raised in the painful “pig knuckle,” already responsible for countless bruises on my young body.

I wasn’t the only victim of this insipid abuse, as the youngest often found himself in the crosshairs when it was decided I’d had enough. Although, I must admit a certain disappointment in the ingenuity of the torment exacted on the youngest, as he usually simply found himself locked in the dryer for a few hours, sometimes even quietly napping there. I got the A material.

The “Summer of Pain,” as I’ve come to remember it, reached a pinnacle of abuse one day as, once again, I sat waiting for the tub to fill, expecting him to burst through either of the indefensible entrances to the bathroom. As a precaution, I would keep my underwear on almost until the moment I slipped into the water, trying to cling to the little dignity I had left. As expected he opened the door, swatted away my feeble attempts at self-defense, lifted me under his arm, and made way to the front door. This time, however, he continued into the yard and around to the back. A sense of dread began to build, and I knew there was something particularly devious in mind for me, causing me to fight even harder, but to no avail. As we turned the corner, I saw, near a decaying pile of lumber and the remnants of our father’s failed attempts at gardening, a crudely fashioned cross made from desiccated pieces of wood. Certainly, this did not bode well, but I was so perplexed, and fatigued from my previous escape attempts, I could not raise a finger in my own defense. I was roughly placed against the cross and brutally lashed there with nylon rope around my ankles, wrists and neck. He double checked the bindings, smiled at me evilly, and returned to the house with a spring in his hoof.

There I was, stiffly tied to a splintery cross, clad only my BVDs, in the middle of the Louisiana June. It sucked. It sucked a lot.

I was abandoned there for, as best I can remember, close to three hours. The uniquely flat landscape of Louisiana allows one to see for miles on a clear day, and as soon as my brother saw our mother’s car returning home, he exploded out of the back door and sprinted the distance to my pre-teen Golgotha, snatched me under his arm, sprinted back into the house, and dumped me into a tub of freezing cold water.

To this day, I can’t imagine why he did any of that stuff. Even when I ask him, I never get anything other than “I don’t know,” or “It seemed like it would be fun.” That’s good enough for me, though. I don’t carry any permanent scars, except for a few from the chicken pox he gave me; I have yet to prove that was intentional. I do, however, have this wealth of memories, most involving me being semi-naked in the front lawn or baking under the midday sun like that guy in Shogun when the Jappos bury him up to his neck and let the ants pick at him for a few days.

I got him back once, though. I don’t remember the circumstances well, but I was just getting out of the tub, with a towel wrapped around me. Somehow I managed to corner him, drop the towel and urinate all over him. He still claims that was worse than anything he ever did to me.

You be the judge.

Last Friday night, I went to see a rapper named MC Chris. He's one of my favorites, and if you haven't heard it, his album "Life's a Bitch and I'm Her Pimp" is available to freely download from his website. If you like good hip-hop, good humor, Star Wars, or any combination of the above, I highly recommend his music. At the show, I got his new record "Eating's not Cheating" (which is conspicuously unsigned...) and I'm enjoying it immensely.

The show was in a moderately large venue, the same place I’d seen Mr. Quintron and Miss Pussycat a few months earlier, and was sold out at five hundred people. The room was less oppressive than the other times I’d been there because due to Mc Chris’s extreme asthma, there was no smoking allowed in the venue. When you hear his voice you’ll understand. And yes, he is a full-grown man.

MC Chris walked onto the stage with a Rebel Alliance t-shirt and a wireless mic, DJ Fewell plugged in his Powerbook and a wonderful show commenced. The crowd was in motion and MC Chris’s high-pitched rhymes were in full effect. He even graced us with “I Want Candy” from Aqua Teen Hunger Force. For those not in the know, MC Chris does the voice for MC P Pants (you know, the eight-foot spider with the diaper and the hairnet) on Adult Swim’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

At one point during the show, those four Rebels I’d consumed (Czech beer, not to be confused with the alliance) had made the rounds and were ready for deploy. I really couldn’t hold it, so I quickly made my way to the men’s room. I stepped to the urinal, and as I was draining the snake, I couldn’t help but notice the guy at the next station. He was about 5’5’’, maybe 110 pounds and was dressed like Jon Bon Jovi. His pants were so tight, you could almost make out the numbers on the credit card he had in his back pocket, and his medium-length, and carefully disheveled hair was dyed blue-black. He looked ridiculous.

I’m trying to finish my business and get back to the show when another guy walks into the bathroom and makes for the stall. He takes one look at the little rock star and says in this great, bellowing, drunken frat-boy tone, “How long it take you to squeeze into those jeans, Stamos?”

My first assumption was that this frat- guy was a friend of mini-Stamos here and was just giving him a hard time, but mini-Stamos turned to me with this perplexed look on his face and I realize that he was waiting for me to acknowledge this frat- guy as one of my friends. I’m fighting the urge to laugh at this point, which is made worse but the fact that the frat-guy is now in the stall, peeing very loudly and making noises like “aaaaahhh” and “oooooooooh.”

Drunk people are funny.