A Man Of God

What a surprise! The new Pope is white, authoritarian, and Catholic! I'm on a roll now. I also predicted last week that the NFL's top pick would be a college football player. Correct again. I'm going to limb it now, and say the next president will be an American citizen.

And consistent with this shocker, a recent survey of the media shows that most reporters want the new Pope dead, and are desirous of a black lesbian Po-pette to replace him. That the Vatican has the audacity, in this age of great enlightenment and harmony, to dare elevate an actual Catholic to the papacy, is making all the anti-religious bigots print some funny stuff in your daily paper. The unspoken fear of these 1st Amendment-hating handmaidens is: "We're going to be a theocracy soon." Well, too late, dreamers. The left-wing socialists have practiced their religion of diversity and tolerance for decades now. The Pope selection is just a little more push back from people who are fed up with being forced into accepting destructive ideas and people. Wanna give head to other guys? Have at it. Don't expect to be Pope. Like to suck fetuses out of your womb? It's legal, but don't expect to be Pope. Got AIDS? There are many meds available, and the money you didn't spend on condoms and ecstasy can be used for purchase. Don't expect to be Pope. Self-righteous former jock-sniffer Keith Olbermann skillfully points out that the new Pope may have been a Nazi:

At age, 14 membership in Germany's "Hitler Youth" became mandatory. So Joseph Ratzinger enrolled.

Weakling. He should have resisted and been taken to a concentration camp and volunteered to be shot first. Hey, Keith. Why don't you try not filing a tax return for the next few years? See how that works out for you.

From AP-Europe:

Ratzinger turned 78 on Saturday. His age clearly was a factor among cardinals who favored a "transitional" pope who could skillfully lead the church as it absorbs John Paul II's legacy, rather than a younger cardinal who could wind up with another long pontificate.

How on earth could they possibly know this? The cardinals do not speak at all. To anyone. An inference has been turned into a fact. A "transitional" pope? Well, I agree. The pope after this is going to be even more hardcore than the two preceding him. Careful what you wish for, lefty.

I still don't think anyone on the left has noticed or can deal with the reality that not only is religion a major part of all world politics and has been in this country since it's founding, but that it is as inextricable from politics as money. Read the holy volume The Book of McCain-Feingold in the liberal's bible for insight.

Reuters:

German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the strict defender of Catholic orthodoxy for the past 23 years, was elected Pope on Tuesday despite a widespread assumption he was too old and divisive to win election.

Whose assumption? This reporter's. How widespread? All of his friends and co-workers.

Reuters again:

Cardinals on Tuesday elected conservative German prelate Joseph Ratzinger as the new leader of the world's 1.1 billion Roman Catholics, in a controversial choice to succeed Pope John Paul II.

Controversial to whom? Reuters. Who else would assume that even the Cardinals themselves think the Catholic Church is too Catholicy? Stooping even lower, an enterprising reporter at the McMinnvile Oregon News-Register made a pilgrimage to a Catholic school to file the classic "through the eyes of the young" piece where a reporter validates his/her own childish thinking by proxy:

Watching on a television screen in their classroom, the children were surprised to see that it was a rainy evening in Italy, as they had just come in from morning recess on a sunny day.

Well, they are children. This is an odd observation with which to lead a story about how children are naturally imbued with a gift of insight.

The children made guesses about where the new pope would be from. Would he be from Africa? Latin America? Europe?

No America? That's because children are pure thinkers whose minds haven't yet been tainted by adults and experience.

The crowd responded by chanting "Benedict! Benedict!" That excited the children, particularly a first-grader named Ben. The class talked about how Benedict is very similar to Benjamin.

I suppose it's better than being called Ben Gay again and getting punched in the head by another bully. From NY Newsday:

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany was elected by his fellow cardinals Tuesday to become the 265th pope, putting a conservative who is expected to continue championing John Paul II's orthodox ideas at the head of the world's 1.1 billion Catholics.

That's like reporting that the Republicans have nominated a Republican for president. Newsday has been bitterly disappointed again. From KIROTV.COM:

Gay Catholics In Washington Concerned With New Pope
OLYMPIA, Wash. -- Dejected gay Roman Catholics in Washington state called the choice of a Vatican hardliner, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as pope a painful reminder of his role in Rome's crackdown on homosexuality, priestly celibacy and the role of women in the church.

Yes, sweeties, but the last pope felt the same way. Yet here you are, still gay, alive, and nominally Catholic. Now run along and make someone over before a house falls on you, too. Then they go and give out the Pope's email address. Hope he has a good Queer filter. He's gonna need it.

I'm not a Catholic so I don't care too specifically who the Pope is. If they want to cede moral leadership to the irrational minority of bigots like so many others, that's their choice. But I like when a group sticks up for it's beliefs against it's putative destroyers. I even sent a gift basket to the guy who spit on Jane Fonda. Do you know how hard it is to find a place that does arrangements of bagels, coffee, and Skoal?

