On Dendrology

My mom completely job-blocked me over lunch today.

Grandma found out she needs to have one of the trees in her back yard taken down and it's going to run several thousand dollars, more if the dendrologist has to haul all the lumber away himself.

So I said screw that! Jay just took a tree down at his house a couple weeks ago, and a few months ago I watched some guys on T.V. explain how to properly fell a tree, which I promptly filed away for latter use.

See, what you want to do is cut a smaller V above and opposite your main cut first, horizon on top and at a 45˚ diagonal on the bottom, then your main cut just beneath that on the side you want to tree to fall. This larger, primary cut should be 45˚ on top and horizontal on the bottom, so that when you push the tree over the two cuts form a ledge that prevents the tree from tipping back the way you don't want it to go.

I explained all of this and mom was thoroughly impressed. She suggested my friends and I could take the tree down for far less money. Grandma was then so ecstatic she doubled that price. Now I was ecstatic.

Then sometime while I was dazzled by dollar signs dancing in front of me, mom stepped in and convinced grandma she'd better go with someone who's insured.

COME ON.

I stand to make a bunch of money by using power tools to destroy a majestic maple tree? How could you deny me that? And insurance? You've already got home owner's insurance.

"But what if it falls on the neighbor's house?"

Maaaaan, he has home owner's insurance!

"But then he could sue grandma for using someone without insurance."

JEBUS CHRISTY! Do we really live in a world where every single job has to be conducted by a licensed and taxable professional? Can't a man just chop down a dying tree for his grandma because he's nice and wants money?

Godddamnit, Paul Bunyan didn't need fucking blue ox insurance. You know how I can guarantee we won't fuck up and drop a tree on someone's house? Because we're not incompetent. We have knowledge and experience and are willing to take a substantial pay cut because we are not professionals. You know how a professional can guarantee he won't drop a tree on your neighbor's house? HE CAN'T! That's why he gets insurance! Because he's become lazy and careless after so many years of working with chainsaws. He's absent minded. He has nothing to lose, we have everything. We can guarantee the job because we want it badly enough.

Also, the tree's back in the tree line way the hell away from any house.

On Avocados

Every time I place avocados back into the "FRUIT" bin in my refrigerator, the tomatoes stare at me accusingly.

I don't know why I keep caving to societal pressure and leave them in the vegetable bin, all I know is they've got to be pretty mad at this point.

On Banks

Let me preface what I'm about to say with something else that I'm about to say:

I do not partake of illegal substances.

Now I fully support everyone's right to do whatever they want responsibly, I just don't do certain things because I think my mental state is suitably askew already.

That said, I know a drug dealer who closes up shop at 9 p.m.


Think about that. He sells drugs and he keeps normal business hours. Costco is open later than this guy. "Hey, what time is it?" "It's like 9:55, dude." "EFFFFFFF MEEEEEEE…."

Really? You're really going to stop selling drugs just because it's getting late and you want to go out with your friends? Or sleep? Dude. Those are prime drug trafficking hours.

Kid doesn't even start his day until two, anyway. What kind of respectable drug dealer is gonna stay open exclusively from two to ten? You really want to keep to an eight-hour day that badly? You're like my fucking bank.

I hate banks.

They're only open weekdays in the middle of the day. Everyone else is at work. How the fuck am I supposed to get my money into you if you close in the middle of the fucking day? Seriously.

I mean, yes, I understand that you don't make anything from my money, but from taking that money and–essentially–playing the stock market with it, but man … you could at least do me the courtesy of pretending like my business affects your business hours in the slightest.

Man, help me out, banks. I got drugs to buy and my guy closes at ten.

On the Oil Spill

I was asked tonight to explain the oil spill, not so much how it happened but how so much oil could be coming out so fast for so long.

The way I explained it was like the opposite of when you get a break in your drinking straw. It's fine at first, but then you drink the waterline down below the break and suddenly your getting all this air along with your drink. The BP oil spill is kind of like that but backwards; instead of air seeping in through a break above sea level, oil is spilling out because the break is below.

But how can it come out so fast?

I dunno, man, underground pressure maybe? I mean, we drilled it it shoot oil up out of the ground. Now the derrick is just burned and collapsed into the sea and we put a ring of floaties around it. Like those little hats you give kids to keep the soapy bath water out of their eyes.

But how have we not fixed it yet?

No one's, uh, ever had to deal with one this big before. Pretty much every solution's been failing spectacularly. We put a ring on top of it, the oil's clumping underwater and flowing outside the ring before surfacing as giant goobers. We drop a giant concrete box on it, it's still spewing. We poor tons and tons of mud and cement down its fossil hole, great, now it's spewing a lower ridiculously large amount of oil into the open sea per hour. Great.

I read the other day that the BP oil spill is sending enough raw crude into the ocean now to match the entire 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster every three and a half days or so.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't we go ape shit over that? Weren't there massive repercussions? Didn't we all come together to help clean up the water and, only after containing what we called "an ecological disaster," blame people accordingly? Where the fuck did all that go? Where's Argentina and Russia and all those people familiar with oil drilling to fix this?

