Obscene Chewing

2008-11-30T17:06:00.000-05:00

I Finally Saw the Light (A Fiction)

2008-03-31T17:44:00.014-04:00

[Disclaimer: This is one of the stupidest things I have ever written. Celebrate my stupidity with me, won't you?]

Judith Light was standing there, in a shallow pond of what we naturally presumed was her own vomit. Its color was manifold, undulating at its periphery in contrary shades of utilitarian brown and shrill raspberry. Occasionally, she picked up her foot, set it down, and then the other, very horselike, undemure, and set off a dozen or so generations of ripples riding out and dying in the shallowest reach. She was less graceful than I'd imagined--when I'd taken the time to (imagine her), that is. Which was--if I'm honest--never. Who after all takes the time to think about Judith Light anymore? She won't mind me forgetting her if I smile, pretend not to notice the fresh sick sloshing around her sad businesswoman flats.

I said to Angelica at first, "She looks like..." But I wasn't quite sure. It might've been Joanna Kerns, or even the woman who painted nails at the Wal-Mart kiosk. She looked like bits and pieces of every woman. A bleached blonde amalgam. Oddly sallow.

But Angelica said, "She is." A brutish declamation. Her voice rounded out with a degree of certainty that sounded borrowed. She (poor Angelica), you see, was a slave to binarisms. She fretted everywhere, almost vocationally. Even behind her empty shopping cart, she was debilitated by Choice, which chattered and cajoled in red sunburst packaging and orange clearance placards across the canyon of superstore. Lays or Ruffles? Pepsi or Coke? Glad or Ziploc? Paper or plastic? Sometimes she frazzled and hissed, like a dying flame, and then surrendered, leaving only with one waxed roll of Neccos and a bag of water softener salt. The small tasks were large, and vice versa. She decided to unplug her mom, dying of some vague debilitation, for instance, in a matter of only minutes. Life and death were obvious things, you see, but lunch meat--there was the stuff of dialectic!

"I know it's her," Angelica reaffirmed, almost as if I had protested. But I knew better. Angelica had seen every episode of Who's the Boss? many times over. She wasn't what I'd call a fan of the show so much as a fan of the routine of watching the show, which she did without fail. She was a religious woman who in fact paid no mind to gods or their long-faced retinues. Her rituals were, rather, crosswords and sitcoms and cross-stitching and hair brushing. Sometimes she bored me so much that I wanted to pick her up, crunch her up into fours, and flush her down the toilet; at other times, less frequently, she looked very much like a wounded adolescent deer, lapping up my too-easy sympathy. Her eyes were wide and very stupid but yearned for a gentle knead of the flank or a finger tipple behind the ears. All in all, our marriage was troubled. I had gambled and lost, I realized. I should've married someone who didn't speak English or didn't have long to live. Which one of us would die first? I was already making the calculations.

Before the beeping and castered supermarket microcosm had time to settle, to asborb the strange reality of a washed-up sitcom star standing in her own rebellious lunch, Angelica walked stutteringly over to Judith. She walked, I used to say, like E.T. did, clipped, swaying, and sort of silent-filmy, in the manner of Chaplin. Once I asked her sister if there was any even very, very small chance that she (Angelica, not her sister) were maybe retarded just a little, only I didn't use the word retarded but a prettier euphemism. I can't remember which, but one that made her (hypothetical) disability sound more like a cute foible. To my surprise, her sister laughed, quite sinisterly, but didn't answer. Later I found out that Angelica had once tried to kill her sister with the flat of a shovel. Angelica had been twelve, her sister nine. Her sister somehow survived and seemed mostly unresentful. She even sometimes claimed that Angelica was kind and smart. I wondered later, when I was lying in bed, whether she was being ironic. I almost wanted to call her and laugh and say that I finally got it. The joke, I mean. If she laughed too, fine; if not, well then, wrong number...

"Are you all right, Miss Light!" Angelica barked. It wasn't a question so much as the beginning of a show tune. I held my breath. Suddenly anything seemed possible: the end of the world or, worse, my very short wife hugging this has-been with her puggish snout reaching only the southern hemisphere of Judith's bloused hoohahs. I was tempted to flee. To abandon our groceries and run, melodramatically, like Tom Cruise in The Firm, whining and baring my rabbit teeth all the way. But I didn't. I was a failure even at cowardice.

"Uhhh..." was what I think Judith said, although I'd have to see the transcript to be certain.

"Are you overdosing?" my wife asked, very sympathetically. She had acquired a medium-grade showbiz wordliness from leafing through month-old issues of People in her psychotherapist's waiting room.

"Uhhh..." was what Judith responded. It seemed somehow eloquent in the moment.

"Whom should I call for help? An ambulance?" Angelica asked.

"Call Ricky...!" Judith rasped, rifling through her obviously knock-off Louis Vuitton handbag. Obviously because, I mean, you don't get that kind of money from doing stage productions and Lifetime Movies. I remember the TV flick-of-the-week where she was this ditzy married woman in badly patterned sweaters, who was being stalked by Jack Wagner. At some point he was chasing her through the bleachers of an abandoned indoor sporting venue. She, of course, had great difficulty eluding her well-coiffed pursuer. She stumbled on occasion over the bars circling the loges and crumpled like a ragdoll on the concrete steps; Wagner, meanwhile, was an experienced stalker, wearing black leather gloves and easing around plastic seatbacks as if he was born for this kind of thing. I think he either raped her, or almost did, but I couldn't quite suspend my disbelief far enough to make me think anyone would want to rape Judith Light. But to each, as they say, his own: in this case, Jack Wagner's own. No, she wasn't the ugliest broad around certainly, but she was unsettlingly avian. One dreaded, subliminally, her shriek, all of a sudden, like kookaburra, very hard of beak.

"Who's Ricky?" Angelica said, with a toughlove familiarity that made me feel suddenly intrusive, as I clutched a plastic bag filled with a six-packs of paper towels and a box of trashbags close to my groin. Should I be doing something? I wondered. Nah, I answered.

"He's my friend," Judith explained, her eyes darting around her to a Farmer In The Dell style ring of onlookers encircling her vomit puddle. Then she confided (I later learned from Angelica), very quietly, "My dealer..."

"Heroin...?"

"I don't remember anymore," Judith cried, suddenly very loudly. "My God, somebody help me! I don't...! I can't...! Is this here what I did? [The vomit, she meant. It was a rhetorical question.] Oh my God, oh my God... Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Sorry if there's kids around ... oh my god, kids... Alyssa Milano and I used to play parcheesi right after we... after we... What happened to those good old days, Danny?"

By Danny, we all assumed--in some meta-psychological congruance--that she was referring to Danny Pintauro, who played her awkward, geeky son Johnathan Bower on her sitcom. We had no idea then that Danny was also the name of her sponsor in the Church of Satan... Danny Ransbottom was his name, a middle-aged man weighing three hundred twenty-six pounds, living in Brentwood, and describing his hobbies as neo-rebirthing techniques and advanced origami. During an ensuing investigation, Pellicano-related, you understand, it was revealed that Danny was prepping Judith as an accolyte of the Church of Satan and, alternately, trying to lay her. He entertained morbid fantasies, never realized, of mounting her from the rear while querying, "Who's the boss? Yeah, who's the boss?" It seemed an inordinate bother for such a lame punchline, if you ask me, but then again you didn't.

After calling for this Danny Pintauro/Ransbottom archetype, Judith Light--the moderately erect, still self-supporting actress--suddenly collapsed, becoming Judith Light--the pile of overbleached hair and cheap navy-blue rayon. At least until the ambulance arrived. An indignant woman in a "Do I Look Like I Care?" sweatshirt was overheard remarking to no one in particular: "Well, I for one am never watching Mr. Belvedere again."

Angelica proudly supported Judith as she thrust the latter, ass downwards, into a shopping cart. She smiled emphatically, like Corky at special needs summer camp, while she wheeled Judith out to the curb to await the paramedics. She stood, supervising her cargo, while a slouchy teenage superstore employee waited, in a parallel stance, for a customer to pick up his Olevia LCD 42" television.

Finally, the matter was resolved. Judith was picked up by EMTs, who stalled for a smoke by one of the cart returns, and Angelica returned to my side to retrieve out groceries. The sloosh-sloosh of a saturated mop, flicked to and fro, snapped me out of my reverie, as I handed my wife the economy pack of Angel Soft toilet paper and reported, gravely, "Honey, I think we need to talk..."

Suicide Notes

2008-03-25T17:16:00.005-04:00

1.

Dear Barbara Ann, Barbara, Louise, Tamara, Loqueesha, & Chuck:

Let me preface this by saying that it's been fantastic, relatively speaking, working with all of you, but I decided to kill myself last night after you all left. I hope that whatever mess you will find in my office can be remedied with a little Mop N Glo, but if not I'd advise googling "stain removal" and/or "tough stain removal" and seeing what this yields. All of the files pertaining to the Ramsey account are in my desk, right-side, bottom-drawer. I also wanted to say that for the past five years I've been stealing paper towels, toilet paper, and pens from the office. That has been weighing on me for some time. You're free to charge my estate a reasonable estimate of these charges, whatever that might be. I also want everyone to know that my life has been a complete and total lie--although I'm hesistant to spell out the nature of said lie because what if I don't die somehow and they take me to the hospital and revive me? Then you'll know my lie and I'll still be alive, and then of course I'll have to kill you. Haha. Just kidding. But anyway, right... Complete and total lie. Just chew on that for a while.

Jacob

2.

Patricia Ann,

I hate you. Enjoy my splattered brains all over your fucking brand new offwhite couch. Please cancel our reservations for the Caribbean cruise before July 1st to get a partial refund. I don't want those fuckers getting my money. Or I guess you can just take whoever you're fucking by then. Or whatever. You're one sick bitch, by the way. I finally realized that thing you had wasn't psoriasis.

Joey

3.