OK, sure. Some young Catholic boys have been molested by priests and the Cardinals covered for them. Answer this. Hot date. You have a choice of babysitter for your 7-year old son. The local Catholic priest, or a guy who works part-time for ACT-UP? Eric Robert Rudolph, or Richard Simmons?

What makes you feel more uneasy? The headlines are all about Catholics or the headlines are all about Muslims? Tough call? You have no hope of being Pope.

The Beer That Drank My Wallet

If we actually knew how much money the government steals from us, there'd be a rebellion.

Last night I went to my local watering hole, a stogy English bar where guys with six figure salaries stare into the bottom of their glasses and say "Oh, where did I go wrong, I wanted to be a..." Fill in the blank. Preacher, artist, writer... They wanted to be someone who makes less than they do now. They're sad that their dreams of being a starving artist were traded for the five zeroes in their salary and four hundred horses under the hood. It makes me sick.

Actually, it made me thirsty, so I ordered a round. That set me back $5, plus tip. Bad, but not too heinous.

How much money, in terms of "money I have to earn before taxes at my shitty day job," did I have to make to buy that bottle of beer?

6.2% FICA withholdings
1.45% Medicare
0.73% Federal income tax
5.3% State Income Tax
= 13.68% of my paycheck goes straight to the government
And...

$0.25 State Sales Tax (at 5.0%), since I ordered it with a meal
$0.09 State Beer Tax (built into the price)
$0.05 State Bottle Deposit (built into the price)

Figuring the relative buying power of what I make, I have to earn $5.93 to buy one round. Apply the term "earn" very, very loosely. Including the built-in taxes and deposits, the government makes $1.07 off every beer I order.

So what, eh? Small potatoes. But look close at the other taxes that shape our lives...

11.1% Fuel Tax (state)
9% Fuel Tax (federal)
50% Cigarette Tax (based on the $1.51 tax on an average $3 pack)
26% Property Tax
Don't forget these for your phone:

$6.38 Federal Subscriber Line Charge
$0.70 Federal Universal Service Fee
$0.13 Local Number Portability Charge
$0.42 911 State/County Charge
$1.75 State/Local Combined Tax

On top of all that, we have extra charges on our cable bills, room taxes on hotel rooms, tolls on our roads, parking meters in our cities, inheritance tax, vehicle title licenses, city vehicle stickers, oil and tire disposal fees, speeding tickets and parking tickets and jaywalking tickets and equipment compliance tickets and... Buy a piece of land in the middle of nowhere, don't do anything with it, and you'll owe the government sales tax on the initial sale and property taxes every single year thereafter. There are a thousand ways to lose your paycheck to the government.

Say you make $120 for a few hours of digging a ditch, by hand, in Mississippi in August. That's back breaking, sweat-drenched work. You've earned every penny. How much gets stolen? Say you buy a tank of gas to get to the job ($32), smoke a pack of cigarettes ($3), drink $5 worth of beer, pay your phone bill ($50), and buy $30 worth of food between breakfast, lunch and dinner. Those are solid uses for your money. The government gets $33.43 from you, which is 27.9% of what you made. If you work at $15 an hour, that's two hours sweating in the sun you do just to satisfy the public coffers.

What do you get for that 27.9%? You get to pay Halliburton to steal money when your drinking buddies get sent off to Iraq without proper body armor. You get to fund a war on drugs that is intentionally mismanaged so that it continues, by design, to distract the public conscious and maintain thousands of jobs...and that drives local drug prices up. You get the honor of supporting a welfare mom's crack habits while inner city schools don't get the books they desperately need. You get to buy genocidal foreign dictators lunch in the opulent White House when they come to chat with our president.

And you have no choice. You have to pay, or the IRS will take everything you own. Homeless, you'll wander the streets until you get arrested for vagrancy and thrown in jail, where finally you'll get to use your former money when you get fed fifty cents worth of shit that the private prison company charges the taxpayers ten dollars a unit for.

Ain't America grand?

Our forefathers did a little somethin' somethin' about the taxes they hated: they boarded a British merchant ship and dumped its cargo into the harbor. We called it the Boston Tea Party. They called it liberation. When is enough, enough?

Johnny Vs. The Penis Pump

This here is a little story that I am none too proud of, but for the sake of all you fuckers out there who say "you gots to keep it real!". Well, this is about as real as it gets. So gather 'round, sick fucks, and let me tell you a little tale about the time a penis pump almost made my cack go asplode!

About 6 years ago, when I still lived in the land of the eternal fun, aka San Diego, the apartment complex I resided also housed my roomate and a really good friend of ours, so pretty much every night was a drunken blur. One such night as the clock struck 4 in the morn', after consuming ungodly amounts of alcohol and dank nuggets of BC's finest, three of us all sat around completely shlitzed and bored. Seth opens his mouth and says the most ludicrous question I've ever heard at that time: "Hey, you assholes every spank off in one of those porno booths?" My roommate and I both vehemently denied it, wink wink, but Seth pressed on with the issue.

