Early Onset of Night

My state (South Dakota) has done much to limit abortion.

It’s a very anti-choice state.

It’s worked, too. Abortions have been going down and down here. They are half what they were 20 years ago. Women have to jump through a lot of artificial hoops made up to make getting an abortion difficult—mandatory counseling, waiting period, forced to look at sonograms, etc. We try to fuck with their fragile heads as much as possible around here. So far, though, we’ve drawn the line at shoving medicial instruments into their vaginas. So far.

Today in the local paper, they are lamenting the rise in unwed pregnancies in the state. Lulz.

It seems that unwed, single mother pregnancies have gone up and up, kinda like how abortions have been going down and down, only backwards.

It’s a real head-scratcher, I’m tellin’ ya.

The people lamenting this, of course, say a bunch of tired crap about how important mom-and-dad traditional families are, but mostly they’re worried about what all these little babies are going to cost. You see, a great many, if not the majority, of these single unwed mothers are poor and are seeking and getting help from the state.

And that’s expensive.

Anne Hajek, one of our state legislators, wants to know, and I quote, “Who pays the bill?”

Gee, I wonder, Anne. Another real head-scratcher.

Linda Schauer, state director for the anti-choice group Concerned Women for America, said, “It appears that perhaps a woman in South Dakota in an unplanned pregnancy is more likely to give birth and raise her own child.”

She also noted that the sky was blue, mountains tall, and rocks hard.

But isn’t this the whole point of passing laws designed to be mean and intrusive, to limit abortions? Since the Supreme Court won’t let a state ban abortion outright, states have to make getting an abortion so difficult and uncomfortable they’re practically banned anyway.

So now we have all these little babies who need state assistance. Schauer says we need to make sure the parents take care of them.

With or without the help of the community, Schauer? Help from the wider community in which a person lives is usually derided by conservatives as “welfare” or “entitlements”. According to conservatives, not only MUST you carry that baby full term, you have to fend for yourself with it after it’s born, amiright?

Whether or not you are pro- or anti-choice, we should all be pro fucking baby once the damn thing is born.

(Source: early-onset-of-night)

I just woke up from a helluva dream. Psychological input welcome.

It started out, like everything horrifying in this world, innocuously enough.

I had bought a bar, actually a bar/lounge, and I was one happy camper about it. It was a rundown place, dirty and dusty, but it was mine. I got to work right away fixing her up for opening day, which was something like a week hence.

I got this big pressurized deep fryer for chicken. That was going to be my specialty: fried chicken. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps I thought it’d be funny as a vegetarian.

“Hi, I’m Mike, a vegetarian who specializes in fried chicken. Introduce me to your daughter. She looks lovely.”

*insert creepy two-second clip of me licking my chops*

Of course, while I was perfecting my super awesome fried chicken recipe, I would have to taste. I am a cook first and a vegetarian second.

I also got a video lottery machine so me and the government could team up and steal lots of money from stupid people using the highly effective variable reinforcement schedules of Pavlovian psychology. No bar in modern America is complete without some dipshit planted in front of a video lottery machine, staring glassy-eyed into the blinky screen and feeding an endless series of dollar bills into its hairless and welcoming stainless steel slit.

The place was a real fixer-upper and there was much to be done and I was thoroughly enjoying doing it. It was my place, my own, my preciousss.

In one corner, I came across a pile of dusty boards and rolled-up scraps of old carpet. Dumpster fodder to be sure. I wheeled my wheelbarrow over to it, all manly and shit, and got down on my sweaty, well-muscled haunches. (I was wearing tight, blue-jean cutoffs, ladies).

I began to clean the area out.

Almost immediately a cloud of flying centipedes emerged from behind the pile and began trying to land on me. I screamed like a little bitch and started running, but the cloud of flying centipedes was very fast. Some were even landing on my neck!

I ran and ran all around my would-be bar, screaming and waving my arms crazily. Finally, I ran out the door, into the summer day. I ran and ran.