To Whom It May Concern:

Ha. That's a laugh. As if my death concerns anyone, as if anyone gives a good shit. They'll probably only bother to notice anything when I start stinking up the place. By then they'll have all forgotten who I was and won't be able to tell anymore because I'll be all rotten and shit. I guess that's why I'm leaving this stupid note. It's just that when someone finally gets around to finding my maggoty old body, I want them to know who it was that fed those maggots. Me. Ricky Limbeck. Yeah, I was that creepy guy all of you assholes never bothered to talk to. I saw you when I was downstairs getting my mail, but did any one of you ever bother to say hello or how are you? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Get real! Why waste the energy on me? Maybe you can't tell now, but before the maggots started eating me, I was a fat slob. A fat, bald slob with no friends and a dead-end job working for the highway department. I have never had sex with a woman in my life. And before you get all snide about it, I haven't had sex with a man or even an animal either. A wild boar would've probably even barfed at the thought of getting poked by me. And that wild boar would be right. Damn. I never thought I would have empathy for a wild boar.

Ricky Limbeck

4.

Lucas,

So there you go. I finally did it. You didn't believe me all these years, thought I was bluffing. It's not so pretty is it? Have fun explaining to everyone how you ignored the warning signs. I could have had "I'm Gonna Kill Myself" tattooed on my forehead and you would've asked me for the remote and farted. I really hate that I had to go to this length to prove a point, but as you are well aware I'm a principled individual. I believe in personal integrity. Now go get a bucket and scoop my integrity off the floor before it seeps into the basement. I do want you to know that I loved you once, in a theoretical sense. Let that warm your heart as you trudge through the years without me.

Judy

5.

Dear Sir(s) and/or Madam(s) and/or Other(s):

It is with great sorrow that the undersigned hereby tenders his/her suicide note, thereby notifying the above-referenced person or persons of the intent by the undersigned, whether acting singly or as a spokesperson for a larger group, to terminate his/her (their) life (lives) without additional notice. Furthermore, the undersigned would like to thank the recipient(s) for the immediate closure of all correspondences with, accounts of, and other exchanges to and/or with the undersigned or to and/or with those entities which the undersigned herewith represents as a legal and binding spokesperson.

The Undersigned (Please Print Legibly):___________________________

The Giving Tree Review

2008-02-22T13:02:00.004-05:00

My review of Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree was officially expunged from the records of goodreads.com today with no notice. I am endeavoring to resurrect it. Thank you to Tracy for having the foresight to anticipate censorship. [UPDATE: I'm happy to report that the original review was reinstated on goodreads.com on 02/25/08. Now the world at large may at last enjoy this poignant, life-changing piece of writing.]

Okay, this is some motherfucking fucked-up shit right here. The Giving Tree is the straight-up wack story of how this selfish little ass-faced prick kicks it with this full-on saintly tree. Everything's fine for a while, with the lil' prick all getting up in there and saying to the tree, "Yeah, you know you my bitch," but then all of a sudden, this jumped-up prick goes through puberty, gets his chia on or some such shit, and so he's off screwing the skank-ass bitches on the block all damn day and can't spare one motherfucking minute for this poor old tree who is waiting for him and is looking all motherfucking sad and droopy. So this little punk-ass bitch comes up to the tree--this is a motherfucking tree, hear?--and asks her [it's a sexy-ass lady-tree] for some g's. Well, the tree is all, like, "I ain't got no cash, bitch. What part of me says ATM on it?" And she should have held up there, but--no--this tree gets all fucking benevolent and is like, "Well, I've got mad apples you can go hustle on the streets." So this ass-faced prick just, like, boosts all these damn apples and leaves this tree with, like, its weave all out and shit. So next, after working the streets with his crew, little bitch boy comes back, looking all old and jacked-up, and asks the motherfucking tree for a goddamn crib. So the tree's like, "Hol' up. Do you see Coldwell Banker all up and down in here? I think not." But then, being all kindly and shit, the tree is like, "But I got mad branches..." And what? She motherfucking takes it in back for this fool again. Later, another goddamn time, punk-ass bitch comes back, looking all old and saggy and wack now, and he's like, "Bitch, what you got for me now?" "Awww, hell no," tree says, but then she starts getting all soft and shit again and says, "Why don't you cut down my trunk or some such shit and go 'head and whittle a pimped-out yacht, full-on Hamptons-style?" He's like, "Yeah, I thought so, bitch." And then--guess the fuck what?--little shriveled up, played-out mack comes on back wit his ass all hemorrhoided and shit. He look nasty and old. Tree is like, "I know that you ain't come to ask me. All's I am is a motherfucking stump, motherfucker. How you gonna come back at me like that?" This punk-ass bitch is all drooling and jacked-up and just wants to sit the hell down. What does motherfucking tree do? Says, "Hell no! You motherfucking fucker get your motherfucking ass face out of here 'fore I cut you up good: give you some mad tree fungus, motherfucker!" The motherfucking end.

Okay, so that's not really the way The Giving Tree ends, but maybe it's the way it should. Some time ago, my ex-girlfriend and, afterward, long-time co-dependent friend gave me The Giving Tree as part of my birthday gift. I loved it, but I hated it, too, because I felt so bad for the tree who is endlessly shat upon by this worthless "Boy"--as he is always known, regardless of age; I longed to console the tree and, maybe a little, to condemn this book as yet another emotionally-scarring "children's" entertainment in the manner of Old Yeller. Don't give me any shit about learning valuable lessons. The only lesson I learned was that human beings are nothing but steaming piles of corn-freckled feces, and that I wanted to found a not-for-profit shelter for unloved trees and rabid dogs and any other nonhuman thing, living or not, which was either unwanted or despised.

Having said all this--and although I don't approve of the treatment of the giving tree--this book is very moving and very delicate. The delicacy is somewhat counteracted when the reader turns over the book and sees the author photograph of a thoroughly evil-looking Shel Silverstein. He looks like the sort of person who would burn down whole forests of rare giving trees just for kicks. Picture Othello just before he strangles Desdemona.

If you--and, yes, I'm talking to you personally--are not moved by the plight of the tree after reading this book, then perhaps it's time to check yourself: are you the giving tree or are you the motherfucking taking tree? Or are you the sneak-out-in-the-middle-of-the-night-and-steal-all-my-shit tree?

Single White Little Bear Seeks Predator

2008-02-21T20:14:00.004-05:00

I’ve never been molested (that I recall), but it would’ve been nice to have been asked. After all, I went to a Catholic grade school, where, in retrospect, one expects to be inundated with bad touches from every conceivable angle. Statistically speaking, I should have been like a clip-on tied Toshiro Mifune in one of those classic black-and-white Kurosawa films, parrying attempted blows, so to speak, from an encirclement of inept samurai. (Didn’t you always love how the opposing samurai thoughtfully took turns attacking, leaving Toshiro ample time to pirouette and meet them all head-on just before julienning them with his sword into a side order of samurai frites? It entailed all the courtesy and logistics of a modern gang bang.)

Alas, I threw a party, and no one showed up. As a prepubescent, I wore the proscribed Corpus Christi grade school uniform: a light-blue long-sleeved oxford, a navy blue necktie, and matching navy blue cotton-polyblend pants, into which I packed what was, no doubt, a tantalizing young bootie that--sad to say--drew no takers. In my imagination, I seemed like ideal jail bait (or, I should say, cash settlement bait) to some lecherous priest who might prove creative in repurposing the darkness of the confessional booth; but the parish priest Father Blank [a real not a symbolically-assigned name] was all business and seemed to suspect only that I had shaved a few incidents of lying and/or dishonoring my father and mother from my sin tally and not that I had a seriously bangin’ eleven-year-old ass. (Or maybe he preferred huskier boys. The kind who are always somewhat damp and get red-faced from a single flight of stairs. In the end, who can account for the totalitarianism of taste?)

Somewhere around second or third grade, we were all marched, lock-step, by a glass-eyed nun into the gymnasium for a highly erotic skit known as “Big Bear & Little Bear,” which depicted the inappropriate crotch-area groping of Little Bear by another animal, the species of which escapes me. (The interspecies angle of the mammal-on-mammal action seemed to needlessly complicate the moral, in my estimation.) After some internal debate that bordered on the schizophrenic, Little Bear eventually joined the Hall of Fame of rat-faced squealers by snitching on his lover to Big Bear, whose name suggested his own proclivities. I don’t recall how the incident was resolved, but if the Catholic Church employed the fondler in any capacity, I suspect that Big Bear wound up with a “happy face” [slit throat] and floating in the river.

At first, I believed that this play (one of the lesser works of Edward Albee, surely) was a conflict of interests, very much in the manner of tobacco companies donating money to Stop Underage Smoking campaigns. But then I got wise. The Catholic Church craftily allowed these performances less as cautionary tales than as instructional guides. After all, we were just a gaggle of toe-heads without any sexual know-how… Little Bear’s initial acquiescence (“Ooooh yeah, dat how I like it, bitch.”) taught us (1) not to scream or gag and (2) to realize that we were intended to reciprocate before either one of us would be allowed to go to sleep. It is indeed very meaningful (and savvy from a marketing perspective) that I recall the fondling and not the subsequent litigation from this skit.

Of course, I didn’t allow stereotypes to limit my options either. There were, after all, plenty of pilgrim-shoed nuns with theoretically untapped hymens roaming around the halls of Corpus Christi, and perhaps my still-miniature love spigot would register as an insistent blip on one of their vaginal sonars. Then again maybe not: the particular beasts known as men accept sexual favors, as an axiom, with few preliminaries; women, on the other hand, prefer some kind of emotional connection. I shudder to think of what genre of connection was conceivable between me and Sister Geraldine, a visigothic elderly nun of abundant size and wrath.

These sisters, all over fifty years old, lived in a modest (although all-brick-exterior) convent across the street from the school with a mutt named Patches. Had the nuns of our school resembled the large-breasted, coquettish orders depicted in Italian nunsploitation films, the boys of Corpus Christi, nearing pubescence, might have been more imaginative in their conjectures of what went on in that convent. Perhaps Patches and a jar of creamy peanut butter might’ve figured prominently. As it was, we imagined only a great deal of gardening, squabbling over chores, compulsory prayer, and watching the local religious channel. Not exactly fodder for late-night Cinemax.