"C'mon you faggots, that SHIT'S fuckin' great! You go in, put your dollar in, and fuckin' start snappin' that radish! Let's go! What the fuck else we gonna go?"

Through the haze of Heineken and Northern Lights, he was starting to make sense, but in a weird perverted way. What the fuck ELSE we were gonna do? So what did we do? Damn right, we three plucky comrades walked our drunken asses over to the nearest porno shop, ready to beat our respective dicks like they owed us some money. Face flushed from embarrassment and the anticipation of beating off in a locked booth where countless other lonely men have spanked it, I entered the cold confides of the booth and locked the door. Remember folks, if you're a straight man, ALWAYS lock the door to your spank off chamber, lest you accidentally like it when strange gay men enter behind you and do all sorts of faggotry to you. I'm pretty liberal when it comes to sex, but damn it, not THAT liberal. After about 8 minutes and 3 dollars later, I finish myself off and allow billions of microscopic me's to dry up in the courtesy napkins they provide for you. As I leave my booth and avoid eye contact with the shadowy prowling homosexuals that frequent the dank hallways of porno shops, I spot them both staring wide-eyed and drunken at the vast array of penis pumps. They had always seemed to be something unearthly. For real though, who buy's penis pumps? At the time, I just couldn't imagine ANY man walking into a place and confidently placing a StrokeMaster 2000 on the counter top, look the cashier in his shifty eye, and say, "That's right motherfucker! I put a large plastic tube over my pecker and pump that shit up! How much for said device, my good man?"

Only your dignity.

So there we were, looking at the dildos and plastic latex forearms and whips and chains...the whole time our eyes darting back to those strange archaic devices. One of us said, "We should buy one each, then in a months time, see who's cock got bigger!" I said, "You're a faggot, shut up." And that was that. We walked home, testicles drained, livers bruised, and we all decided that buying one of those pumps would be just plain silly.

So of course, the very next day, I bought one.

And I didn't just settle for no 30 dollar plastic pump. No, I bought the most expensive one I could find. It was a thing of sheer imposing depravity. 12 inches of 2 inch diameter Pyrex glass, vacuum sealed hosing, and a what looked like a bicycle pump attached to the hose. I had heard from reliable sources, that if you use a quality pump for 20 minutes a day, every day, sure enough, you WILL gain an extra 3-4 inches. Shit, we could ALL use an extra 3 or 4, I thought, and waited a day or two when I knew my apartment was empty. On the day in question, my roommate went out of town, so I locked the doors, popped in my favorite porno tape entitled "Extreme Japanese Anal Assault Ninjas". Volume 12, by the way. Check it out. And then I took a hefty shot of GHB and prepared to pump those next 20 minutes away.

Oh, did I mention during those years way back, I had quite the GHB addiction? And anyone who knows GHB, knows if you take even a LITTLE bit too much, you pass right the fuck out and fall into a deep sleep. So you could imagine what happened next. I just got to my favorite scene where our hero Sho Kuntsuki is anally penetrating three young female ninjas from a rival clan with his dildo nunchucks when I slipped on the glass sleeve and starting pumping away, sucking all the air out of the tube and creating a massive vacuum around my swollen member. At first, it hurt like a son of cunt...but like all things perverted and morally depraved, after about 5 minutes of it, it kinda felt good. The GHB was kicking in big time, and I had already pumped my 6 inch cack to a staggering and girthy 8 inches! 30 minutes had elapsed and Sho Kuntsuki had already passed the dreaded Trials Of The Eternal Gaping Vagina and my penis felt ready to explode. I fumbled with the release valve, praying that I make it in time, but suddenly...

Darkness. Falling. Drifting on waves of narcoleptic lunacy. Finally, deep sleep.

I awoke about 4 hours later, the television sending out waves of soothing white noise when all of a sudden I was wide awake with a feeling that can only be described as a rabid Pit-bull chewing slowly on the head of my penis like a chew toy. I looked down, and my poor poor penis was three shades of purple and blue. Blood had oozed up to the surface from the intense vacuum created and the feeling was absolutely excruciating. What to do? I couldn't think, I couldn't move, for pain and the embarrassment of calling 911 filled my entire being. It had even sucked one of my balls into the tube, so one ball was huge while the other just sort of dangled there, looking deflated and upset about itself. I roared like a mad beast, ripped off the tube, and threw it across the room. My poor cock. It was massively swollen and huge, which under ANY other circumstances would have been a boon, but the pain I was experiencing and the blood oozing out of my own cock head told a different story. I rushed to the bathroom and did the only thing I could think of: I filled up the sink with cold water and plunged into it, cock and balls first, moaning and cursing the insidious fools who invented such a device.