Behind me, the cloud of flying centipedes had grown to biblical proportions. There were millions upon millions of them now, so many that things around me were growing dim because they were actually blotting out the sun.

I ran faster and faster, but they got closer and closer. They began to land on me and to bite. They were biting and crawling on my bare shoulders and back. (I was shirtless, ladies) and the flying centipedes were slipping down my plumber’s crack, squirming and biting me where the sun don’t shine.

It was at this point, the instant before I was overwhelmed by the flying centipede cloud, that I awoke. The couch I was napping on was soaked with….let’s say sweat. I was gasping for breath and my heart was hammering in my chest.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I said to my dog, who was curled up on my feet and looking at me weird.

On my walk early this morning, I encountered three signs.

I decided to walk in this upscale neighborhood. It was the first time I had been there.

A couple things:

First, it was cleaner. There were less oil stains on the asphalt, fewer beer cans, less trash overall. Not like the areas I normally walk in are shitholes or anything, but they do look like humans have been there. Occasionally, you come across an oil stain, a crushed, forgotten beer can, a scrap of paper. Not so here (I have since nicknamed it THE VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED).

Second, the houses were bigger, but uglier. They were McMansions, very cookie-cutter, and lacking personality—at least visually. I’m sure their inhabitants thought they were great, but they kinda reminded me of Hollywood celebs: skinny-pretty white girls and boys—but in house form (sorry Tumblr—I know who your true gods are, despite all this faux “atheist” bullshit). Also, their newness bothered me. Everything felt like it had been built last month.

So as I walked, I came across these signs in the thick, lush yards. The first one said BEWARE! AREA PATROLLED BY PEKINGESE SECURITY COMPANY! The second one, a block or two down the very clean, astoundingly straight road, said SCREW THE DOG! BEWARE OF OWNER!

The third one was the best: THIS HOUSE PROTECTED BY A PITBULL WITH AIDS! In the fabulous driveway of this last house sat a very new, very shiny pick-up truck. It literally glistened in the moonlight, like urine in freshly fallen snow (It was a yellow pick-up). On it’s bumper was a faded Romney/Ryan sticker. It was the only object in the whole neighborhood which had any wear and tear to it, this silly sticker, any dust or dirt on it, any asymmetry about it at all.

I found that hilarious and laughed my ass off under a streetlamp that was both perfectly vertical and sufficiently luminous.

I wish I was kidding.

The Decline and Fall of Bob

Truthful Tuesday (names changed)…
TW: Animal abuse; implication of child abuse

I first met my friend Bob on a mountain lake beach playing volleyball with one hand because he was holding a beer. Since it was years and years ago, I don’t remember exactly how but I ended up playing volleyball with them. I think it had something to do with odd numbers.

I learned Bob and his group were Seventh Day Adventists, a Christian organization that thinks it’s really important to worship on Saturday. They think this because, like all Christian groups, they’ve mentally highlighted in psychic yellow ink certain lines of the Bible, deciding they’re more important than other lines in the Bible.

This was on a Sunday, by the way.

Bob was not exactly converted to the organization yet, thus the beer. I got the distinct vibe that the entire reason for their little get-together on the mountain lake beach was for his, Bob’s, benefit. They were ‘fellowshipping’ and trying to fully convert him.

Bob, though, was being a tough, if amicable, sell. He had his own cooler full of beer, for example, separate from the group’s cooler full of pop and water. He took and pretended to read every pamphlet handed to him, which he then carefully folded, stuffed in his pocket, and threw away later when they weren’t looking.

To this day, I’m not exactly sure how Bob got himself into that situation. I think maybe it had something to do with the fact that some of his relatives were Seventh Day Adventists. Something like that.

But that was how I met Bob and we were friends for over 20 years.

Our friendship ended over a dog, but not for a long time—20 years, as I said in the previous sentence. At times we were nearly day to day companions, smoking weed and getting drunk. At others, we lived in different towns and didn’t see each other but a couple of times a year. In the very end we were closer than ever, roommates even.