Years later now, I am considering suing the Catholic Church--that is, if all its assets have not yet been liquidated to pay off children who were deemed sexy and desirable enough to molest. My self-esteem has eroded to such an extent that I doubt that even the most salacious, indiscriminate priest would’ve touched me then if I’d been naked, goose-fleshed, and presented on a sterling silver serving platter along with a fifth of Dark Eyes vodka and a clove cigarette. In short, I fear that I will never properly recover from not being molested. Of course, a cash settlement in the amount of 1.3 million dollars (and a book deal) might go some way toward inhibiting my serotonin reuptake temporarily, but I imagine that I will never cease to be haunted by the specters of the myriad ecclesiastics who have failed to want to toss my salad when it seemed (to me) eminently tossable.

A Portrait of the Sandwich Artist as a Young Man

2008-02-12T08:14:00.001-05:00

After months of unemployment, during which time my job search consisted of applying at one independent book store and waiting nine weeks for a call-back, I finally decided I'd been jilted and applied at Subway. I was nineteen years old--well past the age, in my own estimation at least, when anyone not a prostitute or a hopeless retard should be delivering the question, "Six-inch or footlong?" to perfect stangers.

Sure, preparing approximately healthful sandwiches might be a career calling for some, like maybe intravenous drug users, cult members, and the elderly, but I was a vital young man. I couldn't subject myself to the existential suspense of locating the precise twenty-three second interval wherein a phallic loaf of bread was neither too under nor overdone. It was a precarious balancing act, to say the least.

The sad thing is that I only got this job because the manager knew my aunt, a prissy, neurotic woman who probably instilled in this gruff man a ridiculous faith that I would tend to a lettuce bin with tender, maternal care. Conveying his reluctance to hire a skulking, uncommunicative goth with a plaintive sigh, he begrudgingly enlisted my services and wasted no time showing me how to mop a tile floor and to mix a basketball-sized glob of mayo and tuna in a giant metal bowl using only my bare hands. (Was my aunt diddling this man on the side? I often wondered if I were maybe the reimbursement for a blowjob or something. It made me feel dirty and valuable at the same time. After all, a blow job in the currency exchange of my world was worth quite a bit.)

I worked nights at first with an emaciated woman in her thirties named Stacie. You know the type, even if you don't: skin like naugahyde, stringy hair, British-style teeth, probably born with a cigarette dangling from her mouth. She had heroin-addict written all over her. More to the point, she was obviously on the fast track to career advancement within the Subway hierarchy because she dispensed with each and every ribbon of lettuce as if it cost her, personally, a dollar of her hard-earned wages. On the back of the prep counter, you see, there was a diagram of sorts describing the quantity (often in weight) of each topping permissible on a sandwich with no additional fees, surcharges, or tariffs. Stacie, despite her ignorance of who the vice president at the time was, knew instinctively how a given number of ounces of any sandwich topping felt in her ungloved hand, and she was far from reluctant to get in a full-on huff with customers who accused her of excessive frugality. She would point to the proscribed weights and the accompanying graphics as if they had descended from Sinai and would, promptly and without remorse, upcharge any neanderthal who dared to ask for an additional black olive.

On my second night with Stacie, a morbidly obese woman and her somewhat less obese daughter approached the counter. The mother was nearly snorting and revving her hooves like a bull spoiling for a fight. Her oatmeal raisin cookie, she claimed, and not without much indignance, was overdone, dry, and crumbly. Being for the most part averse to confrontation and not really giving a damn about my job one way or the other anyway, I attempted to be conciliatory by offering the woman either a refund or an exchange for a moister, more acceptable cookie. But Stacie, fuming in the back veggie prep area and always on the verge of a bar fight no matter where she was, overheard this and would have none of my liberal sentimentality. She had baked that particular batch of oatmeal raisin cookies, with a pride of craftmanship unimaginable even to the most propagandistic of old-world communist agitators, and she flatly told the woman, "There is nothing wrong with this cookie." Then, for dramatic effect, she broke the cookie in two and took a bite of it herself. I was, meanwhile, looking in one of the laminated cupboards for Kafka. The confrontation ended in a trailer-window-to-trailer-window style shouting match. The coup de grace came when the customer swatted the cookie evidence out of Stacie's bony hand and bid a smoldering retreat. Stacie's final words were not "Have A Nice Day"--as encouraged by the training materials--but "Get the hell out of here before I call the cops!" I was hiding in the back pretending to rotate stock. Stacie joined me and acted as though nothing had happened. Business as usual.

Another thirtysomething woman named Cathy worked the day shift. She wore pink blush as though she were auditioning for a Human League video every day of the week, but she was exceptionally friendly--too much so. When she discovered that I was working on my English major, just as she was, she looked like a lioness eyeing a gazelle over the Serengeti. She started saying I should come over to her apartment and we could study together some time, but her use of "study" struck me as vaguely euphemistic. On occasion I noticed her watching me with disturbing intensity while I agitated the seafood and crab. A few times, she also touched my shoulder and back, which you generally have to know me for at least two years (and submit a criminal history report) to be able to do. Now I knew how Anita Hill felt.

After I'd been on the Subway team for a while and proven I could assemble a Cold Cut Combo with the best of 'em, I got to work alone, which I preferred most generally. Ours was a small, master-closet-sized franchise and didn't afford much breathing room for my psyche when I was paired with a giggly high schooler or a woman who saw cookie defamation as a call to arms. Plus, when I worked alone, I could steal food and money, which I did like a madman.

By now, the original manager who hired me had been shipped off to this ghetto Subway on the other side of town--the kind that's always being robbed (like once or twice a day) and has to hire an off-duty police office who won't even help slice the onions. (Maybe it was his punishment for hiring me.) The new manager was a humorless middle-aged man who usually scheduled himself during the day so he didn't have to work with me. More than once, he told me that, at evening clean-up, I failed to clean the bins to his satisfaction. Thereafter, I tried to muster a passion for bin-cleaning because it was only fair since I was stealing so much money. I figured that since I had to drive so far, from my maggot-infested apartment downtown (with a hole in the kitchen wall) all the way out to this suburban shit hole, then Subway could at least spring for my gas money. (Oh, and pay my heating and electric bills, too.) What I'd do is, since I pretty much had the costs of everything (tax inclusive) memorized, I'd just charge the customers for the sandwiches without ever ringing them up. The communists would have called it expropriation, so I will too.

Also, at the end of every night, I'd take bagfuls of assorted sandwiches, chips, and cookies home to my girlfriend. It seems that the two of us were on the Subway diet when Jarrod was still the fat fucking slob of folklore. We should, to this day, probably be getting royalties for this ad campaign since we subsisted on a diet of veggie subs, chocolate chip cookies, and Boone's Farm Sangria for months (the last of which, although not necessarily a part of the Subway diet, was compliments of the evening take).

One night I really fucked up a batch of bread. I took it out of the oven too early because I wanted to pop in back for a quick ciggie. The resulting bread was malleable like Play-Doh and was thus unusable. Even Stacie, with her diminished quality control standards, would never have served these gummy spheroids, which were more suited to a potter's wheel than a sandwich. The next day when I reported to work, Mr. Big Shot Manager threw one of the preemie loaves at my feet, and it bent parabolically like a flaccid penis. He was, needless to say, unamused by my negligient baking. I myself did not know exactly how to react. No one, manager or otherwise, had ever thrown bread at me before, and there is as yet no Dummies guide that tells one what to do. I diagnosed his acting-out as displacement, imagining he suspected that I was skimming from the top but didn't have the hard-and-fast evidence yet. So I was kind of looking forward to unemployment again in a way, although life without gratis sandwiches would place new obstacles in my way. Visualing prosecution and prison rape, however, I made a very conscious effort to avoid the accusatory glare of the hidden camera when I nightly pocketed the loot, and I would at least, from now on, hit NO-SALE while I was conducting a mock transaction to give the action a little dramatic intensity.

Imagine my surprise a few weeks later when a teenager on the afternoon shift cheerily told me that the police came and took away Mr. Manager in handcuffs that very day during the lunch rush. Apparently, the owners of a dozen or so Subway franchises discovered he was embezzling money, so he probably just threw bread at me because I was infringing on his territory, which I can understand in retrospect. I'd probably throw bread at me, too.

My tenure at Subway therefore ended under the reign of yet a third manager, a noodly type, who seemed frightened of me, as if I might have a secret yet powerful alliance with Lucifer. He would ask my high school co-workers, in my absence, if I was "a punk rocker" or what the story was. They would just shrug their shoulders. I had won them over long ago by teaching them how to stir up mayo, mustard, tomato sauce, bits of meatball, oil, and cookie fragments in a Subway cup and then dump the concoction outside the front door on the sidewalk so that it looked like freshly discharged vomit. This tactic would deflect a few of the more squeamish of our prospective customers and make for a stellar reaction shot as cars pulled up to the front door.

My final days at Subway were whiled away under the threat of imminent bloodshed and Texas-style vigilante justice. The owners of the franchise, a paunchy, middle-aged couple, met with all the employees to warn us that Manager #2 (the embezzler, in case you lost track) was currently out on bail and that, if we should see his car pull up, we were immediately to lock the front door, hide in back, and call the police. I was beginning to feel that much of this was above and beyond the call of duty for a Sandwich Artist.

Naturally, all the embezzlement hoopla had whittled away my courage for stealing money, and I was able, in the subsequent McCarthyist witchhunt that I dreamt up in my head, to boost only an occasional sandwich or two. It goes without saying that the sandwiches never tasted as sweet, so to speak, with the threat of disconnected utilities and, more important, a depressing lack of Boone's Farm Sangria on the horizon. I subsequently left my celebrated career at Subway for a stint as an inept barista at a coffee shop owned by militant Christians, who made their belief that I was in league with Satan quite explicit. Although I wasn't acquainted with Satan personally, I was touched that people thought I could hang with him. But that, as they say, is a whole 'nother story...

Marilyn Bayman's Final Solution

2008-01-31T18:30:00.000-05:00

INTRODUCTION

The following essay is about cursive, letter writing, and evangelism.

The following essay is not about stencils, the Mayan calendar, polygamy, Jean-Paul Belmondo, or glass blowing. If you are interested in stencils, the Mayan calendar, polygamy, Jean-Paul Belmondo, or glass blowing, please visit your local public library by walking, by driving, or by another preferred means of transportation. Your local municipality, depending upon its size and the demand, may provide public transportation to its residents, and also of course to its guests, at a reasonable cost. Please consult your local chamber of commerce or visitor's bureau for further information about public transportation in your area.