It stayed massive and swollen for about 2 days straight, the proof of my plight evident to all who looked down and saw my perma-erection pitching a tent in my pants. A giant blood blister and formed right around my pisshole, making the simple act of pissing all but impossible. But the worst part of it all?

It was numb and lifeless. I couldn't even go back to the spank off booths to rub one out those past couple days. After that, I decided to never again use a penis pump. Besides, who needs 8 inches anyway?

My tongue is 12.

Simple Pleasures For Simple Minds

My primary interests in life, at the moment, are moderated by my body. I want to eat, sleep, and I want to fuck. Maybe that's because I'm young and male, or due to some freak sex drive and manic metabolism, but I feel no shame. I have plenty of hobbies, and a steady day-job to feed them the cash they consume like crack rocks in the projects...yet my keenest interests curve back to eating, sleeping, and fucking.

There's precedent in this: Watch the Discovery Channel. You'll see lions eating gazelles, having sex, and sleeping in the sun. All the animals do on the Serengeti is eat, fuck, and lay around for photographers — kind of like porn stars. What's wrong with that? For all the contrivances in the modern world, what improvement do we really offer on that system?

It sucks for the animals that get chased down, but they, in turn, have their own utopia: munching on grass, then cavorting, then sleeping in the sun. Same thing, different diet. Fruit flies don't sleep. They have the greatest lives ever: they're born, eat several times their body mass, fuck with abandon, then die without ever caring about more. Have you ever seen an unhappy fruit fly?

Our bodies tell us to eat and procreate. Since the advent of beer, mankind's thirst has skyrocketed as well. But what natural drive drags man out of bed to tie a Windsor-knot-noose around his neck and shuffle off to the office during the prime of his life, on beautiful summer days? And whose sadistic idea was it to prohibit inter-office dating to remove the last vestige of primal instinct from our daily lives? Take away lunch why don't you, finish it off.

If you're inclined to religion, look to the history of man: God gave man everything he needed: food and naked women (Lillith as well as Eve, for the zealots out there). Man needed no more, but soon ambition got in the way of euphoria, and men invented jobs they hate, to buy shit they don't need, to stroke egos the don't deserve. Look at your manager. He has no equivalent in the pride, pack, or flock. In the wild, they'd kill the son of a bitch, then eat his gazelle. The original balance of things was knocked off its foundation, and this leaning tower has grown more precarious with each new story history writes.

Every generation struggles with their questions of identity and direction. You are what you do, what you say, what you think. Our grandfathers had World War II, whether they liked it or not (and I suspect that few of them enjoyed it). Our parents had the cultural revolution of the 60s, which was nothing more than organized chaos...but in the melees of guns and bombs, drugs and music, people found themselves. In the sixties they also found a lot of drugs and had a lot of sex. Hence, us.

For ten years, twenty if you include the shrinking culture that continued through the seventies and then died in garages and basements in the 80s, people did what they felt inclined and compelled to do: eat, fuck, sleep. They also wrote songs and painted pictures, traveled the world with abandon, and actually made efforts to find what truly matters to them.

A lot — a helluva lot — of bullshit came out of those years, and there's nothing worse than getting stuck next to a stinking hippie three weeks ripe from thumbing it around California. But, give them credit: they were guided by their instincts, the gut feelings that are never as wrong as the bad decisions you make when you deny your metal and kowtow to someone else's vision. They were onto something, something the lions and tigers and bears knew all along: happiness is a warm spot in the sun, an acquiescent lioness, and a slow gazelle.

Have we really improved on that formula?

The Second Step

I got kicked out of rehab.

Have no doubt about it, those professionals discovered my public depravity here in the sideshow circus tent, and showed me the door. Why, do you ask? Because I committed the cardinal sin of portraying myself as a recovering drunk and crackhead, on the run from persecution from all directions. I know, unimaginable. Now, you'd think after some seventeen weeks of group therapy and well over $1,000, I might be shown some semblance of consideration before being summarily dismissed from my drug-addiction recovery program. And I was. In fact, they dawdled and debated for over a week, taking more of my money and time before dropping the axe on my neck. Sound sincere about helping people recover from their "disease"?

I didn't think so, either.

And if you're wondering who "they" are, trust me, "they" know. They are those judgemental pricks and conservative narrow-minded counselor-types who wedge your personality and habits into a psychological template. They are the book people. They are, on occasion, the religious folk who know no other way, and practice those principles on all their affairs by forcing you into a room full of drunks. Albeit recovering drunks, but drunks nonetheless. And then, at our finest moment, we're told to learn a new little dance that consists of 12 steps, under the close scrutiny of complete strangers and some well-schooled fucker who wants to know everything about you. Your drugs. Your childhood. Your sex life. Your medical history. And above all else, your relationship with God. So try to imagine, if you will, spilling your guts into their notebook bucket, listening to all that banter and lecture, having what amounts to therapeutic intercourse with a trained professional. And then, get told to get dressed and get out.