Bob moved away to another town for work.There, he met and fell in love with a woman. They got married and bought a house. The woman had been married previously and had a teenage daughter, who became Bob’s stepkid.

I went to their wedding, which was a Seventh Day Adventist ceremony. Bob always considered himself a Seventh Day Adventist, even though he didn’t attend church, was pretty much an alcoholic, and smoked weed almost daily. It was simply the little box he had checked off in his head.

Most people need to do that, I find, i.e., “I’m Catholic!”; “I’m atheist!”; “I’m a Colorado Rockies fan!”.

Check.

Then tragedy, like it often does, struck. A few years after they got married, Bob’s wife fell ill and passed away. His stepdaughter wanted to finish growing up with blood relatives and he was left all alone in his house.

I did not go to the funeral, which I’m sure was a Seventh day Adventist ceremony.

During the time Bob was married and a stepfather, he didn’t drink or smoke weed. He had become what he had always wanted to become: a regular Joe Schmo. Not only did he have a yard, he even fucking mowed it.

I come back into his picture at this point. I had called up Bob and gave him my condolences, of course, shortly after he lost his wife, and this started us talking regularly again.

Bob resumed his drinking and he would call me up smashed a lot, trying to talk me in to coming up and partying with him (he lived a few hundred miles away). I was having financial issues of the completely fucking broke kind and always declined. At work, my hours had been cut and I was having trouble making rent.

“Come on up and live with me,” he said.

“Really?”

“Hell, yeah. I got plenty of room. This is a three bedroom, one and a half bath house, and I’m the only one here. I got a garage, even a deck. We’ll have cookouts! Plus, there’s a shitload more jobs around here.”

“Ok.”

So I packed up and headed north.

My first few days of living with Bob were spent in an alcoholic haze of reminiscing. We were reconnecting and in a lot of ways it was just like old times.

There were some odd little things, though, that began cropping up. Like, for example, padlocks on all the cabinets in the main bathroom. They weren’t locked or anything, but someone had gone to the trouble to install them. Heavy, pendulous padlocks hung unclasped on every cabinet door in the bathroom. WTF?

I asked him about them.

“Oh, that was because of my daughter.” He always referred to his stepdaughter as his daughter. He told me they had begun the process of him adopting her when the illness struck and sidelined everything.

“Because of your daughter?”

“Yeah, she used a lot of towels and rags and stuff when she showered. I mean who needs to use two towels when they shower?”

“So you installed padlocks on all the cabinets?”

“Yep. I had to distribute her towels and toiletries because she always used too much of everything.”

“You had to?”

“Yeah. She was a handful.”

“…..”

Also, his reaction to some of my books. I had, of course, brought my books with me when I moved in, and he didn’t like the ones on Buddhism. I had (still have, in fact), ten or twelve Buddhist books, sutras and commentaries mostly, some stuff by the Japanese Zen master Dogen, various other related material. He had a problem when he noticed them.

“I’d rather you not have those.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’d rather they not be in my house.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.” He laughed and shook his head like I was some sort of idiot.

I ended up keeping them in the trunk of my car. WTF?

During our many drunken conversations, I discovered that Bob was at constant odds with and truly power-struggling with his daughter. At least that was how he presented it.

“She was such a willful teenager.”

On school nights, she was expected home by 4 pm and couldn’t go out afterward. The only night she was allowed out was Friday and her curfew was 9 pm.

She was a 16 year old, for Christ sake.

One time, he told me that she didn’t make it home till 9:30 pm and he had to ground her for the remaining school year.

This occurred in October. On Halloween, in fact—which, he explained, he didn’t want her participating in anyway.

By grounding, he meant that he picked her up from school everyday and took her there every morning. She was not allowed to do anything else. Apart from school, she had to be at home, and could only go out with a parent. Also, she was not allowed a phone or handheld device, nor access to the net or tv.

“I had no choice,” he lamented. “Teenagers, huh?”

“…..”

Shortly after this conversation, I discovered the markings on the wood frame of my bedroom door of where a padlock had once been installed. It would have locked from the outside, of course, and guess who’s room it used to be?