After having arrived at your local public library, via one or more of the means previously proscribed, please locate a librarian or other library employee. Library employees are often easily identifiable (1.) by a name tag or smock or insignia or (2.) by their presence behind rather than in front of library desks and counters.

After having located a librarian or other library employee, please approach her or him and say something. Suggestions of things to say include: "Excuse me, sir or madam" or "Pardon me; may I trouble you for a moment?" Please do not approach library staff members either abruptly or aggressively. The librarian is the custodian of knowledge and, as such, deserves not only kindness but respect.

After having secured the librarian's (or other library employee's) attention, please ask your question: "Might you have any books or periodicals on the topic(s) of stencils and/or the Mayan calendar and/or polygamy and/or Jean-Paul Belmondo and/or glass blowing?"

If the answer is yes, please request that the librarian direct you to these books and/or periodicals or, if you are sufficiently knowledgeable of the classification system at your local library, attempt to locate these books and/or periodicals yourself. Remember that other library patrons require the assistance of library staff members also, so please do not monopolize their valuable time with numerous silly questions.

If the answer is no, that the library's holdings do not currently include books and/or periodicals relating to stencils and/or the Mayan calendar and/or polygamy and/or Jean-Paul Belmondo and/or glass blowing, then please shut your fucking yap, sit the fuck down, and read this thing instead.

This is an essay about cursive, letter writing, and evangelism.

1. CURSIVE

A few days ago, I trudged through the snow to my plastic, collision-proof mailbox. I expected nothing more nor less than the usual potpourri of catalogs, coupons, and bills. Imagine my surprise, won't you please, when I discovered there, obstructing the face of the age-progressed missing child on the weekly coupon mailer, a handwritten envelope.

Now, I wasn't born yesterday. Far from it, my friends. I was all too aware that occasionally commercial firms, such as financing and credit cards companies, employ fonts on their mailings which resemble cursive writing. Thus, I inspected the envelope more closely. Was this another ill-fated attempt to get my hard-earned cash into the pocket of some corporate fat cat? If so, then count me out, brother.

But no. This handwriting was authentic. One could discern, upon close inspection, some gapping and blotting in the ink. Of course, I quickly reconsidered. Technology, such as it is, would surely allow a savvy ne'er-do-well to simulate the gapping and blotting of a standard ink pen.

But no. This handwriting was authentic. One could discern irregularity in the cursive. For instance, the bloated--and, one might say, obese--loop in the d at the end of David was not identical to the more svelte, angular loop of the d in Indiana. This was in fact a real, honest-to-goodness handwritten envelope.

Now that I had determined that the envelope was addressed by hand, in ink, and to me, I examined the writing for some clue as to the identity of the sender.

In no time at all, I concluded the addresser of this envelope was very likely elderly. The cursive was very precise and traditional, in the manner of someone well-schooled in the art of penmanship. Now, no offense to the modern educational system, but penmanship has fallen by the wayside in terms of the attention it receives in school. For example, most youngsters are unaware that the stem of the lower-case p should rise a good quarter-length beyond the uppermost limit of its sphere and that an upper-case Q, when rendered correctly, resembles the number 2. They say that drugs and gangs may be partly responsible for the apathy toward traditional penmanship, but the fault is more aptly directed at parents, who fail to set a positive example in their haphazardly jotted notes.

In the good old days, those glorious Eisenhower years, penmanship was deemed more than a frivolous preoccupation; it was, rather, an artform and the foundation upon which written expression was based. Many colleges, universities, and technical schools offered degree programs in penmanship, wherein advanced topics, such as the the uppercase I and the thorny transition from lower-case o to lower-case s, were discussed.

I knew, therefore, that the addresser of the envelope was the product of a sound training in the bygone art of penmanship. Reinforcing my estimate of this person's age were the fine, scarcely decipherable quivers in the larger stems of some cursive letters--perhaps signaling the advent of tremors. (Tremors, you must understand, are common among the elderly.)

2. LETTER WRITING

Who writes letters anymore? Only a very old person, surely. Picture it with me, won't you please? Some spotty-skinned octogenarian (drool and spittle, no doubt, escaping from his mouth) is sitting in front of a blank computer monitor; he or she wishes to be a part of this oft-discussed "Information Age" but can't tell a USB port from his own inflamed anus. He's so worried by the prospect of some hypertechnological dystopia that he (poor dear) soils his underthings. He hasn't bathed properly in three weeks because he's afraid he'll slip in the tub; plus, he can't remember where the bathroom is. He thinks it's somewhere over there, but his arthritic joints refuse to investigate. From time to time, he calls to his wife Edna to bring him some ointment. What kind of ointment? No one knows, and anyway Edna's been dead since the Carter administration. And her name was Ellen, besides.

Who writes letters anymore? I mean, good old-fashioned letters on parchment stationery and sealed with those quaint wax seals? Well, for starters, old people do. Experiments have shown they don't take well to change. Some people say--and I can't say I entirely agree with them--that old people should be rounded up onto several large ships. We--meaning these people--would tell them they were going on a long vacation to Gumdrop Land. "Where's Gumdrop Land?" they'd ask, if they were sentient. We'd smile and say, "Why, it's over there." And they'd say, "Good. I always wanted to go over there." So we would put them on these big ships--you know, stack up these old people like firewood--and send them off to sea. Only we wouldn't tell them there was no crew and no one guiding the ships at all. They would just drift peacefully across the majestic oceans, until they died of starvation or ran into some treacherous rock formation and capsized. This is really what some people think we should do, but I think they go a little too far. Who is going to pay for the big ships? I don't know what you think, but my taxes are high enough.

3. EVANGELISM

When I at long last opened the envelope, I was shocked to discover that the letter had been composed on a word processing program, such as Microsoft Word. I recognized the font very quickly. It was that tired-ass Times New Roman (Size 12) again. I might have been impressed by this old person, having ventured out of her comfort zone into the "Information Age" if she hadn't used the fonts Times New Roman or Arial. Those fonts are usually application defaults, and only stupid, hateful people use them.

The letter was as follows (verbatim, my friends):

My husband & I live in your neighborhood. We have not been able to speak with you personally, but we have some important information that we want to share with you. A sample of it is contained on the enclosed tract. It is our privledge [sic] to share in a work that is being done by volunters [sic] in upward of 200 lands. In all these lands, people are being invited to benefit from a program that helps people to learn the Bible's answers to such important questions as; [sic] Why do we grow old & die? What is the purpose of life? How can you find real happiness? We engage in this activity because we are genuinely interested in our neighbors. Our work is not commercial. It is our hope that someday soon we will be able to talk to you personally. Please feel free to get in touch with us by phone to set up an appointed time to discuss these subjects. Sincerly [sic], Marilyn Bayman.

See? Now this causes me to want to include evangelicals (of any age) on the Ship of Old People, if I were hypothetically to think that the Ship of Old People was a good idea. But instead of Gumdrop Land, we would tell them they're on the way to smite the fork-tongued Jew. "Sort of like a safari" is what the brochures would say.

If you happened to guess that the enclosed "tract" was the handiwork of the Jehovah's Witnesses, you are in fact smarter than you seem. I am looking at the evidence as I write this. The cover depicts an Alpine-looking land during the autumn. In the foreground an Asian woman wearing what looks like a stewardess outfit is petting a bear--yes, a flesh-eating, skull-crushing bear--along with her daughter, who is holding an empty basket. It is useful to point out that, in the subconcious imagery of Freud, a basket might refer to a vagina. (Take this as you will.) In the background, we see a black couple: the wife is wearing a matching African robe and head wrap, while the mustachioed husband apparently has on a bowling shirt. Both are bearing baskets (or should I say vaginas?) filled with vegetables and are grinning wildly, as if they just got done fucking hard behind the Matterhorn. In the far background, an Indian family (as in Bollywood, not Tonto) is petting--and I shit you not--an adult lion. In fact, the Indian father is lifting the Indian daughter up close to the lion's face, as if she were an appetizer. No member of this family is carrying or adjacent to a vagina. Last but never least, the inevitable Caucasian boy, honkeas erectus in the Latin, is carrying a large vagina filled with red apples. He is laughing heartily, although he is off by himself, and looks to me like a habitual masturbator. With all of these vaginas littering the countryside, it's easy to see why.

AFTERWORD

The preceding essay was about cursive, letter writing, and evangelism.

Marilyn Bayman wrote me a letter, which was enclosed in an envelope which was addressed by hand in cursive. In the enclosed letter, which was composed in Times New Roman on a word processing program, without the use of spell check, she endeavored to share her work with me and to encourage me to find in the Bible the answers to many depressing questions. I decided that Marilyn Bayman was old, incontinent, and a likely candidate for the Ship of Old People and Evangelists, should there be one. I hate Marilyn Bayman and vow to crush her for encouraging small Indian girls to be eaten by lions in Austria.

I do not believe, as most Christians do, that small Indian girls should be eaten by lions in Austria. Where do you stand on this important issue? I mean, where should they be eaten?