Oh, and leave the money on the table.

Clean and sober? Yup. Dancing those 12 steps? Sure. Resentful? You bet your sweet ass. Resentful enough to share this little tale with half a million apathetic bastards, knowing word might just get around to those good rehab specialists. But how can they kick me out again?

Let me tell you how. On this fated day, I'm appointed to stroll into the office of the very counselor responsible for my dismissal. This afternoon, I'm gonna spend a long hour with that woman, and we're going to fuck with words. And I'm going to thank her afterwards, for kicking my ass out of their little program. I'm going to tell her that I'm still driving this freak show tour bus of a website, that I've got 80 days without substance, and that if I hadn't been given walking papers, I might have never gotten it. That my purpose, our purpose, is not to stumble around this globe in search of the story, drink myself blind, and survive a crippling addiction to cocaine. Our time is borrowed, and with every drive down the highway and unprotected fuck, burning cigarette and empty shot glass, we are killing that time. We board airplanes and crawl Bourbon Street, work the long hour and stare at the television because we are afraid. Afraid of mirrors and our hands, the possibility that we be something more than mothers and fathers, the fact that tomorrow might be just like today and the only difference between January and July is a few letters.

We are self-centered, egocentric, inconsiderate fucks that give no more thought to the car in the neighboring lane than the person before us in the checkout lane, hoping only that the line moves faster so we can get back to nothing. And by nothing, I mean a life without a tangible objective. You might sell yourself on the idea that your life is glorious and exciting, that you're commited to your children and your career, and your life has meaning. I say bullshit. An insane person does the same thing, over and over again, in hopes of a different result. And all of us, every one of you, does the same thing over and over again, every fucking day. You drive down the same streets, leave the house at the same time, fuck the same woman in the same position, watch the same television shows, hit the same website, vacation in the same cities, smoke the same crack rock, drink the same beer in the same bar. And exactly what result are you hoping for?

This one?

You've been seeking a power greater than yourself this whole time, as if you had a clue.

Farewell Feminist

As few of you probably know, and even less probably care, famed feminist Andrea "Sweet Tits" Dworkin passed away this week from what doctors report as being a severe case of "morbid unattractiveness".

Born September 26th, 1946, in Camden, New Jersey, Andrea was famous for an ugliness that even her home state was ashamed to have produced. Her family claims she was a generally congenial lass up until she was touched on her naughty bits at the age of 19 by overzealous (and apparently beer-goggled) doctors. Despite the fact that most women would leap at the opportunity to have their naughty bits touched by a well-to-do surgeon, and despite the fact that Andrea had been selling her gristled poontang in exchange for gas money all through college - oh, and regardless of it being the 60's, when everyone was touching each other's dangling parts - Andrea was incensed, and embarked on a courageous lifelong journey to repeatedly hurl her full 300 pounds onto the strained arm of the world's collective Fun-O-Meter.

Beginning with the publication of her first book, the promisingly titled "Woman Hating" in 1974, Andrea's plus-sized panties were in a permanent bunch. She lambasted all forms of sex as forced rape, and encouraged mandatory death penalty for all sexual crimes. Of course, she is most renowned for her vehement stance against the horrors of pornography. Her 1981 book, "Pornography: Men Possessing Women" earned her critical acclaim from many confused, desperately-grasping critics, still detoxing from all the drugs they took in the 70's. Exploiting America's right-swinging Reaganite morality kick, she then joined forces with the infamous Linda Lovelace to pen legislation that would classify pornography as a crime against a woman's civil rights. The idea was summarily laughed out of damn-near every court in the land, but, by cajoling the Deep Throat starlet into believing she had been raped and parading her before the media, we were all reminded why it was such a great movie to begin with - a woman can't talk with nine inches of stromboli stuffed down her gullet.

Andrea Dworkin, over her pathetic killjoy of a lifetime, clashed with folks from all ends of the ideological spectrum. She regularly claimed that people feared her because she spoke the truth, but, in my experience, people fear what they don't understand, and Andrea's rape-crazed musings were pretty damn incomprehensible. Many women as well as men despised her, but most simply wrote her off as the product of misdirected, overboard feminism and a severe case of orgasm deficiency. She will probably be best remembered as the flesh-and-blood archetype of the "Feminazi" character propagated by her equally fat-bodied, socially-crippled blowhard counterpart on the other side of the spectrum, Rush Limbaugh. Something about being absurdly fat and unattractive drives people towards becoming either shit-spewing political provocateurs, or drug-happy physical comedians. I wonder which one I am.

Then in 2000, inconceivably, Andrea was raped at the very peak of her disgustingness, eliciting from the world a collective, "Who the fuck is this guy?"