Yeah.

I began to grow some distance between us. Not really because of the above, but because of the alcohol. Bob was a full-blown drunk, way worse than he had ever been in our younger days. Now, I like to drink, don’t get me wrong, but getting completely and utterly shitfaced every single night? No, thanks. I enjoy getting lit up once or twice a week, but I just couldn’t do it every night anymore. I had drank like a fish for the first week or so after moving in, but the ‘special occasionness’ of it all wore off and sometimes I’d just want to kick back with a puzzle or a book.

Meanwhile, Bob would be out in the living room blasting Foghat and pissing his pants.

I got a job, settled into a routine, and began searching the paper for a place of my own.

It was about two months after I had moved in that Bob came home with a dog. It was adorable, a young, light brown, medium-sized female with big friendly eyes and a super waggy tail. He had gotten her from a co-worker who had to move house and could no longer keep her.

Bob named her Leah, after his daughter.

Things went to shit almost immediately. The next morning after he got her, I went to work like always, and on my way home I stopped and bought a Pringles potato chip can full of tennis balls as a present for Leah.

When I got home, me, Leah, and Bob, spent the warm afternoon and evening out in the yard playing with the balls. It was great.

As darkness settled in, Bob, of course, began drinking and I joined him. I still drank with him from time to time. Just not every day. He was pretty fun to drink with, up to a certain point. Eventually, he’d get insensible, unable to communicate, stumbling around. I’d call it a night at that point. But for three or four hours, it was the old Bob and pretty damn fun.

Leah was underfoot as we drank. Young and curious, she’d go from me to Bob and back again. We interacted with her and our little party was kind of all about her, which she didn’t mind at all. Bob began to be a little annoyed with her, shooing her away good-naturedly, but then more firmly.

Eventually, he decided that Leah needed to lay down and “be fucking mellow”. He insisted that she lay down on the mat in front of the door. She complied, but only for a second. Bob would make her go back to the mat, getting rougher and rougher with her.

“LAY THE FUCK DOWN!” he screamed at her.

But young and impetuous, she couldn’t, not permanently.

He began to kick her when she’d get off the mat. Hard.

“Fucking chill,” I told him. I felt a bit cornered. It was Bob’s house and Bob’s dog, after all. I’d try to get her to lay on the mat, even sitting next to it cross-legged with her and petting her. But I’d get up to piss or something and BANG! he’d kick her in the ribs.

I stayed up all the way with Bob that time, not wanting to leave Leah alone with him. At one point, after he had completely gone over to the Drunk Side, I even restrained him from kicking her.

Finally he passed out with urine spreading to the knees of his blue jeans.

And so it went every night, for three or four days. Bob got wasted every night and Leah was supposed to lay on the mat in front of the door while he did it or she’d get kicked, fucking hard. The super waggy tail that had once wagged so much it was blurry now hung between her legs like a thing paralyzed or dead. She was terrified of him and this only pissed him off more. If he wanted to pet her, which he did randomly on occasion, she’d flee from him. He would rage and then kick her.

Using my phone, I recorded several instances of his abuse and went to the cops. I spoke to the animal control officer and showed him my video. As he watched, he began to shake his head.

“Well, that’s pretty clear,” he said. “If needed, can we use this in court?”

“Absolutely.”

“Would you be willing to appear?”

“Yes.”

I filled out a bunch of papers, signed a bunch of things and went home.

Bob was drinking. I began to drink too. By now, Leah had been trained. Her spirit was completely broken and she pretty much refused to leave the mat in front of the door. I’d call her to me and she would look at Bob and put her head down.

About 9 pm that night, the cops knocked on the door. Bob kicked Leah to make her move from the mat so he could answer it.

They told Bob they were taking Leah and explained that he had the right to go to court to plead his case and try and get her back. They had anonymous complaints of abuse, they said, and even cellphone video.

Off she went. Bob looked at me. “You fucker.”

“Me?”

“Who else would it be?”

“Yeah, it was me. And fuck you.”