62 Royalty-Free Excuses for Whatever You Do

2008-01-25T15:39:00.000-05:00

1. Because Ted Kennedy was driving.
2. Because of whirl-jack.
3. Because the cat bit my scrotum (alt: labia).
4. Because I took an ipecac.
5. Because I was on Greenwich Mean Time.
6. Because it interferes with my rebirthing.
7. Because it’s secreting a viscous fluid.
8. Because he ran into a kettle drum.
9. Because of the South Africa.
10. Because of Lizzie Grubman.
11. Because Oprah said not to.
12. Because Sri Lanka is below India.
13. Because it’s too small.
14. Because your fedora is in the way.
15. Because I’m committed to your sanity.
16. Because she vomited in my mouth.
17. Because it’s wrinkled and hairy.
18. Because they’re easily distracted.
19. Because she’s a mezzo-soprano.
20. Because his knee popped out.
21. Because we’re moving to the Golan Heights.
22. Because it’s not notarized.
23. Because Tony Danza ate mine.
24. Because these were under your dickey.
25. Because love is an illusion--a pathetic, damnable illusion.
26. Because there’s feces on it.
27. Because Kiki Dee never gets any credit.
28. Because both base angles are equal.
29. Because he gets 40% of the take.
30. Because she was watching Mr. Belvedere.
31. Because all fees are non-refundable.
32. Because it’s a good source of riboflavin.
33. Because we’ve scotch’d the snake, not killed it.
34. Because it could spread.
35. Because I was practicing my didgeridoo.
36. Because rock crushes scissors.
37. Because of my colonoscopy.
38. Because there was no one watching.
39. Because the tip is perforated.
40. Because Clarence Thomas is black.
41. Because it’s ringed in fat.
42. Because we’re halfway there.
43. Because I forgot my headdress.
44. Because I ordered the gumbo.
45. Because it used to be called Rangoon.
46. Because your card has been declined.
47. Because a vagina resembles a shut eye.
48. Because it should be palpated.
49. Because choosy mothers choose Jif.
50. Because the real title was “Orinoco Flow.”
51. Because we hate you and wish you dead.
52. Because silk is summer weight.
53. Because I want it that way.
54. Because Golda Meir looked like a dude.
55. Because obesity has been linked to a gene.
56. Because pi is an irrational number.
57. Because old men smell like turpentine.
58. Because of the Suez Crisis.
59. Because she was the people’s princess.
60. Because less isn’t really more.
61. Because they only have it in green.
62. Because of nuclear Armageddon and other related misfortunes.

Is It Ironic to Write About Not Being Able to Write?

2008-01-25T10:25:00.000-05:00

I hate writing. Except that I love it and can’t live without it. Ergo, it had better not leave me—never ever ever!!!—do you hear me?—not, that is, if it knows what’s good for it. It’s like Joey Buttafuoco to my Amy Fisher, but just around the edges and only if you squint really hard and from a very great distance.

Whenever I settle my ass down in order to whip me up some kick-ass literature--I’m talking some real Dostoevsky-grade shit—my mind travels a circuit of distractions, large and small, ranging from the philosophical, as in: What does It, whatever It is, all mean?, to the pragmatic, as in: When was the last time I cleaned out the litter box? Then my mind, after a while, gets all muddy so there’s really no point any more. I inevitably start describing the weather for a paragraph or two—the shifting purpled clouds, antsy winds, a raw and keening chill. And nothing but nothing, as we all know, cranks a prospective reader’s knob like a full-on meteorological report. I think Shakespeare sort of closed the book on climate-as-omen in Macbeth and King Lear, leaving a better writer than I the challenge of somehow eking portent and doom out of, perhaps, dew point and barometric pressure.

I have never wanted to do anything but write, except for a brief, ill-fated flirtation with acrylic paints. (Don’t ask. All evidence has been destroyed.) Consequently, when I am unable to write—or, more importantly, to write well—my net value, as openly traded on my internal stock exchange, plummets, and then foreign markets are affected as I tumble into full-blown grumphood. Which is understandable, I guess. You try misplacing your raison d’etre and see how you feel. It’s as if you’re a plastic Aunt Jemima-shaped bottle with all the syrup gone out. An opaque husk of a once-jolly stereotype.

Writing about writing (or about not-writing, as the case may be) is even worse than just-plain-writing because it reflectively, in that very hip, very now, very postmodern way, calls attention back to the writing itself, to the writing-as-product. The process becomes naked and welcomes any and all attention that its curdled tuches receives. If you read Proust, for instance, you can get all swept up in his reveries about high-calorie biscuits and what-have-you, but if I mention that I must write, as a Categorical Imperative, a number of you peanut gallery types will needle me, as you are wont, to keep my day job. Which I have and will. But my day job just isn’t my syrup; this is my syrup, this strange, difficult, nauseating writing thing.

Do you see what I’ve done here? By assuming that my writing, vis a vis writing-on-writing, will make you hate me, I’ve made you love me, haven’t I? Or if not love, then not want to kick me and call me names. Or if not not-want to kick me and call me names, then not want to aggravate my depression because my surviving family members might find a good lawyer and sue your naysaying bloomers off.

In other words, if I’m off moping in the corner, eating Paxil like Skittles and chugging Dark Eyes vodka by the triple-swig, then what does it say about you, and, transitively, about the meanie-pants of your ilk, that you can’t fucking lift up your snarky-ass hand, set it on my shoulder, and say, in a voice of damp intimacy, “There, there.” And then pause for effect before admitting that, ere my writing, impenetrable darkness reigned and the human imagination was snuffed beneath a thick, funereal pall. (I mean, would it hurt you to toss out one mere ort of nourishing praise every now and again?)

I had celebrated the advent of the quote-unquote Postmodern Age because I had hoped that, within this new paradigm, where form takes precedence over substance, I would finally be liberated. I could be a writer without actually needing to write a damn thing. I could be the image of a writer, wedged tightly, and forever without resolution, between the seminal moments of inspiration and the humdrum drudgery of pecking at a keyboard in the fluorescent LCD-haze of early morning, vibrating doubly, from the caffeine and from the fear of being a writer who isn’t one. (A writer, I mean.)

But if not writing then what? I suppose I could go to the zoo. I like to look at the animals, although (1) I’m afraid the llamas will spit at me (either instinctively or as a matter of taste), and (2) I have an emotionally hazardous tendency to anthropomorphize, which lends itself to visions of liberating the petting zoo, Che-style. Or I could masturbate for a while. That always burns through a fair-sized block of time, but too many consecutive rounds at the maypole, as the frequent flier knows, whittles the poor thing down to little more than a throbbing nerve within a rime of slough like an onion skin. Or I suppose when all else is lost, there’s television… although it gives me the icky, contractive feeling that my brain is drying out like a rotten fruit. Ever since, as a child, I was accosted by the syndicated sitcom Small Wonder, about a ‘tween girl named Vicki who was actually a robot and always wore a frou-frou red-and-white Baby Jane dress, I have largely distrusted the medium. It’s something like finding out your wife of thirty years has been sleeping with Abe Vigoda on the sly.
Speaking of the halcyon days of youth, I remember my first foray as a writer--an inauguration which intersects the theme of crappy television very nicely. I was inspired to write my first aimless, suitably idiotic story after watching a television movie starring Gary Coleman as an angel sent back to earth to redirect the spiritually wayward. As most of you will recall, Mr. Coleman played the poor black boy, with the depressed pituitary, who was adopted by the wealthy, white Upper East Sider Mr. Drummond (Conrad Bain) in NBC’s Diff’rent Strokes. If your fond Proustian recollection requires another go with a cattle prod, you may remember him as the sayer of the oft-repeated query: “Whatchoo talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?” If you are too young to remember any of this, then just go to hell. You’ve missed out on all the finer things in life anyway.

This sublime Gary Coleman angel flick, along with an admixture of equal parts Catholic education, Star Wars, and Clash of the Titans (Ray Harryhausen), coalesced into a serial narrative under the title Herald’s Wings, authored by yours truly circa the age of twelve. The plot, insofar as there was one, involved a band of vigilante angels called Herald’s Wings who, in hyper-Miltonian bombast, attempt to keep a band of devils and auxiliary no-goodniks from invading Heaven proper. We all, with a keen eye for resale, know what happens to property values when a demon or other postmortal malcontent moves into the neighborhood and puts his Monte Carlo up on blocks in the front yard.

Many of the villains came in the form, as dictated by my developing young naughty bits, of succubus—a demon in an expressly womanly receptacle, preferably in a black rubber bodice and patent leather jackboots. (One of Herald’s Wings antagonists was named Kristie but was physically derivative—however shameful it seems in retrospect—of Kirstie Alley as Lt. Saavik in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. But that was back when the cocaine, in lieu of Jenny Craig, was keeping Kirstie thin.)

To single out Kristie as one derivative element in this ragout of a thousand purloined ideas is a bit like eating only one potato chip or accusing only one priest of tossing a boy’s salad. Herald’s Wings was essentially a run-of-the-mill good versus evil adventure dressed up with hokey celestial art direction, i.e., billowy clouds and white satin robes. But the point of this digression is that, back then, before my own fall from Eden, it didn’t matter that the story was steaming horse shit, coiled high like a fecal ziggurat. I wrote it for myself and only for myself and, although I never reread any of the episodes, I enjoyed creating them, enthusiastically and unironically, without regard for future readers, future critics, or the future me, who is now hurling figurative rotten tomatoes.
Why can’t I recapture that writing innocence? That inhibited pleasure derived from telling stories that only I wanted to hear? I guess part of the problem is that it’s lonely speaking only to oneself especially when oneself never shuts the hell up.

But we—the greater community of accomplished writers, so-called writers, and even Nicholas Sparks—can take some small comfort in the realization that no matter how derivative, uninteresting, and/or all-out stupid our writing may be, we will likely never conceive of a prose so clumsy and stilted as V.C. Andrews’s. (Here, I am speaking of the stuff she wrote before she died.) The comparative value of her fiction is always the consolation prize at the game show of literary life.

They Don't Call It the Seminary for Nothing

2008-01-18T08:23:00.000-05:00

Catholic priests love them some serious schoolboy bootie. (There. I've said it.) It would appear obvious that the greater part of the Catholic establishment got into the biz because it was advertised--strictly word of mouth, mind you--as a veritable smorgasbord of prepubescent ass. The confessional booth, that painfully literal Catholic vessel of reconciliation, affords the priest a dark, intimate, and--dare I say--romantic encounter with impressionable fondlees, who are only too eager to avoid the eternal, tendril-like fires of hell through whatever oral or anal means possible. (It's exceedingly strange the things a benevolent God asks children to put in their mouths, but God's will, too, is impenetrably mysterious and shouldn't be prodded at, as if with a stick.)

It's almost like a double-team operation. The nuns, in their function as administrators of some vague genre of religious education, create unique and terrifying visions of hell and damnation, like budding modern-day Dantes in pilgrim shoes. There is--if one backs away from the crime scene and analyzes the situation methodically--an almost sensual attachment to the morbid and the punitive on the part of these storytelling sisters.