But we've never dealt with one this big before!

I know, I said that. That's why you had like, a month to figure shit out. How is no one on top of this kind of thing? Where's Sweden? "Oh, hey, we know we're Sweden and everything but, I mean, we've got this thing? We used it back when our entire nation went solar back in 1975? And, well, we just thought maybe you guys could use it right now."

Thanks a fucking lot, Sweden. Assholes.

Seriously, though, is there some mad businessman just waiting for the last possible moment to gouge us on anti-petrol breathing masks for fish or something? Is someone out there just waiting to Lex Luthor us and make a fortune?

Can't we send anyone to fix this?













"Send me.…GWOAN!!"

On Rookie of the Year

One of my favorite baseball movies as a kid was Rookie of the Year. I was never a Sand Lot kid, nor even a Little Giants man. Frankly, with how ardently my father and grandfather routed for the Mets and Yankees respectively, I grew up firmly believing that sports were, generally speaking, pretty dumb. (This was probably exacerbated by how bad I was at them, although I was vindicated years later after proving to have been going slowly but outrageously nearsighted. Suck it, right field.)

Anyway, somehow I still found one baseball movie I enjoyed. I never got the draw of Angels in the Outfield, in part because the dad was a deadbeat loser and in part because I loved Back to the Future and didn't like mixing Christopher Lloyd movies. But Rookie had a draw to it I could get behind. It was a sports movie about a kid, my age, who sucked at the sport he played. Granted, he enjoyed baseball, but the similarities couldn't run too far beyond unathletic, nasal Jewish boys with single mothers. He's the absolute worst player on his team, but one fractured and mis-healed clavicle later and he's playing for Dan Hedaya and the Chicago Cubs.

But something always bugged me and no, it was not any scene involving Gary Busey.














No, what really, fundamentally bothered me was the very last scene of the movie. Having re-injured his arm, protagonist Henry Rowangartner fakes out a runner on first for a second out and takes down the Mets' heavy hitter with "the floater," a questionably legal pitch once thrown by his mother. Thus the Cubs defeat the Mets, though they have lost both their best pitchers in the process.

Cut scene to a Little League field some months later as Henry makes the game-winning out back in his old right field, now a respectably decent young player coached by Gary Busey's Chet "The Rocket" Stedman, who just happens to now be dating Henry's mother since she beat up her sniveling douchebag ex.

Now look at this:

That's the very last image that appears on the screen.
You see that ring? That's a World Series ring. It says "WORLD SERIES" on it.

Now this is what I never grasped until recently: in the film, they're playing the Division series.The Mets and the Cubs are both in the same division. The Cubs' manager even tells Stedman (unaware of his freshly destroyed rotator cuff), "I'm saving you for the playoffs!"

I never understood why they were so happy at the end of the movie. They won, sure, but they had an even more important series coming up. One which they would have to play without either of their starting pitchers. Yes, the whole team was reinvigorated by the winning streak, but let's be realistic. The only reason the Cubs were doing so well was because of offensive pitching. Hitting and defensive play held their own, but the whole point was that Henry was pitching ridiculously well.

So apparently between the climax and the denouement we are expected to believe that the Chicago Cubs, without their two best players, went on to defeat four times the American League champions, which statistically has better than a one-in-four chance of being the Yankees. Any New Yorker will tell you that comparing the Mets to the Yankees is possibly the largest discrepancy in both talent and luck of any two teams in major league baseball. Are we really expected to believe that this fictitious version of the Cubs which could barely beat the Mets, sans their top men could defeat the juggernaut that is the New York Yankees?

Really?

Or are we just to believe that Gary Busey, likely through high kicks and quoting old Western movies, somehow prevented the continuity guy from making sure the prop department got a Division Series ring?

Reasons To Move Out of Your Mother's House

Reasons To Move Out of Your Mother's House:

• She has already placed a non-functional exercise machine in your room under the assumption you weren't coming back from college.
• You have failed to convince her that trading you for the master bedroom would be more convenient since your room has a hotplate.
• You've realized the only reason you leave all your stuff lying around is because you can't throw away stupid things like other people's clothes or baby pictures.
• You are tired of dealing with people who are awake in the daylight and don't want to cook at 1 a.m. every night.
  
• You have run out of places to add more bookshelves.
• You've got wonderful pop art for the walls but someone prefers to look at Georgia O'Keeffe's vagina-flowers all day.
  
  

On Bees

This afternoon a bumble bee sort of floated up to my second story window all gentle like, fat and slow and happy like an Air Hogs^TM brand personal aircraft toy.

I fucking hate wasps, and yellow jackets, and even those regular skinny bees that are just essentially tiny wasps or yellow jackets. Any way I try not to freak out, but I always keep to bobbing and weaving and keeping the damned things from landing on my at all. I've only been stung once and I'm not allergic, it just sucks to get stung by a bee.