We fought—physically. We both ended up bloody and bruised. The kitchen table was destroyed. It ended in a draw and I packed my shit and left that night to constant “get-the-fuck-outs!”

Two years ago, I moved back to this town for a second time. I actually live about four blocks from Bob and his three bedroom, one and a half bath house as I write this.

Even though I’ve been here two years, I have yet to stop by and say howdy.

I’m sure you understand.

A woman was lamenting about her highly intelligent son.

Not really lamenting about him but perhaps being perplexed by him.

“His teachers all rave about him. He excels at all his school work. I never have to tell him to do homework. He does it on his own without any prompting. During his last conference, the principal said she thinks he might even be gifted. But I tell you, he is the shyest, most awkward kid. He can’t relate to anybody. Plus, he lacks all common sense.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, he can’t tell the difference between the recycle bin and the trash bin. He’s constantly mixes them up when he’s doing his chores, throwing trash in the recycle bin and recyclables in the trash bin. We even got a letter from the city about it. One’s blue and one’s black, for God’s sake.”

“Perhaps he doesn’t give a shit.”

“His father and I have sat him down and explained to him time and again. But there are other things besides that, like all toothbrushes go in the toothbrush holder on the sink. His sister’s, mine, his father’s are all right there, plus there’s a slot for his toothbrush. But for some reason he just lays it right down on the sink, right next to the toothbrush holder even. There’s just lots of little things like that. He just lacks common sense. I don’t understand how someone can be so smart but still so lacking in common sense, in everyday ordinary smarts.”

“Have you ever thought that it went both ways?”

“Both ways?”

“Yeah, like the people who are socially adept, gifted even, with lots of friends. People who are extroverted and involved and making smart, reasonable decisions, people who know where the trash goes and, what’s more, care. People who put their toothbrush in the toothbrush holder in the designated slot, has it ever occurred to you that they might be dumb as rocks?”

“Um, no.”

“Seriously. I’ve heard that complaint before a lot—that super-smart people lack common sense. But take a person with common sense coming out their ass and ask them who Schopenhauer is and all you get is a blank look.”

“Who?”

“Exactly.”

“…Clinically proven to relieve dry skin.

I remember reading that almost every day when I took a piss. I would stand there, pissing and reading “clinically proven to relieve dry skin”.

What does that even mean? What clinic? There are people proving this in clinics? In Africa, children are starving, AIDS is rampant. War is everywhere. Religious nuts of the This and That persuasion are killing each other in the Middle East and elsewhere. People in the richest country on Earth are dying of cancer because they don’t have enough money and people are squirreled away in clinics fucking working on this shit?

As her bath products built up, I became angrier and angrier. They are toiletries, actually, but who says ‘toiletries’? They fucking built up and built up. There was more and more of them until the bathroom was stuffed.

If I bitched at her she felt attacked, so I’d lay off, say nothing, and there’d be more and more of them. She wasn’t happy, of course. How could she be? Her entire psychology had been manipulated to think she wasn’t good enough as is, that she needed all this fucking useless shit, that her skin was so dry that she needed some clinically proven goop to relieve it.

Her routine in the morning got longer and longer and longer and the only thing she was doing was applying more and more corporately produced chemicals on to her body, layer after layer. It was like she was building a shell.

Basically, she was convinced that burying herself was a good idea, a clinically proven one. I disagreed, and for that I was an asshole…”

(excerpt from my novel coming out later this year)

You can’t fail as an artist. You can only succeed.

Think about it.

Cider, DIY Alcohol, General Rambling (A Report)

So I’m making cider and having a blast. I have never made cider before, nor have I ever even tasted it. I have made a cyser, which is honey and apple juice brewed together. I got serious with that cyser, too. A friend had given me a juicer, so I juiced my own apples, mostly Granny Smiths, which are my favorite, and some Golden Delicious. When I saw how complex and difficult it was to clean the juicer, I threw it away. Now, I kinda wish I didn’t, though it would still be dirty to this day because I’m not a mechanic, nor do I have an engineering degree.