When I was but a young lump of clay, malleable to the manipulations of these habited she-wolves, Fatima was a favorite theme of apocalyptic-grade fervor. Fatima, for those unfortunates who aren't in the know, is a small town in Portugal where, allegedly, the Virgin Mary appeared to three peasant children circa the First World War. In addition to just popping in for a visit, Mary reportedly supplied a lot of pyrotechnics and bombast to Catholic folklore, the likes of which Hollywood itself might have thought too over-the-top. At one point, according to the nuns of my youth, Mary opens up a doorway to hell in the earth to show the little kiddies what's in store for all the folks who aren't on board with Catholicism.

(Back then, I always pictured a sort of whooshing, perfectly square pocket door opening onto a scene of about, say, thirty or forty aspiring actor-types--you know, the kind of bland people you find mugging and emoting in the backgrounds of music videos. These actors, stripped to rags and grease-painted with faux burns and gashes, clamber when the door is opened; they try to extract themselves from this sweaty mosh pit, but to no avail. Today, when I imagine the scene, I am tempted to round out the image with Mary stomping on one of their imploring hands and chiding, "You had your chance, bitches!" I know this isn't in keeping with Mary's character, but I can't fight the screenwriter in me. If you get too preachy and earnest with a religious scenario, especially if you don't have Julia Roberts playing Mary, then you're going to have a hard time luring a wide audience. You need to throw in a little ironic anachronism, like Robin Williams' genie in Aladdin, pointing out hell's uncanny resemblance to a giant trash compactor or, better yet, Scandal's "The Warrior" video.)

Nowadays Fatima has been supplanted as a first-tier apparition site by Medugorje, Bosnia, where (allegedly) Mary began appearing in 1981 to six teenagers and continues appearing to this day. (It's kind of like when a really, really popular rock band books a venue for seven consecutive SRO nights of head bangin' artistry.) At my Catholic high school, there was a religion teacher who was obsessed with the apparitions at Medugorje--so much so that he neglected to teach anything at all. He simply told us stories about his "pilgrimages" to Medugorje, where he had seen the sun spin in the sky and then seem to careen toward the earth. He told each and every story with the intense nostalgic enthusiasm of one who'd witnessed the apocalypse (or a facsimile thereof) but lived to talk about it. Meanwhile, I was doodling pictures of Fat Man swallowing Little Man in my Mead three-subject notebook. Even the hardcore militant Catholics in the class half-suspected that Mr. Medugorje had suffered some incidental blunt trauma to the head somewhere along the way.

My point--and I insist that I have one--is that with all of this special effects-laden doomsaying about secrets, damnation, and unimaginable suffering, it is, ergo, pretty easy for a random wolf-eyed priest to convince your average clip-on tied schoolboy to join him under his tented robe--or else God might send him down into that New York apartment-sized hell with all of those bad actors shrieking, "Help me!" and twisting their faces into unspeakable shapes. Truth be told, the Catholic Church has done an awful lot for the child molestation industry. It has not only supplied a mechanism of persuasion (i.e., supernatural retaliation), but also a complex and secretive bureaucracy to shuffle priests around when the heat gets wind of the game. One hears tell that there are ultra-private California [e]rectories where black-thong-wearing priests, bishops, and tap dance instructors lounge around a pool whilst being served tropical drinks out of chalices by altar boys. Priests are moved to these locations when they've tapped out their parish's stock of youthful tail.

In Middle Americans We Distrust

2008-01-17T08:50:00.000-05:00

The citizens of the state of Indiana ("Hoosiers" as we're inexplicably called) trust in God--or so I am led to believe on my daily commutes by the increasing numbers of "In God We Trust" license plates worn proudly on the rusty derrieres of many a GM vehicle. In my latest ACLU-Indiana newsletter, I learned there was a lawsuit pending against the state, citing "unequal treatment," because these plates are available at no extra charge over the standard state flag plate whereas other non-standard plates incur a fee. Although I couldn't be more vehemently opposed to these license plates, the case doesn't appear viable because "In God We Trust" remains in fact (and against all better judgment) a national motto. There would certainly be no cause for a court case if, for instance, another, more neutral motto/catch-phrase were used, such as "America the Beautiful" (gag), "Sweet Land of Liberty" (double-gag), or "E Pluribus Unum" (Middle Americans loves them the shit out of some Latin). But, unfortunately, if the "In God We Trust" plates were to be (legitimately) challenged, it would only be in a higher arena. Yes, I'm talking about the Supreme Fuckin' Court, baby, and it wouldn't be on the basis of "unequal treatment" but the contentious issue of separation of church and state.

Legality aside, the issue of these license plates intrigues me because it is a striking provocation against liberalism. Now, I've never been a fan of tepid American liberalism, preferring a more radical standpoint instead, but it certainly beats the shit out of conservatism or the so-called "moderate" position. [It strikes me that "moderate" is the word conservatives use to describe themselves so as not to appear extremist or unreasonable. The tactic doesn't succeed on either of these counts.] Any number of patriotic images and/or banner-waving slogans could have been chosen for the plate design, but tellingly "In God We Trust" was selected--and it reminds one of a petulant child doing something antagonistic just because he can.

It further reminds me of the liberal "War on Christmas" fabricated by the conservative pundits. There is a neat simplicity of logic that these cultural hawks seem eager to ignore... Saying "happy holidays" is not only more efficient because it includes both holidays, but more importantly it is an authentic display of the so-called Christian spirit that Christmas purports to celebrate. It is an inclusive statement rather than all of this exclusive, arrogant "taking back Christmas" baloney. It comes down to this: By wishing others well who do not share our beliefs, we do not thereby diminish our own beliefs. This would seem apparent and yet isn't.

Similarly, people claim that if the government is not allowed to mention God, then this favors or is partial to the beliefs of atheists. This is a clear logical fallacy. The opposite of the government's reference to God would be an explicit statement of some kind that there is no God. The government's silence regarding religion and spiritual matters, on the other hand, is not an affirmation of atheism, but an expression of its respect for and non-interference in the personal beliefs of citizens.

I cannot speak for all nations or all peoples, but I have always intuited a strong fascistic vibe among Americans; perhaps this is true for all human beings in general, but I have not lived, for any significant time, in another nation in order to be able to extrapolate this claim. I do contend that Americans, by and large, immensely enjoy the pageantry and fanfare surrounding our country's claims to freedom and equality, but underneath all of that lip service there resides a strong, unnamed impulse to marginalize and to outlaw those persons and beliefs who do not fall within a relatively narrow spectrum of "moderate" ideology that is deemed acceptable by our banal median culture.

Of course, since I am a cynic, I would guess this impulse is inherent to humanity itself, but the level of the intellectual development of a nation determines how much free reign this impulse is given. America, by these standards, is very much a middle-of-the-road country, having not outlawed dissent, per se, but having limited the boundaries of ideology by means, for example, of the media and social conditioning. We are hardly in the dire straits of Iran, Taliban-era Afghanistan, or Sudan with respect to the legal prohibitions of expression, but we dangerously imagine our freedoms to be greater and more all-encompassing than they are. Rather, the rules of the game have only changed, adapted, been optimized. Citizens are controlled not through the explicit force of law, but through subtle means, which often remain unrecognized.

As a postscript, I'd like to clarify the concept of "intellectual development" to which I alluded in the previous paragraph. I am not therein speaking of "book learning" or the regurgitation of data, nor am I speaking about acquiring practical abilities for a wage-earning career. I am talking about the rarely taught skill of learning to think critically and independently--or as independently as is possible in our message-saturated culture.

Masturbation: The Hobby That Stains Most Fabrics

2008-01-16T19:06:00.000-05:00

When last I masturbated--an occurrence nearer in proximity than I feel comfortable admitting--I happened to consider the question concerning the (moral) prohibition of said practice. Well, truth be told, this meditation was only momentarily touched upon (no pun intended) at the time because, as you may but daren't imagine, my energies, mental and otherwise, were directed toward more pressing avenues of exploration during the formal act itself.

Of course, all of this propriety, euphemism, and beating around my proverbial bush is just the cowardly way of saying that, when I'm whacking off, earthquakes and Olympian thunder may shake the earth into some sort of titanic seizure, whole cities may be engulfed in spontaneous fire, and fierce, Tourettic lights from alien spacecrafts may sift through my miniblinds, but I remain immune to distraction, and certainly to philosophical considerations.

Anyway, after those several minutes of masturbation and the subsequent clean-up and reordering phase, I revisited the theme of the supposed immorality of self pleasure and where this notion originated. As is the case with much of our prevailing morality, the masturbation prohibition (not to be confused with the substantively similar Emancipation Proclamation) likely arose from a practical concern. Perhaps, if in early civilization, for example, masturbation were promoted as enthusiastically as, say, discus-throwing or etching limestone facades dorically, little would have ever been accomplished, such as expanding the infrastructure, improving chariot technology, and so forth... The (social) world would have devolved, metaphorically speaking, into a collection of dark, dank basements with pale, pimply-faced jack-off artisans churning their fists like antic pistons under a crusty afghan. In this interpretation, masturbating must be frowned up or civilization will atrophy. No one will be left on the streets, and a haunting arrhythmic thumping--countless hands in unison--will be o'erheard, rising from the underworld and causing, with its vibrations, entire tectonic plates to be forcibly shifted. The economy, too, must survive. Can you even imagine if the general anti-jerk ethos were overturned today how many people would call in sick, from shops, offices, government agencies, the military...? Spurt after fabric-bleaching spurt would erupt across America, like the fountains at the Bellagio, while Islamic fundamentalists lie in wait to crush the paper tiger. We can only hope that sexual frustration gets the better of them, although Osama bin Laden has the sleepless, sunken-eyed look of a chronic masturbator. (What else is he going to do? There isn't much in the way of canasta or light reading in a remote cave.)

Okay, so the previous few remarks may have earned me a fatwa or two... Perhaps I should move on to another hypothesis. Maybe masturbation was thought to weaken family or tribal ties because it seemed to preclude marriage and procreation. True, we now know this is nonsense because married men masturbate up to 61 to 73% more than single men on average, according to the latest issue of Reader's Digest. More disturbingly, 12% of these married masturbators have admitted to quote-unquote uncurling a wad into the concavity of a plastic Starbucks to-go lid.