But bumble bees?

Shit, they're my buds. We get along like flowers and, well, bees.

They're just so damned cute. All round and fuzzy. Where do they get off, really? I see a bumble bee floating around me, my first instinct isn't, "OH FUCK OH FUCK OH GEEZE GET IT OFF GET IT OFF GET IT OFF AAAAAHHHHHHGH!!!!"

It's more like, "Aw maaaa, yeeeaaaaahh…. Hells yeah, little guy! Or girl. You're all girls, right? That's cool. I'm down with equal opportunity insecting. Whatchu up to today, girl? You got some pollen off a dandy-lion or somethin'? That's pretty sweet, yo."

People freak out around bees and go spastic and put all those fear pheromones into the air and that just scares the bee. It lands on you and goes nuts and stings you and then it dies and you're in pain.

But a bumble bee lands on me it doesn't sense fear. All it says is, "Oh! Hey. That's a thing. Alright. Peace out, weird big thing," and flies off.

Hells yeah. I'm a thing.

On The VW Beetle

I've been saying for years that there is no such thing as a masculine Volkswagen Beetle.

Sure, you can get it in black, or even silver, but all anyone will see is a middle aged man with three daughters and sperm that's been swimming sideways for the past two decades.

Dean tried to argue this point once, after telling me his office had sent him on a two-day excursion in a yellow Bug. After maybe fifteen minutes, he added that the Beetle comes with a place to put flowers.

Not a cup holder that could serve as a repository for floral arrangements should you stick them in your travel mug, a tiny vase. There is a thin tube of plastic built to hold sweet smelling botanicals and it has its own little hook to one side of the dash. The Beetle has a flower hole and that's not even a Georgia O'Keefe joke.


That said, until a few days ago I would have stood by my original hypothesis that there is no masculine Beetle. I just saw it as an impossibility. There was no way to make a Bug seem cool in any way. Obviously, I forgot blatant irony.















Now, I'll freely admit this is a mock-up achieved through about twenty tedious minutes in Photoshop, but I'm not exaggerating when I say that this is a pretty accurate representation of the Monster Bug I drove past a few days ago.

It was just a strip of polymer bumper material, patterned with red and white triangles, but dammit if this twenty year old kid in his Mastodon t-shirt didn't find a way to make a busted-up hand-me-down Beetle something a dude could stand to be seen in.

Kudos, Sir. You have not only proved me wrong, you have proved life hilarious.

Bitches Be Trippin

Seriously, VG Cats has been internet gold for years.


Quote of the night:

"Women just can't go with the flow!"

"…Which, actually, is kind of ironic."

On Dreams, Pt. IV

As I am writing this, it is a little before 10:30 on Friday morning. Those of you who know me will be surprised I am mentioning a time that ends in "a.m." that coincides with their being actual daylight outside.

Truth be told, I had a scary dream. I feel like the mark of being an adult is having a nightmare and immediately being able to roll over and go back to sleep. This time, however, I felt legitimately rested and awake.

My dream was actually so disturbing, so disgusting and out of character for my mind I can't even legitimately be afraid of it.It was like watching a cross between an over-the-top Japanese gorefest and Jennifer's Body (which interestingly I mentioned last night to elucidate how horrendous Megan Fox's acting is. "Have you seen 'Jennifer's Body?' "No?" "Exactly.")

It seems in my dream I was a detective of some kind. I had a very cool gun, in fact. I had just been transferred onto the Tokyo Police force, apparently through some twist of fate mirroring the flash-sideways universe on LOST.

Wandering around, I bumped into a couple well dressed men who, according to my inner monologue, were gangsters, yakuza, presumably, but inexplicably white. In fact, one of them was my friend Steve. Steve was immaculately dressed in some kind of swanky 3-piece corduroy suit.

Apparently, Steve was an ill-tempered Japanese mafioso, because when I kept insisting I felt like I knew him from his suit he pulled his gun on me. That was the point I dove to the ground and reached to the back of my waistband for my own weapon, as my partner went for his.

Then things got all gross and creepy. Steve's boss, rather than see him in custody, fell atop Steve, raining blows upon him. Once stunned, him bit into both of Steve's ears as a scarring display of disowning. Then somehow he slipped his right arm underneath Steve and managed to disembowel Steve bare-handed. Considering I don't watch horror movies, my brain did a pretty decent job of rendering stomach, small and large intestines spilling out of a ripped abdomen.

Meanwhile, all of this is being overlaid with a scene of a Japanese woman dying in the process of birthing a still-born fetus that looks like an angry, Satanic alien baby. That was gross, but did I mention I was feeling her pain? Yes, my guts were exploding outward from my mouth, bubbles of digestive lining herniating up through my esophagus and out my mouth, bursting and squirting out white bile like a mid-nineties Super Soaker, the heat of which was palpable as it often sprayed up to hit me on the nose and face. Maniacal fetus baby cackled and hissed at me, some kind of demonic, extra-dimensional observer.