Of course, taking cheap potshots at Andrea's appearance is no challenge. What truly possessed me to volunteer this obituary wasn't the opportunity to publicly write that Andrea Dworkin's face could've revived Terri Shiavo just enough to pull her own feeding tube out in disgust, but that I've always felt myself to be her brother-in-arms of sorts. Sure, it sounds strange to think that a philandering, functionally-alcoholic pothead would feel himself such a kindred spirit of the world's most reviled feminist, but I do, and for all the most shallow reasons:

Both Andrea and I have spent lifetimes considering the horrible effects of rape on an individual. Andrea, so she could exploit it in political agendas that propped-up her own mental fragility, and me because getting laid has been a semi-annual event for most of my sexual maturity.

People Power

Acid rain burns away our forests as poisoned rivers flow through neighborhoods, and radiation bakes us through a pockmarked ozone layer. Yup, coal and nuclear energy and all the other wonders of the modern world are sure bringing up the quality of life. This isn't a political problem: it's an environmental problem, and like the government and just about everything else, they should be separated.

Unless, of course, the environment is allowed to fight back against Washington. Directly. Tit for tat. A nice plague of locusts would add new motivation to conservation talks.

Hydroelectric power is the only pure, clean, and totally safe way to generate the electricity we need. Problem is, you need powerful (read: falling) water.

There's another problem wracking the country: the predominance of idiots and those who make life unnecessarily difficult for those around them. Go to the grocery store and count the unmarried middle-aged guys pushing their carts with their distended bellies through the "15 items or less" lane to buy seventeen items. Most of their shit is beer and canned meals, and a pack of condoms for their self-esteem, but the effect is what matters: they make life unnecessarily difficult for the rest of us. Fully half of the people in this country are below average. Figure that the middle ten percent of that half exist solely to spite logic and order, and you get a huge figure of people we could do without. There's another ten percent at the top of society who similarly serve no purpose beyond pissing the rest of us off and impeding our right to pursue happiness. Most of them are in politics. Throw in the really gnarly criminals, chicken fuckers, and most of George Carlin's "four groups that gotta go," and the result is a nice slice of America, around the 30% mark, ripped right off the park benches near middle schools.

Now, to bridge these converging storylines.

Oil is a non-renewable resource. Once we burn it all, that's it. We have to wait a couple million years for a bunch of dinosaurs to die and get compressed into black ooze. Judging by the number of dinosaurs in my yard, we have a while to wait. But, we do have a disproportionate amount of stupid and counterproductive people. They reproduce like retards turned loose in a dark room — and note, I don't necessarily include retards in the list...they're probably just as pissed off as we are at the people who pay in nickels and can't coordinate their spandex body suits at Wal-Mart. (No hate for the 'tards. I wouldn't blame them if some were just faking autism to get away from the rest of us. It's actually quite genius.)

So knowing that we have a lot of people waiting for natural selection's fickle finger, and knowing that spinning a specially-constructed turbine can transform kinetic energy into electric energy, I propose we construct a giant paddlewheel at the base of a cliff. We bait the cliff's edge with a TV broadcasting some reality show, then push them off the cliff. A 200 pound male at terminal velocity produces several thousand pounds of force. Listen to that paddle wheel spin, making kilowatt hours to power New York while making life a bit more livable in the process. It's genius.
Like hydroelectric plants sprout up on rivers, we can take these high-dive paddlewheel generators straight to major population centers. Start near Hollywood, and listen to the West Coast's mean IQ skyrocket as wayward surfer dudes and moderately famous soap opera prima donnas are lured into kinetic-public-service. The wheel spins, the San Andreas Fault groans with relief, and somewhere an angel gets its wings.

Now, to find financial backers...

A Steady Diet Of Poo

My girlfriend's ass smells like shit.

Which makes sense, considering what doesn't fall out of her mouth is typically leaking from her crack. But, out of love for her and plain old sick fuck lust, I occasionally have to eat a piece of said ass. So, out of concern for my health, I've taken on the demon questions that have plagued man since he first squatted in the cave: Why does shit stink so bad? And more importantly, Can I do anything to make my girlfriend's ass more palatable?

These dilemmas have weighed on me, and I just can't understand the fucked-up physics that seem to mandate the odor of crap. Surely, I've done wrong in my life to merit God punishing me, but something must be wrong if I can eat the best smelling and tasting food on Earth, drink a bottle of Cool Water cologne, sit down to take a shit, and it comes out smelling like a bowl of spoiled nightcrawlers! I don't know about you people, but I'm starting to think that God kinda fucked us over. Or least he's fucked me over, 'cause I still have to hold my nose when I start in on the humpin'.

Aside from my new vocation here, I work in the construction field. And as I'm sure you've heard, carpenters are some pretty nasty motherfuckers. They enjoy the opportunity to smell each others shit all the time, because they usually don't have any place to take a shit. Where would you leave your used lunch in an unfinished house? Trust me, they find some pretty weird places, and for months afterwards we'll sit around and laugh at the thought of some family smelling shitbombs planted behind the drywall and blaming each other. They're lucky, though. At least the smell has faded over time, because I have never taken a whiff of shit and said to myself, "Damn, that smells like a country flower!" Especially in the bedroom. A woman's shit smells worse than any tobacco chewing trucker old man' underwear. I don't care if you've got the best looking college girl in four states or, in my case, the hottest little Canadian God ever made, if you walk in the bathroom immediatley after she takes a big ol' dump, you'll want to throw rocks at her.