I guess the reason that the no-jack ethos is so perplexing is that chicken choking appears [to me -- Ed.] to be one of the super most best, gosh-golly funnest hobbies ever invented. You certainly don't need a high-fallutin' ad agency to work up a major campaign to promote it. Masturbation sells itself: (1) Another person is not involved, so there are no hurt feelings or emotional hang-ups; (2) There is no interpersonal transmission; ergo, no v.d.; (3) Shaking one off doesn't require two people to be in the mood (a definite odds reducer) but only one (I repeat: one) throbbing id; (4) During self love, the self lover is free to get full-on fuck-ugly without inhibition because there is no other Other to dis/approve; (5) The soloist is not faced with the proposition of getting emotionally close to other human beings, who are all stupid, cruel, smelly, psychically draining, and unfathomably unwilling to cede their entire being to your will as they rightly should if they knew what was good for them. Did I just write that out loud? I guess all of that intensive psychotherapy didn't work. It's back to the pills and booze regimen pour moi.

Now all of this hubbub about masturbation may lead a more presumptuous reader to assume that I do it all the time, or at least when I'm not sleeping, eating, or sanding the floors. Let me assure you that there isn't a quota or a schedule, and I don't neglect to visit people on their death beds, for instance, because I haven't shot a wad in a day or two. There is a time and a place for everything, my friends. The time and the place just happen to be now and here.

The Axis of Good, the Axis of Bad, and the Axis of Ugly

2008-01-11T10:19:00.000-05:00

Americans enjoy nothing better than simplicity. This isn't a value judgment, per se, but a mere observation. Given the choice of digesting either a multi-tiered flowchart of oddly-weighted and incomparable variables or a cute little binary opposition, your garden-variety, middle-of-the-bell-curve American will opt for the latter, no matter the inherent distortion in most either/or scenarios. This is why your average heartlander lapped up, with almost canine enthusiasm, the clunky, juvenile propositions of both the War on Terror and the Axis of Evil.

The Axis of Evil, which was or is comprised of North Korea, Iran, and (Evil Emeritus) Iraq, calls to mind not only the perfunctory images of "commie chinks" and "sand niggers" (not my epithets, friends), but more intuitively perhaps a monolithic Snidely Whiplash-style nemesis, twirling his handlebar mustache, and securing some buxom damsel to railway tracks. That buxom damsel, if we stretch the metaphor beyond all conceivable recognition, is the freedom-lovin' Western world. (It's sissy to round out your g's at the ends of gerunds and participles, by the way.) And that oncoming train...? Well, that would be Armageddon. And if you are unable to wrap your mind around the obvious moral clarity of the situation, then your perception is either defective or, worse, contaminated by the enemy. Indeed, the situation we've arrived at is rather cold war revisited, with all of the major (and minor) players lined up on either side of the ethical line of demarcation.

Meanwhile, the idea of a War on Terror is so muddled and nonsensical that, if it were at all possible, we might likewise declare war on other nebulous, abstract concepts like Sheepishness, Ennui, and Depression. (Never mind the fact that America and its allies themselves have engaged and continue to engage in various activities that would easily align with most prevalent definitions of terror-inducement. Bombing innocent civilians in order to battle "Terror," for example, is the sort of irony to which most dunderheaded Americans are immune. The Evil People occasionally call their version of Terror "liberation," and we call our version "collateral damage." After all, as the trite bumper stickers reminds us, freedom isn't free, and a few kids might have to have their heads blown off in order to remove this abstract noun from our consciousness altogether.) I wonder if, in the future, we will branch out and declare war on other parts of speech, like maybe adverbs.

This discussion of evil and moral absolutes in general reminds me of the film Halloween, in which the psychiatrist Dr. Loomis (played with grim seriousness by the late Donald Pleasance) often refers to his patient Michael Myers as "evil"--which, aside from being a wee unprofessional, strikes me as closing off any avenue of recovery. Evil is easy to understand, irredeemable, and promises a lifetime of long, expensive, unsuccessful psychotherapy. Of course, Halloween was just a 1970's horror film, not carrying with it the burden of international relations. To label an entire country evil is itself a short-sighted linguistic flourish which reduces complex international situations to the proportions and bright primary colors of a comic book.

The Formerly Headbanded Humanoid Cracks Up

2008-01-09T18:56:00.000-05:00

While searching for the image appearing above, by entering various permutations of the words Clinton, Hillary, cry, tear, tears, New Hampshire, and weep into a Google Image search, I encountered the (expected) pictorial disparagements of Ms. Clinton, such as but by no means limited to Hillary with superimposed red airbrushed horns, Hillary with adjacent thought bubbles referring to purported lesbianism of same, various caricaturized Hillaries "cuckolded" by wolf-eyed and salivating Bills (with and without splattered Monicas in the margins), and even a cut-out of Hillary's beaming, senatorial face pasted sloppily, with little respect for the niceties of sound graphic design, over an image of Darth Vader's helmet, cape, and red-buttoned candy-box chest piece.

This blog entry is a subset neither of disparagement (a.k.a. hatin') nor of endorsement but is concerned more properly what it means to be the first viable female American presidential candidate. (I had to add "viable" to weed out the pesky and, one would suspect, long-suffering Elizabeth Dole, whom fate has consigned the thankless task of being mounted--however occasionally--by her pharmaceutically-refortified octogenarian husband. But I digress, precipitously toward the macabre.)

People who are apt to hate Hillary do not deign to go about it in any kind of wishy-washy, half-assed, or midgrade way; they really, really, really, really hate Hillary with a passion resembling only that directed toward Jar-Jar Binks and Milli Vanilla, post-LipSyncGate. With only slight embellishment, I might (and do) claim that Stalin is more beloved, if only because he slaughtered more communists--more efficiently--than any American president could ever dream of.

While recently in the presence (unwillingly) of adamant Hillary detractors, I dared to pose the most simplistic of questions: "What is it about this particular person that is so loathsome to a particular demographic, i.e., you and your ilk?" In response, I received some of the typical anti-Hill rejoinders: She's a calculating shrew, a ball-breaker, a socialist, a liar, a back-pedaler, a dyke, a terrorist-lover, an opportunist, a power-tripper, and a good old-fashioned cunt. To these epithets, I must reply that, if you excise the specifically liberal-baiting appositives, you've described nearly any major politician. (Are you, for instance, trying to tell me that Dick Cheney isn't a cunt? Methinks, Gentle Reader, he invented cuntness.)

What we have here is what I like to call, for lack of a more clinical-sounding name, the Kathy Lee Syndrome--in which case we have (1) a female (2) who is not considered sexually desirable, in the prevailing median opinions thereof and (3) who is considered aggressive and/or assertive. Kathy Lee Gifford, yes, I will grant you, could in fact be irritating in her incessant ramblings about Cody and Dippy (or whatever her kids' names were) on that Regis TV show thing she co-hosted, but to single out Kathy Lee for such intense and vitriolic animosity as was often directed at her is to ignore what a barking, tedious, buffoon Regis himself is. More pointedly, having somewhat recently been ill in bed and thereby catching a fragment of vapid banter between Regis and Kathy Lee's replacement, Kelly, I can assure all and everyone concerned that, via the transitive axiom of equality, Kelly is in fact Kathy Lee, only younger and more sexually desirable. So if we factor in all the controls of our experiment, the variables, the margin of error, etc., the brute, stubborn equation remains that a "good woman" is best seen (preferably with her top off and her jugs oiled up) and not heard, and especially not heard talking about foreign policy or economic recovery.

Where was I? Oh, yes, Hillary... Well, earlier this week, as everyone knows, Hillary got choked up or dewy-eyed or something at a campaign stop in New Hampshire, and by Wednesday morning the media was atitter with the probability that this display of humanity (subtext: stereotypical femininity) may have won her the primary because, in the past, she had generally been perceived as a tightly-coiffed humanoid bent on cold, calculated world domination (i.e., a man). Now I must ask you... Would a candidate such as a McCain or an Obama or--dare I say?--a Rudy have (seemed to have) benefited from a display of desperate emotion? (That's rhetorical, but if anyone were dumb enought to answer yes, I think I might be subject to an imminent display of desperate emotion.)

Each Is Borne on His/Her Own Gurney

2008-01-04T13:33:00.001-05:00

While I was engaged in my early morning prep work--including but not limited to the application of various hypoallergenic salves and ointments, epidermal sandblasting, consumption of own urine and/or uncooked bacon, and (continued) scheming to unmask Bono as alien ambulatory reptile (cross reference: V and V: The Final Battle)--I overheard the peroxided ding-a-ling on the local "news" saying something about the much-anticipated wheeling of Britney Spears out and away from her spawn on some sort of gurney. Of course, sharing the misplaced priorities of much of the world, I whiplashed my neck to get a gander at a snippet of helicopter footage of a kind of medical van (paddy wagon?) at some nondescript Californian locale. Ms. Spears, I heard-tell, was allegedly under the influence of The Junk, as they say in blaxploitation films. In other words, she was hopped-up and low-down, nearing the terminus of a career trajectory which reminded me of that Mountain Climber game on The Price Is Right--wherein a yodeling Alpine-type ascends to the summit and then, if the contestant lacks price-guessing acumen vis-a-vis Extra Strength Tide or Excedrin PM, said climber drops off a cliff to his presumably bloody demise. (Although the implicit gore was long soft-pedaled by Mr. Barker.)

I know: "Britney, Shmitney," you say. And you are correct to be pooh-poohing, Mr. and Ms. Cynic-Pants, but what interests me more than Britney the human being is Britney the phenomenon. What is it about this low-class, KFC-lovin' dame from down south, who comes into some dough by way of a few Nabokovian pop ditties and, by the way, doesn't wear panties, that collectivizes America (and the western world?) in a community of "full-on haters," as the pesky Kids might say? What, in other words, brings about this Schadenfreude? We can't agree on whether toilet paper should hang over or under the roll, but consensus has been reached regarding Britney (that weird Parker Posey-looking dude on youtube notwithstanding): She is spoiled, insane, fat, white trashy, dumb, smelly (okay, I added that one), and a short-list contender for the Worst Young Mother of All Time.