So yeah, that was pretty weird. I mean, I don't even think Japanese police officers are allowed to carry guns.

Random Thoughts That Won't Fit Elsewhere

• No one really uses "irony" appropriately. I sneezed while eating yogurt the other day and I think some granola went up my nose. If I get a sinus infection from health food, that would be irony.
  
  
• All my shirts are cutoffs because wearing sleeves would classify my arms as concealed weapons.
  
  
• It bothers me when Facebook sluts post 837,000 whorish photos and don't even have the common decency to use a high-resolution camera.
  
  
• If they combined the Coors Light train with the train from "Back to the Future Part III," I think that'd be just about the coolest train ever.
  
  
• If they reboot Superman one more time, he'll have been adopted by the Kents, a good-natured, Middle American couple on their way home from seeing an advanced screening of Star Wars.
  
  
• I do not want the "hardest working" antiperspirant. I want one that makes that shit look easy. I want the Lebron James of deodorants.
  

On Family Car Trips

Family Car trips have been pretty acceptable in my recent life, in part due to our "family" just being me and my mother in the car, and as any one can attest to, I was the kid with "The Cool Mom." Rock music and napping have been staples of a long drive for decades.

Grandma, on the other hand, is not so much "The Cool Grandma." I bring this up because I will be waking up around 6 a.m. today to bring Grandma to a train station in Connecticut so that she can attend my cousin's college graduation all the way down in Maryland this weekend.

Last time I had to drive grandma solo I was taking her to a funeral. Funner than you'd imagine, except I was ragingly sick and thought it might be divine retribution for my seething hatred of churches. Beyond badmouthing the dead the whole trip up and back, Grandma was most concerned with getting to the funeral early, because she had to look like she gave a crap.

I informed her that I would not slow below about 70 mph because our exit was on the left and I could not slow down without changing lanes.

She demanded I slow or I would get a speeding ticket and make her late. Understand she didn't care about me being safe or getting a ticket, it was that getting caught breaking the law would inconvenience her.

After about twenty minutes of this I finally yelled at her that to slow down any further would result in us getting rear-ended and her likely death, which would be far less convenient for both of us and if she didn't like it I didn't give a shit.

Considering how matriarchal our family is, it's surprising how chauvinistic it can be. I could have thrown in, "And make me a sandwich!" at that moment and probably gotten away with it.

But I don't play that game.

I don't trust anyone else with my sandwiches.

On Leggings

Sometimes I come up with a really funny idea and in searching for more information on the topic, find someone's already made the joke I was going to use. Often not as well. Sometimes better. I'm not really sure which feels worse.

But sometimes I come across something and all I get is that terrible feeling that someone far more observant and more eminently qualified has made a joke I should have, far more powerfully than I ever could, and I don't even realize it until I've read it.

This is one of those things:














UIUC - No Pants


Considering how long I spent with part-time jobs in clothing retail, I can't believe I never noticed this.

Girls are walking around with no pants on.

I mean I kind of get it. Leggings are like thick stockings. You can wear them under skirts or even shorts or with a tutu. Whatever.

And sure, they were popular without other bottoms back in the '80s, but has "Well, it was popular in the '80s," ever panned out as a good reason to do something? Phil Collins was popular in the '80s. Giving money to the Taliban was popular in the '80s.

Personally, I blame yoga pants. Those things just kept getting thinner and tighter and, believe me, I won't complain unless you're the type of person ill-suited towards tight clothing, but at some point we passed the point where Western society has typically drawn the line between garment and undergarment.

What does this change? Absolutely nothing.

But next time you're walking down the street and you see an attractive girl wearing only leggings from the waist down, just remember this: she's not wearing any pants.

Just remember that and try to take her seriously. Try to take America seriously.

On Crappy Slogans

"Uh-OH! SpaghettiO's!"

Who the hell thought that would be a good marketing strategy?

"Yeah, guy's, I've got it! Let's equate our product with messes, spills, and children throwing their food all over the kitchen floor! Mothers will be cleaning it off the floor and ceiling for weeks with this catchy tune in their heads!"

How about we apply this line of reasoning to other products?

• "McDonald's: Ba-da da da da … It's slowly killing me."
  
  
• "Windows 7: I click a lot of shady links, and I'm a PC."
  
  
• "American women have a 1-in-3 chance of being sexually assaulted. Shouldn't you feel safe? Always carry Trojan Condoms."

Of Paradoxes

This past Friday a bunch of my friends went out, ending the night at Lou's, our local 24-hour deli. Personally, I ordered a breakfast sandwich better suited to my phenotype as a form of slow-acting euthanasia than a hot meal, a bacon-egg-and-cheese with hash browns and ketchup on a roll.