It turned out tart and dry and I liked it, but the honey was the star. It was essentially appley mead, which is what cyser actually is.

I have been making copius notes of my current cider project, which I then lose in my messy house and among my 400 million notebooks. All of this is from memory.

I didn’t mention in my first post about yeast but I used ale yeast. Homebrewers, with the best intentions, overpitch their yeast, I feel. They want the assurance that it’s going to take off well. Normally it does when you use a massive shitload of yeast, too. Me, I like a real yeast cycle, so I only use a half a teaspoon. There is lag time, where the seed spreads and gradually populates the liquid, then fermentation commences, gradually rising in vigor until it is downright vigorous, then it tapers off, and the yeast goes dormant and settles on the bottom of the fermentation vessel.

All of this is clearly visible with underpitching of yeast.  A true lifecycle happening before my eyes. I find it totally bitchin’. When I use the recommended amount, the damn thing is roiling away in a matter of hours and when it does sediment out, it’s fucking ankle deep. Plus, the final product tastes yeasty to me. Also, I have read that your yeast is healthier my way because the vast majority of it is second generation.

“My parents came from a foil pack,” this younger generation says. “Losers.”

Cider is often fermented with the natural yeast present on the apples and in the juice, but this is a crap shoot, with emphasis oftentimes on the crap part of the shoot.

My notes noted the coloring of the cider, the fermentation activity (bubbles, fizziness), the ambient temp, the scent coming out of the fermentation lock. They were, as I said, copious. And, also as I said, lost shortly after the application of the final period. Good thing I have this steel bear trap of a memory.

What was I talking about again? Oh, yes, the cider I’m brewing. It was born in my kitchen and resided there on the counter for the first 36 hours. It’s warm there, about 69-71 degrees American. The lag time took about 24 hours. I checked it every hour or so, like it was a sleeping baby, and it was fun watching it gradually come to life.

That’s the coolest thing about homebrewing to me: the fact that it’s ALIVE, a living thing. No wonder the wise refer to alcohol as aqua vitae (the water of life).

I then put it in the laundry room, which is about ten degrees cooler, and there it sits. At first, it farted a bubble out of the fermentation lock 78 times every minute, almost as if it had eaten at Taco Bell. Today, it is farting only 20 times a minute, which is only, like, can-of-beans level. It is still very active and fizzing, though. I think it’ll be ready to bottle on the 2nd or 3rd and be circa 5% alcohol.

The most interesting thing is the aroma coming out of the fermentation lock. It was standard apple juice smell at first but now it is like complex and multi-layered apple smell. More floral or something. For about a 24 hour period, the smell was a bit sulfur-y (common when fermenting apples), but that has pretty much faded.

I can’t wait to drink this shit. How come brewing and fermenting didn’t occur to me when I was underage? All those hours on Friday and Saturday night wasted trying to track down a buyer.

Jesus, life is too short for that shit, even when you’re only 16.

The Heart

This time, my hair is black, parted on the side. When I was young, my hair was dirty blond or light brown. It only turned black in my late twenties, after I had shaved it all off. I am walking through empty small town streets, stepping over skeletons. There are thousands of skeletons covering the ground, thousands and thousands of them.

I am heading, for some reason, toward a grocery store. Like everything in this town it is abandoned, boarded up, sinking back into the earth. I don’t know why I’m heading that way, but I am. I simply feel compelled to go there. As I near it, stepping over and around the skeletons like someone crossing a stream on stones, a young boy runs up out of the dim light and asks for my help. “Please, Mister, please!”

I begin to follow him and suddenly we’re in woods. The darkness of the abandoned, death-smeared, skeleton-choked town is gone and we’re in the brightness of trees. Summer sun, high noon, cloudless sky. Green everywhere and heady, intoxicating scent of vegetation.

The boy is crouching by a man a few feet in front of me. The man’s chest is torn open and his heart is exposed. I see it beating wetly, glistening in the bright light.

“Please, Mister!” the boy says again.