But I've discovered a solution.

This is a hard one to go public with, but I have never been one to embarrass all that easy. I made my shit not stink. For real. And the logic wasn't complicated, I just used reverse psychology against the shit gnomes that live in my ass. How? do you ask? I ate three leveled off teaspoons of my own shit. One in the morning, right after my first cigarette. One about a half-hour after a greasy lunch. And one after my nightly bedtime toothbrushing. I did that for three solid days, and believe me, after going down on my girlfriend, it was easy to get used to. Suddenly, my shit smells like beef boullion! Results may differ, according to your bowel frequency. Examples include pizza, cucumber, chitlins, and the like. With enough time and careful planning, I may just find a way to get my woman to eat my shit, and end my suffering.
Remember, three leveled off teaspoons, six if you eat a lot of cheese products. I will put my reputation on the line that your BVDs will put off the aroma of somthing special. And if you can gauge that amount without the spoon, try it right from the source. I think you will absolutely love the results.

ncidental rare side effects include: shitty breath, gingivitis, loss of friends, chronic hallitosis, and hook worms. Consult your family physician if you are allergic to peanut oil.

Why A Team?

The memo I received today from my boss started, "Dear Team!" or "Hey, Team!" Or maybe it was just "Team!" It doesn't matter. T-E-A-M. There's no "I" in it. But a real team player will helpfully point out that there is "me" in "team." There's also a "mat" in "team," as in "doormat" Thuus, whenever a manager refers to his staff as "My Team," what he is really expressing is:

Are you a "me" or a "mat?" Huh, teammates?

Simply put, this is not just an innocuous greeting from a middle manager that hasn't bothered to read his bosses team-oriented memos about the death of 80s corporate culture. It's really a pit bull with bared, yet hygienically underfunded teeth. And he's saying, "I like my career more than you like yours. I'll prove it by throwing these magical productivity killing nuggets of bullshit your way every once in awhile. Step on one, and it will roll you under that oncoming bus. See how you do."

The truth is, whether a manager means it in the sincerest of lame motivational ways, we are not really a true team at work. A real team has one goal. Our teamesque team has hundreds roaming the hallways. From my radio partner who dreams of being taken seriously as a writer and thinker without actually having to write and think, to the sales assistant who makes delicious homemade fritattas and sells them in the hallway for $2 with free microwaving service. We are more a collection of individuals, climbing over one another to grab our piece of cheese and find the exit. But "Dear Rat Scum" doesn't make a good greeting for a memo. It would be very unteamly.

I suggest that it might be more appropriate to start your motivational memos with "Dear Cooperator." That's essentially what work is. We're cooperating. Our common bond is not to become "meat," which is also in "team" and we'll get on whatever team can provide mutual "me" without the "mat."

Look, fellows. We signed up for work because we have to, and we are all adults who understand and actually like competition. Treat us as such.You don't have to use these little-pussy-hurt-himself-playing-dodgeball-so-the-rest-of-us-have-to-be-punished-to-make-it fair words like "team." And I guaran-damn-tee you, the custom of a manager referring to his employees as a member of the team has it's roots in some long-forgotten lawsuit filed by a member of the Tribe.

The Pain Of Being Plain Jane

I watched some of the Jane Fonda apology on 60 Minutes of Communist Favorites Sunday night, and it really changed my mind. Now, I want to smack this bitch more than ever. I want to smack her hard...and looooonng. The sweet sting of my palm against her delectable cheekbone.

I'd love to throw a vacuum cleaner at her.

I didn't go to Vietnam, but it doesn't matter. Let's take an example closer to home. How did you feel on 9/11, before the politics? In the Moment. No one cares anymore about where you were and what you felt when you watched that good for nothing JFK go down. And no one cares where you were when the Twin Towers were attacked, seeing as how it's unlikely you were in them. What were you thinking watching fellow citizens get incinerated in such a surreal scene? How did you feel with the uncertainty of not knowing if your city or plane was next? Then how betrayed did you feel when you heard prominent fellow citizens saying that, whoever it is, we deserved it?

But this is America. People are so used to being safe they've started to question it. We have all sorts of voices to balance out each other that someone always has like-minded individuals to turn to for comfort in times of stress. I'm sure you got over that betrayed feeling and took care of it at the ballot box. But you still felt it. And you felt personally scared for your life for maybe the first time.