Typically I would partner such a sandwich with a tall iced tea and some kind of snack cake. On this particular evening I found a small piece of carrot cake I'd liked a month or so back, but my usual tea brands were either unappealing or not present. In a decision of questionable logic I selected a tallboy of Drank extreme relaxation beverage.

Holy mother of God, I have never been such a believer in a product living up to its advertising claims since I got hungover from trying 5-Hour Energy on an empty stomach before beer and reheated pizza. Granted, I'd been awake for fifteen hours, did manual labor for six and a half of those, then bowled so hard I ended up hurting both my knees and one side of my ass and just consumed a giant hot meal, but by the time I finished off that two-serving can of Drank I was feeling mellow.

Everything felt slowed down. I felt calmer, more fulfilled and taciturn. My voice felt deeper and for some reason I kept thinking off celebrities like Louie Armstrong and Charlie Murphy and Forrest Whitaker.


But it occurs to me: what would happen if you drank a Red Bull along with a Drank?

I am reminded of The Adventures of Pete and Pete episode "Grounded for Life," in which Little Pete is grounded for the whole Summer after scorching his father's perfect lawn. Why did he do this?

He wanted to see what would happen if you left a humidifier running next to a dehumidifier.



So what would happen if you drank a Red Bull along with a Drank? I'm not entirely sure. Probably nothing. I'm not really in the mood to try, but based on the additive method of mixing colors, I'd assume mixing the yellow and purple drinks would make you pee brown for three days.

Either that or your kidneys are just shutting down.

On Bitches

I am told that "bitches" are not inclusive to shit excepting the subcategories of prostitutes and purveyors thereof.

Of Animals: The Loving Vs. The Eating

My mom's cousin Joey was a bit of a rural guy. He graduated from high school and immediately joined the police force, meaning he retired with a full pension by age 38.

He bought his family a big piece of land out in I think Iowa and started raising horses. He had always been good with animals.
As a matter of fact, his children grew up with a pet pig. Not a pot-bellied, George Clooney-loving piglet, mind you, but a full-sized 300 lb. hog. Of course it wasn't that big when they got it. Like New York City's sewer gators, they found this piglet and thought it was cute, then raised it to maturity, albeit they did not flush the pig down the toilet once it grew too unwieldy to keep indoors.

In an uncharacteristic ought of good humor, Joey named the piglet "Porkchop."
The problem was that once Joey's eldest daughter graduated from high school, the family held a big barbecue and Porkchop lived up to his name.

On Hot Chicks

My friends have raised an interesting question:

Where the hell do hot chicks go in the winter? Do they just disappear? And how is it that as soon as the weather turns even remotely nice they instantly appear in their booty shorts? Is it magic? Are they familiars to a secret cabal of wizards?

But they're right. When the weather turns cold, attractive girls just seam to fade into their parkas. Guys subside on t-shirts and the occasional polo all year long, so by the time Spring rolls around and we're thinking about breaking out a baseball because–face it–we haven't seen anything else worth our attentions for six months, BAM! That's when the sluts appear.

And no, they're not exactly sluts. Not all of them, at least. It's just after such a dearth of toned shoulders and bare skin we're suddenly inundated with it as every woman even halfway attractive immediately jumps at the first chance to show off what she's priming for beach season.

Still, we know some of these women. Someone knows them, at least. They don't transform into disfigured monsters like Dr. Jekyll that first chilly week in October. They have to go somewhere.

So this is my theory:

Hot chicks are like bears.

Yes, you can make a kind of "they're cool to look at but stand next to one and you'll just yammer and stammer and wet yourself in terror and then run away" analogy. Or, sure, you could equate her BFFs to a she-bear's little cubs and realize that to in any way get near them will result in Momma Bear going completely feral and mauling you into a bloody stump what was once a man.

But here's the real truth: attractive women hibernate. Every fall the gorgeous girl you mooned over all Summer returns to school or work or wherever it is she spends the part of her life that isn't a vacation and she prepares for the Winter months.

If she is in college she puts on what is called the "Freshman Fifteen," approximately seven kilos of pure Hot Pocket and wraps herself in a warm bed, surrounding herself with blankets, snacks, multiple seasons of "progressive" women's television shows on DVD and possibly an ill-conceived Walmart beta fish which will die within six weeks. The few times that she does wander out of her nest in the Winter, it will be grudgingly, angrily, and hungrily, lashing out at those around her and fighting willingly for even the meagerest scrap of high-protein sustenance.

Towards the tail-end of Winter, Hot Girl will begin to stir in her hovel, the last episodes of her Grey's Anatomy boxed set drawing to a close without that one perfect kiss between McDreamy and that chisel-faced blond twig the show is named for. She will slowly start to spend more time outside of her cave and interacting with other creatures, even taking physical care of herself again. She will refuse to be seen looking like a looser in over-sized hoodies and track pants, unshowered and unkempt. Eventually–and usually secretly–she will begin the arduous process of "getting ready for the beach," which is actually a bizarre ritual comprising poorly-executed remedial components of yoga, aerobics, cardio and awkward giggling, followed by a massive calorie burn through all the complaining she'll do about not being able to eat [X] anymore.