In case you skipped German class for a smoke in the art supply room (cross reference: Pump Up The Volume), Schadenfreude is defined by Wiktionary, in its first citation, as the "malicious glee experienced from someone else's misfortune."

And yet Britney is an every[wo]man. (Did I just write that?) I don't mean to imply that every person is an umbrella samurai or that we all enjoy flashing our downtown goodies (and their cleanshaven suburbs) to the paparazzi. What I am saying is that--perhaps more than power--money corrupts our rationality. Or perhaps more to the point, money is power, and power is transformative. We have no right to say, "What a stupid fucking fat cow she is. Why don't they lock her up somewhere?" Why not? Because we are all stupid fucking fat cows in our own stupid fucking ways. Let's get down to proverbial brass tacks here: If I were born in the south to Nascar-lovin' yokels who bleached my hair, put me in lip gloss, and sent me off to Disney to whore myself out to that ubiquitous mouse, and then later I had a hit song and video targeting the pedophile demographic, then I'd probably be listless and chubby in my VMA performance, too.

Elect This, Bitches!: A Survey of Democracy

2008-01-03T08:19:00.000-05:00

Obnoxious & Despicable: The List. As promised, he said--while his voice reverberated around a cold and empty room, not unlike an unrented banquet hall--I will begin my list of the obnoxious and/or despicable things located on this, our particular plane of reality. Disclaimer No. 1: This list does not pretend to be either comprehensive or definitive and reflects only whatever happens to traipse (daisies-in-hair) through my mind at any given moment that I happen (a.) to be situated at an internet-accessible computer and (b.) not to be masturbating. Disclaimer No. 2: I was only kidding about the masturbating. Disclaimer No. 3: The disclaimant (i.e., moi) reserves the right to disclaim other things not heretofore disclaimed by nos. 1 and/or 2 with or without prior notice and may do so at his/her/its sole discretion and without additional signatories or & etc.

1. IOWA.

Nein, meine Freunde. I have nothing against the state itself, that stout (dare I say chubby?) little geographic entity located somewhere over yonder, in what I am told is the "heartland" of America. (I reckon that puts Texas smack-dab in the middle of the "entrailsland" of the same bumbling nation. It makes metaphoric sense, no?) No, I am frothing, spitting, and otherwise bothered by what Iowa is emblematic of--especially now.

For some elusive reason, it is deemed fair by unseen powers that Iowa (and New Hampshire and other early primary/caucus states) get to determine the presidential election candidates for the rest of the nation. I don't know about you, and with all due respect to Iowans, I don't give one flying, leaping, bounding fuck who Iowa wants to be president. No person has yet provided that rarely cited "reasonable reason" why all states shouldn't have their primaries and caucuses on the same day. Perhaps it's too reasonable and meddles not only with the idea of tradition that Americans so blindly hold dear, but also with game-playing structure of presidential politics itself, which more and more resembles a big-bucks-no-whammies style game show rather than liberal democracy. (And by the way, I don't care if Iowa and/or New Hampshire happen to be good representatives of greater American public. One might suspect that the greater American public might be an even better representative of the greater American public. Plus, a single-day primary would inoculate dimmer-witted American-types against the "old Jedi mind trick" of liking to pick, firstly, their noses and, secondly, a winner. If Huckabee, for instance, gets 50% in the early states, and Romney gets 20%, Joe Sixpack, who had been previously been wooed by Romney's starchy conservatism, will second guess himself and sniff around to see which way the herd is headed.) In short, the median American is slow and is often distracted by bright lights and/or stock car racing, so it's best to simplify the process so we can if not eliminate, then minimize the stupidity. If one were forced, at gunpoint, to reduce it to a proverb, one might--and, I stress, might--say, "No detours for the short bus." (Disclaimer No. 4: Don't be snookered into thinking by my employment of Romney and Huckabee in a for-instance scenario above that I favor either of these candidates. It was only by reference to these bastards that I made my bid at folksy impartiality.)

And don't even get me started on the electoral college...

Happy Beginning of Fictitious Increment

2008-01-02T09:18:00.000-05:00

Recently, as I half-listened to Valerie Bertinelli's dewy-eyed television endorsement for NutriSystem, or Jenny Craig, or Fat-Be-Gone, or whatever it is she's hawking, I reflected upon the (in)significance of the new year. In the spatial-temporal paradigm which we, as humans, necessarily inhabit, there is an implicit hour glass marking our short time on this wretched planet. At times, the motion of the sand through the bottleneck becomes deafening, but of what relevance is the particular passing of one "year"?

True, the annum seems to acquire some scientific legitimacy via the revolution of the earth around the sun--although what relevance this astronomical phenomenon has to my receding hairline and existential dread I have no clue. Don't let the Man, in the guise of many individuated babbling men and women, fool you, my friend. Years are nothing but one big metaphor (a year, i.e., is like a cute little mini-life with spring/youth and winter/death), and I have no doubt that the holiday surrounding this non-event was originally created to lure some ancient Greek Heather-type into flashing her hoo-has at some ancient Greek frat kegger. (Whoomp, there it, as they say, is.) As if people required an excuse to get wasted and shame their parents.

The non-event in question also affords the individual a metaphorical opportunity to start anew by swearing off naughty foods (like deep fried gristle, for instance) and by getting in shape. Mental mind games aside, if you--and, yes, I'm talking to you, Fattie McFatso--don't have the discipline to slim down on an anonymous uncelebrated Thursday in early April, then a new "year" probably won't make much of a difference. Sometime around, maybe, the ides of March, you'll wake up in the trench your hemispheric ass has made in your sage green microsuede sofa and gaze wistfully at your NordicFlex or BoTrac or TaiGym equipment, jutting there--with arachnid-like poles, rods, and bands--through a beam of sleepy sunshine. It will be covered with a skin of thick dust, interrupted only occasionally by a hand print, from that time you set your pork rinds on the seat while you located the remote. New year or no new year, you will be inevitably revealed as the weak, self-pitying loser that you are, and you will have been indicted simultaneously by your gelatinous gut and the unopened cellophane around the exercise equipment instruction manual. You have been exposed, my friend, as the vermin that collects on the underside of other, larger vermin.

In short, everyone always tries to make this beginning of the year non-event a time for hope, optimism, and opportunity. As for myself, I rather prefer to see the ridiculousness of life freshly and with a renewed, refortified disparagement. That is why it shall be my "resolution" this year to compose a list--a jaunty, fun-loving list--of the most despicable, obnoxious things in this world. It shall neither be in order of obnoxiousness nor comprehensive in its scope. I only want to take a small, wafer-thin moment to give just a little back...

The Small-Penis Low-Down Can't-Be-Found Blues

2007-12-28T12:15:00.000-05:00

Everyday, after having pried my world-weary body out of my snuggly bed, I make ready for the day as well as I am able. I watch a snippet of the local morning news broadcast (a.) to ensure that Armageddon hasn't obviated my morning rituals and (b.) to reactivate my omnivorous loathing of the world; a transcript of the banter between local news anchors Tricia Sloma and Gordy Young would, I assure you, send the most self-actualized rise-and-shiner (elbows and ass) to a shrink for accelerated primal scream therapy. (All of this talk of Dopplers and lake effects tires the soul and regresses the intelligence incrementally. Just you wait.)

Eventually, by hook or by crook, I arrive at my place of employment wherein I partake of my e-mails--the unfailing majority of which provide the topic (penis enlargement solicitation) for today's discussion. Evidently, no non-surgical service is desired more ravenously than the enlargement of one's phallus or, if one is deprived of the pleasure of owning an actual "fuck-stick" (as a recent spam termed it), than the enlargement of the entirely unsatisfying small-toadstool-like member of one's sexual partner.

These e-mails do not in fact sell a product, per se, so much as they attempt to shame, cajole, and otherwise extort the reader's psychological distress. E-mail after "love pole"-referencing e-mail alludes to some hypothetical woman who is offput by my particular thingie, to varying degrees. One example, sent by someone named "Amparo J. Mayberry," asks if I'm tired of getting hot and heavy and then having her say, "Damn, you too small to be having seks [sic] with that thing!" Spammers love to encode words with similar looking characters to bypass anti-spam software. You may have blocked e-mails, for example, with the word "dick" in them, but did you have the foresight to block "dicI<," "dix," "dik," and "di{k"? (If you thought of all of these permutations of words for schlongs, then you must, by philosophical axiom almost, be a spammer yourself.)

Yes, yes, I know... Spam is one of the oldest bugaboos of the so-called Information Age, but the thing that really pisses me off about penis enlargement spam--the thing that gets my skin flute in a proverbial knot--is the assumption I make that, if I get--on average, let's say--forty of said e-mails in an average day, if such a herculean effort has been made to circumvent filtering software, then somewhere, in some undreamed-of otherworld, this ploy must actually work (at least some of the time). If no one ever opened up an e-mail about maximizing his respective "fuck scepter" and screamed, "Amen! Sign me the hell up!" then it stands to reason that these e-mails would not continue.

There are theoretical alternatives, of course. Maybe these spams are sent out merely as some sort of colossal joke. Maybe the spammers' (the government?) intent is to wear down the human psyche to such a pathetic little nub of intellectual capacity that its only alternative is to submit to the will of some insidious entity?

Oh hey. While I was speculating, I just received an e-mail from my good friend Randy I. Lopez, who is eager to inform me how I might, if I were so inclined, go about enlarging my "trouser mice" (his euphemism, not mine). Mr. Lopez, or "R-Man," as I like to call him, says, in almost blank verse: "Happy holidays!/Gate to your bliss is open/Please yourself and your loved girl with the best gift ever!/Elongate your love wand with herbal remedy!/Steamy nights in year 2008 are ensured!") At the bottom of the e-mail (in another attempt at filtering circumvention) appears the following: "Jacques Chirac was the worst president of the republic announced on Tuesday.The trial against former media baron Conrad Blackwarm and melt the moon's interior for billions of years,political assassination in New Zealand. It was made Jacques Chirac was the worst president of the republic geysers is 'organic' crimes, and has itself orchestrated and participated in Kenya with losing against India. deal, the Penguins organization would be expected to pay." The only piece of valuable info I managed to pluck from all this blather is the oft-o'erheard truism: "Geysers is 'organic' crimes." True that, true that.