Now you're a POW. You live in worse conditions than the Schaivo girl, and to make matters better, you are fully cognizant most of the time. This is not a CBS show where cameras, producers, and medics are always on stand-by and will save your life faster than any place else in the world just to save their own careers. The only network you have access to on occassion is the loose network of other POWs spreading whatever information about their situation they can through crude codes at what today would be a rate of about .005 bps.

After weeks, months, years of these depressing and brutal conditions, a ray of hope! You will be receiving greetings from that hot piece of ass Jane Fonda. The girl to whose memory you often ran one up the flagpole while in your POW hole. And she's going to speak on Viet Cong radio! We must have won! I will soon be free! Golly, as I'm sure my peers are still saying back home, this is really swell!

But Ms. Fonda comes not with a message of victory, but one of defeat. We soldiers should just give up. The government is wrong about this war. Nobody likes what you're doing. It's hopeless. If even a spoiled Hollywood cunt like Jane Fonda can see it, we might as well die. Losing side, wrong argument. What's the use?

Perhaps even the most rigidly ideologous of you can see how this can not help the cause of America, whether you agree with it or not. And in fact, this is why there is almost universal agreement that the Vietnam War was indeed, lost. We were winning and we lost the will to finish it. Who lost us that will? It wasn't Nixon. It wasn't Fonda. It was both. The Jane Fondas used furious anger and righteous violence to put across their arguments and intimidate the nation for decades into complying with social rules that made little sense the more one was able to calmly scrutinize them. The Richard Nixons of the world were too intimidated and too adrift intellectually to come up with a counterargument that resonated with the American people as the news media did with theirs. Repositioned as the old tired establishment, the better people slunk off to regroup for when the inevitable unsustainability of a society that desires a prosperous, free nation without a strong defense against poachers.

Somebody needed to put up the rules more often back then, or maybe the protestors kept vandalizing the sign:

1) The government can and must protect you against other countries.
2) You pay taxes to help the government pay for the protection.
3) Stay behind the rope while we're fighting. It's much easier that way.
4) Even if you're right about our decision-making, trying to do something about it single-handedly makes you an asshole.

It's not like Jane Fonda hasn't been forgiven already. It's the only reason Jane Fonda didn't get executed as surely as Plain Jane Fonda would have sans the nice rack and caboose and a willingness to show them in movies and threesomes everywhere. The question isn't how much MORE forgiveness Jane Fonda deserves. The question is, how many more people have to get killed before we stop excusing this kind of self-promoting behavior?

There's only one reason Jane Fonda wants to be forgiven. To sell her book about her life in which every decision was made to promote Jane Fonda's interests. Now that she has no movies, no husband, no kids, no influence, all that's left is memories and a book. Take those away, and she's got nothing.

And then, I will forgive Jane Fonda.

Pope John Pimp II

How strange would it be to stand in the line at the pearly gates with the Pope behind you?

Stranger still, imagine that the Pope is behind you at the pearly gates and all you can think about is how much of a bastard your husband is.

To take this even a step further, imagine you’re in line for heaven, the Pope’s behind you, you can’t stop thinking about how much of a bastard your husband is, then realizing that you can’t remember much of the last fifteen years of your life, let alone why your husband is a donkey-fucking shit-eater.

Imagine standing in line at the pearly gates and the Pope tells you that your husband started repopulating the Earth with another woman, while still legally married to you, while your earthly vessel was locked in a degenerative vegetable state. I think it’d safe to say that there would be a pretty pissed-off white woman on her way into heaven. Yours truly is just happy that he’s not in front of her in that line.

Personally, I happen to be the worst person to stand behind in any line. I’m the one who whips out coupons in the check-out line after my purchase has been calculated. I’m the guy asking the video store clerk about each and every DVD I rent. I’m the asshole who takes a bag of nickels to the bank and goes all apeshit when asked to step out of line and return with said nickels rolled properly. …and I would be the dick asking Terri if she ever read any of the Pope comic books like the one Marvel put out in ’83.

Normally, I’d be one worried that such teasing would cause Mrs. Shiavo to lose it like a mid-western high school student and perforate the lot of us. But then again, this is heaven we’re talking about and from what I’ve read, St. Peter & Co. frown upon re-murdering those who’ve literally waited a lifetime to meet the lord, especially when starting with the Pope.

Perhaps if Mr. Shiavo had self-published an independent comic about his wife’s struggle with brain damage instead of mating with the first wildebeest he met, Terri would’ve laughed herself into a speedy recovery. Stranger things have happened. A certain President was re-elected after taking a nation to war over oil, Robbie Williams is an international superstar and Beyonce keeps being cast in movies. Hell, if Sir Shiavo put out a graphic novel about the silly haircut he gave his brain-dead wife by all comparisons this would be seen as just another addition to American Pop culture. After, of course, she revived and beat him to death with a mint copy of it. Maybe then he’d be in line in front of the Pope.

It’s difficult to say.In any case, let’s just say that I’ll be the first to laugh my dick off if some angry protestor were to beat Michael Shiavo to death with a copy of Pope #1.