However all of this is worth it, as come the first sunny day of Spring, Hot Chick will shed her outer layers of gosling-down pillow puff and slogan-ized ass sweat pants for a pink tank top and a pair of slogan-ized ass short shorts. Who wears short shorts? Sluts wear short shorts. But that's fine. Hot Chick is not actually a slut.

What she is doing is called "peacocking," or "presenting." She is showing off absolutely all the goods at once, putting the milk up on the auction block to see who is interested in actually buying the cow. She only looks like a slut because she wants your attention like a slut.

Mostly, she is actually very selective in whom she will go back to another cave with (hers is still in disarray), though the first few prospective mates each season will more readily be able to tap into her absolutely disgusting, filthy bed-lust through sheer virtue of not being the eightieth suitor to approach her that week.

Prairiedogging like Punxsutawney Phil from their burrows of sloth and unattractiveness, Hot Chicks reemerge each Spring to flaunt and taunt men with their hotness, gaining some sick, twisted joy that will alleviate the many months of feeling like a fat, gross cow sitting alone in her room and wondering why she doesn't have anyone to treat her like McDreamy would or her father never did and mommy said she'd never find.

Either that or they all migrate South or something.

Like geese.

On Health Care

I don't usually complain about insane bureaucracy and horrible paradoxes or catch-22's when it comes to government programs. Frankly, I expect as much. Oh sure, I'll still rage rage against the dying of the light when it comes to actually deciding how that insane bureaucracy is run, but for the most part I tend to simply try to avoid the federal government.

Example: I paid my taxes this year. All 93¢ I owed.

Yes, it might have been more fun to waste hundreds of dollars in man hours forcing the IRS to come audit me, then causally tossed a dollar at my poor auditor and told him to keep the change, but I did legitimately owe the government 93¢. Plus, it's just as funny and spiteful to make them go through the all the regular work for such a paltry sum while I kick back and do nothing. (I'm lazy. Sue me.)


But sadly, sometimes I experience the bureaucracy in a way where I can't win or spite anyone and that makes me sad. See, I'm trying to get myself some health insurance.

Since I'm a writer I am self-employed and thus do not get medical coverage through my employer.

As I've yet to complete or sell what I am currently writing, I am technically also unemployed, an interesting dichotomy.

Moreover, since I've been "unemployed" for more than a year now, I cease to qualify for cheap health care from the state.


Essentially I am too rich to be forced to work and too poor for good health care. Additionally I am too healthy for emergency care but too fragile for an immortality exemption.

I mean I could easily get a part-time job and re-qualify for the cheap state care, but I'd really much rather sleep past noon every day and just be a famous author. With immortality. And maybe a cool haircut.

Of The Times and Whether Or Not They In A State of Flux Or Static Equilibrium

(1971) (2010)

Seriously, something's happened to us as a culture in the last thirty years.


And I don't just mean us getting along with the blacks.

On Dreams, Pt. III (Apparently)

I've mentioned that I have some odd dreams on occasion. I have a zombie dream every 5-8 weeks or so, I frequently show up for class unprepared but refuse to care because I remember I graduated college and am just visiting people in these bizarrely huge amphitheaters and, somehow, the world is always coming to and end, a sense a dread and doom weighs down on me from above as a larg, fiery cataclysm waits above us all.
The other day I dreamed of someone I hadn't seen or talked to in a while and ended up running into her the next morning.

Fun stuff. Par for the course, really.

But here's a new one I've yet to figure out: I've begun having a reoccurring dream-theme, wherein I get subpoenaed by the prosecution to testify as a witness in some kind of federal libel/freedom of press case on the scale of the McCarthy hearings. Two nights ago I was chatted up by a pretty girl in a book store who then slapped me with the subpoena, but I didn't know what it was asking me to attest to.
Last night I was actually called to testify. I got up in the witness box and was asked to read some trivial blurb I had written for some magazine, the only of three things in that issue I was credited with. I don't even remember what it was about other than that I mocked something for being on-par with a recent celebrity gaff. Granted I was under no charges myself, but the issue came down to whether or not "everybody already knows" protected my article (and thereby the publication) from accusations of libel by the celebrity to whom I had compared the piece's subject.

Also, I have to pee throughout the whole thing.
I'm not sure what that means.

On White Castle Scented Candles

FUCKING. YES.





I actually have nothing else to add to that, other than "I want one."

On Power Lines

Hooray! I actually got this all completed on my iPhone, but the picture was enormous. Rather than need to fix it, the power just came back on! GO SERENDIPITY (NOT THE MOVIE)!

The last time I was at a blackout party it wasn't really voluntary. I mean I was there voluntarily, it's just the light's weren't.