I hurry over and kneel beside the man. He is barely conscious. I try not to look directly at his exposed heart. Something needs to be done and, for some reason, I know I am the only one to do it. What, exactly, I do not know.

The boy’s eyes are desperate, pleading.

Finally, I look at the exposed heart. I reach out and grab hold of it, feeling it squirming and twitching in my hands. It is slimy and hard to hold on to. My hand is instantly covered in blood. Not knowing what else to do, I try to push the heart back into his chest, into the large gash next to it. It is difficult and I use more and more force, pushing and squeezing harder on the heart. I hear a ripping sound and blood begins shooting high into the air.

I let go of the heart, practically throwing it at the man’s gnarled chest, and jump up.

The boy is gone, running wildly through the trees. His cries and screams echo back to me.

I look at the man’s face and watch as he dies, as his skin fades to a glossy, waxy white and his eyes, once darting and full of fear, become still and staring.

I look up into the flat blue cloudless sky and notice how there is nothing up there. It isn’t a real sky, I decide, but a fake one, a painted-on sky, and it hides a terrible secret.

I look down again at the man and he is already a skeleton. So is my hand, the one which had held his bloody heart.

As I get older, I change, but the economy doesn’t.

It’s obvious, but not completely—aging, I mean. Some things are given: I can’t drink like I used to. I actually NEED to sleep. When I was in my 20s, I’d get 3 hours and be good to go. Sure, I’d be grouchy, but I wouldn’t be physically compromised like now. I have gray in my beard. My johnson still gets hard, but sticking it into any available hole now strikes me as a bad idea. I have become highly selective when it comes to my johnson. Roughly 90 percent of the women I meet make me want to masturbate, but not for the reasons you’d think. I have passed the point where bad movies aren’t funny, too. They’re just bad movies and my time is more precious than irony.

One other thing I have noticed: “The Economy”. It always pretty much sucks, really sucks, kind of sucks, or is about to suck. It isn’t just “this” economy, but all economies. It sucked in the early 90s. It sucked in the late 80s. It sucked in the late 70s and in early 80s.

The economy either sucks, is about to suck, or just got done sucking—only to suck again.

Surely you people in your late 30s and up have noticed this too? I contend that a 50 year old person has spent 40 years of his or her life under a bad economy.

Imagine what would happen if there was no economy? News would not exist. 99% of the ideologies we have made up would be gone. You would go to talk about something and just end up shrugging your shoulders. There would be no politicians. All politicians do is worry about the economy. Everyone has a competing theory on how to fix the economy and, obviously, none of them work.

The economy is like a junky car you keep putting money into. The tailpipe falls off, so you fix it. The minute you get it home, the U-joint goes out. You fix that, but then alternator goes out. You fix that, then it’s the battery….

This is “the economy”.

You have socialism and unions and capitalism and mixed socialism and capitalism and bartering and communism and god knows what else and it matters not one fucking bit because THE ECONOMY SUCKS (or will suck soon).

The economy is like a disease, like a disease the whole human race has. We can’t cure it, just maintain it. It’s diabetes or AIDS that way. We’ll never cure it and we’ll always be kinda sick. Eventually, it’ll probably kill us.

The funny thing is, you can major in economics. You can go to college and learn all about it and nobody there realizes that they are learning how to simply “maintain” a partial, complete, or soon-to-be shitty economy. You have people studying the broken U-joint on our metaphorical car or people delving into the mysteries of how to fix the battery. It never occurs to anyone that we need a whole new car.

I have no answers either. I can’t fix the economy and neither can you. The person you voted for certainly can’t fix it. You elected him to work on the economy. Why in hell would he fix it? I wouldn’t perfect a machine that could write funny. Hell no.

Perhaps having a shitty economy is necessary for us, like evolutionarily. It is so constantly and consistently not working correctly that maybe it gives us something to talk about and try for. If we had a good economy (that lasted forever, not just 2-10 years), perhaps we’d stagnate, like most rock stars do after they finally make it.

It’s hard to be brilliant when you’re sitting around your mansion with a gorgeous groupie going down on you all the time, amirite?

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