Apparently the power outlet in any kitchen by the refridgerator is required to be supplied with electricity at all times, I guess for health and safety reasons. Well when poor college kids don't pay their electric bill, that means like eight daisy-chained powerstrips keeping everyone's laptops and iTunes running off the one plug not cooling the fridge.

Also, apparently one light somewhere had to always work. So beer pong in the hallway.

The last time I was at a blackout party we got kicked out because Jay and Dan were too nasty at beer pong. Granted, they also spouted some very provincial trash talk which outside our town could easily be construed as a racial thing, but that's not the way I like to remember the story.


Anyway, my house just blacked out, I assume because it's windy and I already saw a powerline downed earlier today just down the road.

That said, I'm blogging this from my iPhone, so just imagine a picture at the top of this entry of Powerline, the still-black Michael Jackson rip-off from A Goofy Movie. I'll work on getting that up when I get full Internet back with the power.

Now I just have to find an iPhone-friendly porn site and I'll be set.

On Tabloid Journalism, Pt. 2

I was standing in line at the supermarket yesterday when I saw the following headline jump out at me:Now I've said some pretty horrible things about celebrities, sometimes even in the context of bizarre yellow journalism critiques that should have looked upon them more favorably, but all I can think is that this cover is such a reach that it doesn't deserve to be considered news.

Of course Katie Holmes is in a relationship with an unmedicated manic-depressive who thinks too highly of himself. No one's doubting that.

But this photo was clearly taken at a basketball game. The only "torture" Katie's suffering is the torture experienced by every woman forced to sit through a sporting event she can't stand and her husband can't play.

On Misleading Advertising

Does it bother anyone else that weight loss programs always seem to come with a side effect of giving all the "before" models a pronounced tan?

I feel like that's cancer.

I was going to use this photo, but frankly this girl is horribly Photoshopped and like half plastic to begin with.

Arguments I Will Never Win and Why

Arguments I Will Never Win and Why:

WHAT: There are too many fitness articles written about losing fat and too few about gaining muscle without becoming a complete creatine d-bag.
WHY I WILL ALWAYS LOSE: I live in America, not Europe.

WHAT: Do what you love, everything else will fall into place.
WHY: I'm white and my mother pays my rent.

WHAT: There is nothing wrong with gay marriage; sexuality is a spectrum and we should respect the expression of natural rights by every human being.
WHY: I'm straight.

WHAT: Modern feminism almost exclusively replaces equality through shared human experience added to purely feminine viewpoints with inverted ideals and roles for what is abstractly considered to be prototypically masculine, furthering the original misconceptions of traditional gender-performance roles as diametrically opposed binaries.
WHY: I have a penis.

I think this might be a photoshopping of a Lichtenstein print, or at least comics from the same era as the ones he based his work off of. Neat!

On The McGangbang

If I had to describe my friends in only the simplest terms, it would be this:

We consciously make bad choices because we know they will be fun, however we are prepared to responsibly handle fallout from these decisions and in doing so are the kind of people you want around when bad things go down.


Case in point: we are adventurous eaters, so long as we have access to drinkable liquids, a ride home and maybe a garbage can. There was the Wendy's Classic Sextuple Incident. There was the Double Down Affair. Now we'll have to add "the McGangBang Plot."

Yes, the McGangbang is a McDonald's off-menu item that can be purchased by it's component parts or, for those adventurous enough to ask for it by name, assembled in-house. Utilizing a McDouble and a McChicken from the Value Menu, you can have an outrageous concoction for $2.15 ($2.16 in some states).

Yes, that's an entire McChicken sandwich sandwiched between the patties of a McDouble cheeseburger. With extra pickles, as Dean got it.

And a 4-piece.

Anthony had two of these monstrosities. And a third made out of a McDouble wedged inside an other McDouble.


For the record, I limited myself to just a McChicken since within the last hour I'd just stuff myself full of steak and salad. I know, I'm a disgrace to gluttony. I'm barely even worthy of being slaughtered as an American Infidel and a servant of the Greater Satan.

Well, except for being Jewish, I mean.



For sport, here's a picture of Dean eating his McGangbang. We assembled ours ourselves, as it was 10 p.m. and our local McDonald's only has about two people working each week who are fluent in English.

On Latent Racism

Back in college we had a Professor Meisner who taught some kind of intro-level class. Accounting, or statistics or something, I don't really remember.

Anyway, it was people text messaging their friends that they would meet "after Meisner's class" who discovered the following:

In a cell phone's T-9 texting database, "Meisner's" autocorrects to "negroes."

Now the questions arise, who the hell programmed T-9 spellcheck with the correct pluralization and how could someone so ignorant be such a good speller?

On Time

I'm sitting here eating a box of Girl Scout Samoa cookies and it occurs to me that the little girl on the packaging is only moderately adorable.

She's got a mouth full of baby teeth and eyes that have yet to be completely crushed under the weight of the world's expectations. I mean she's being crushed under the weight of the world's expectations, but it's an ongoing process. She's only recently accepted that "boys play with trucks, girls play with dolls." She doesn't really understand why, but she knows it by rote. Still, she feels something like elation she can't quite understand when they ask her to wear a burned-out helmet and pretend she's a firefighter.

Then it occurs to me that this picture is probably really old. Based on the girl's little turtleneck and the look of everyone giggling and crowding around a gushing fire hose on the package's reverse, I'm guessing it's at least five years old, perhaps as much as ten.

Which is really weird, because it means that cute little girl could be a sexy, entirely legal coed by now. (Though, as a girl scout and judging by bone structure she's more likely reasonably attractive with an okay face.) This is a disturbing possibility. She's probably pretty cute, with a wildly narrow-minded Type A personality, resulting from her yuppie parents pushing her into overly structured, backwards social interactions at an early age.

Anyway, Samoas are delicious and this will not ruin a good cookie for me. It's the same as I've been saying for years about Dave Thomas' adopted daughter Wendy: somewhere out there there's a seventy-five year old man who, every time his children drive him past the fast food franchise, says, "Wendy? Yeah, I hit that."

On Driving

This was a great story when it first ran.



All my friends say I'm a pretty bad driver.

I won't argue that. I enjoy feeling the inertia as I take a turn a little too fast. I enjoy knowing my car and my roads well enough that driving is more instinctual and tactile than cerebral. I'm the quiet observer who given the opportunity would love to get to do a few laps at a NASCAR stadium if no one there knew me or liked NASCAR.

But when my other friends all wreck their cars and I'm the only one with both a vehicle and a valid license, it's like we're in high school again and I'm the designated chauffeur. Of course I'm going to be distracted. Yes, I'm a much worse driver with extra people in the car. That's why when I first got my license and all my friends were younger than I, my mother set the rule that I could only have one friend with me to start with.

But not Dean. If I did fine I could have two people with me or Dean. Dean has and always will, in any car, count as two people. It is not Dean's fault, he's just a probabilistic singularity, your proximity to which can greatly affect your day.

And yes, on unfamiliar roads I'm pretty bad at reacting to the unexpected. Couple that with poor night vision and a slightly out-of-date eyeglass prescription and it's really a better idea for anyone other than me to drive new places at night. I'll admit I've nearly sideswiped a few people because I was too distracted to re-check my blind spot on open highways in the middle of the night.

But here's the thing: I have never once been in an accident.

For all my inability to satisfy my friend's expectations of riding with me, when they do they're usually drunk. I'm a lightweight so I almost always D.D. It's responsible. I may not be a good chauffeur, but I'm a good driver. The only thing I could say might have been an accident was when a red pick-up sped past me in the right-hand lane during a terrible snow storm as I was attempting to move into his lane because mine was not well plowed in that area. I hit some ice I saw coming, decreased speed a bit before, maintained speed as I went over it and tried to stay straight-on, but I lost traction on one rear wheel and I started fishtailing after the pickup passed by.

The guy behind me saw what was up and pulled back. I let the ABS do their thing, tapped a little extra on the breaks to help it out and kept pointing the car in the direction I wanted to travel. When that became impossible I guided the car towards a side street and managed to slow down and careen into a snow bank instead of a guard rail.

All-in-all it cost me $80 for a new tire and $20 I tipped some neighborhood kids for helping me dig my car out. Everything, in a situation beyond my control, was handled masterfully, but also safely.

Now I did mention that it's like I'm seventeen again when all my friends crack up their cars and I'm forced to drive everywhere. Truth be told, my friends are shitty drivers. They take a much more leisurely approach to the ride, so passengers feel a bit safer, but it's not actually safe.

They hit guard rails, skid out on gravel, rear-end old women, have roll-overs, all because they either don't pay enough attention either or because they're not as familiar with their vehicles and so can't react as quickly to what their cars are telling them.

So yes, apparently I'm a bad driver when my friends are in my car, but my friends are bad drivers all the time and don't realize it.

See, this is why I need to get a motorcycle.

On Cars

I mentioned yesterday that my friend's car broke down. That's true. In fact I was tagging along during his Chinese delivery route at the time.

As it turns out, the car just overheated and burned through the radiator hose, so coolant leaked everywhere. The repairs were free and it's only costing my friend an oil change, but here's the thing: my friend doesn't even have Twitter, but because I mentioned it three different people called or texted him to make sure he and his car were fine. Which I had mentioned. Which leads me to believe I was correct in surmising 80% of the people on Twitter don't understand that Twitter was made to be unidirectional conversations.


Anyway, we realized something about car repairs: more than half the time the "check engine" light turns on it's because you need to check the light and not the engine.

Honestly, no one even considers it any more. It's the automobile that cried wolf.

They should just go ahead and replace the "check engine" light with a giant light-up dollar sign, that way when you see it you'll know, "Oh, okay, I'm going to have to spend a shit-ton of money now. Alright."