Monday, January 25, 2010

One For The Road: Pearls Before Swine





...if you're not reading Stephan Pastis' work, you should be.

Brought To You With Limited Commercial Interruption

There’s a chance the Glorious Revolution is slowly…surely… grinding to a halt. The workday: it is a powerful thing. I’m up to almost sixty percent and, Captain, she canna take no more. Ship’s engines have had to file, collate, and deal with AT&T. I had to use the words ‘platform’ and ‘leverage’ in one breath. Luthor wouldn’t even do that to Superman. What I’m trying to say is, I’m tired. I just put the finishing touches on the second edit of a novel. The brain’s dilithium crystals can manage one more Star Trek reference but they lack the strength to raise shields against The Man.

Aw hell, there’s always room for Jello: Dammit, Jim, I’m a Glorious Revolutionary, not a copywriter for a trade magazine read by account executives (Denebian slime devils). And yet…

And yet I wrote this: “…our exciting new platform of initiatives will leverage experience and prestige with the innovation and creativity of the new generation to bring…”

The only saving grace is those words will never be seen. It was a draft only and turns out will not be needed. But the damage is done. They came from my head. The hair follicles desperately tried to scratch them off the old gray matter but they just don’t have enough troops. I am a geezer at 44. I am not as sexily published as Stephen King; there will be no writing groupies. At home there’s a toilet to put in. Grout to be freshened up. And sleep, whole lots of sleep, that eludes.

They came from my head. Tiny little Tom Cruises. The Glorious Revolution is compromised (although I did get paid for the time it took to type that last line; I’m off lunch now. Keep Hope Alive!). Soon enough I’ll be unrecognizable (except when naked, but that’s the Wife’s purview). To all 2 people reading this, Run! I’ll lay down suppression fire. Run for the hinterlands and don’t look back. It’s been fun and it’s been an honor. Take whatever you can from the Revolution and rebuild a fine society, one where account executives (that’s salespeople to you) are retrained as masseuses. I don’t know that I’ll be gone for good, just for a while.

Unless something exceedingly stupid forces my hand.

Viva Paper Towels!

Thursday, January 21, 2010

2010

Why are certain people such dicks? Shouldn’t there be a reset switch inside to return their mindsets to factory defaults? Let’s not debate this. Pat Robertson is a dick. Dick Cheney is a dick. Rush Limbaugh is a dick. Yes, dicks tend to be older white men. Masters of the Universe can’t help but be dicks; dickishness helps one think of oneself as “Master of the Universe”. Not that women can’t be dicks. Not that all races can’t be dicks. Condi Rice is a dick. Understand I’m not speaking from personal interaction with any of these esteemed doofs, I’m going off what they present of themselves to us of their own free will. Robertson is an easy-target dick: anybody that says an earthquake that pretty much decimates a country is divine retribution for satanic pacts should either be ignored or shuffled quietly into the bus to “Camp Comfort”. Cheney: Cheney is Beavis from Beavis and Butthead, complete with that nervously aggressive laugh, in attitude, demeanor and phenotypic traits. A weasel’s a weasel. Michael Steele’s a dick. John Edwards is a dick (literally—dude, is it the hair? Like a Sampson thing pulling in the chicks?).

What’s a dick? A dick is someone whose responses to given situations is so far off the map of human perception that, when presented to a crowd of onlookers anywhere on the face of the planet, the communal reaction is a confused WTF in capital letters followed by looking at one another to try to figure out wtf.

Former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick of Detroit is, was, and always shall be…a dick.

Kim Jong is a supreme North Korean dick.

Monica Conyers (former city council member, Detroit—it’s a long story) is a dick.

Is Tiger Woods a dick? That’s too easy a joke and we already zinged John Edwards. Moving on…

We’re all dicks on occasion. Why, I was a dick just last night. Most of us though, to humanity’s credit, aren’t stuck on dickish. Usually it merely takes a buddy telling us “Stop being a dick” to cure the affliction.

Others aren’t so fortunate. Others are paid millions of dollars and given huge forums to fan their dickishness throughout the land. These poor saps are being robbed of their souls by Rumplestiltskin corporations turning dickishness into gold hand over fist. Pity these poor dicks for they are kind of stupid and don’t even find comfort in masturbation. Dick Cheney masturbating with that sneer on his lips and those beady eyes fixed on a picture of a starving foreign child is an affront to god on so many levels.

Dicks tend to think on the level of “Do the most harm” as opposed to the physician’s credo “First, do no harm.”

Ladies and Gentlemen: hug a dick today. Before he can open his spout-hole; before she can flash that irritating look; before she makes us frown the huge WTF; before he disgusts us with the petty, brackish thing that is his irredeemable worldview. Hug that dick. Squeeze him hard. Re-humanize him. Dicks need love too. They’ll pretend otherwise, but truth is truth: all you need is love. Everybody.

All together now: All you need is love.

Love is all you need.

We love you, dicks, but you are irritating as hell and in the best world we are marching to beat the snot out of you. Please leave the door unlocked.

Actually in the best world there are no dicks. There’s no malicious violence. Jesus is appreciated but not worshipped. Humanitarian aid isn’t viewed as political fuel. People aren’t stupid. Disney stops creating cash-cow teens. In the best world we all grow up. The world has become one huge 12 year old. And 12 year olds, especially boys, are in love with their dicks.

Maturity is woefully under valued.

Can we stop needing to see suffering on a biblical scale in order to re-humanize ourselves?

Sting, when Sting was cool, sang it best: “policeman puts on his uniform, he likes to have a gun ‘cause it keeps him warm, because violence here is a social norm—you got to humanize yourself.”

“Johnny’s joined the National Front; he always was a little runt; got his hands in the air with the other cunts—rehumanize yourself.”

Barring that, can we just agree to ignore the dicks? No more national forums for them. No radio programs. No talking head Sunday morning television interviews. No press. No media of any kind. No More Professional Dicks. The next time Limbaugh wants to say that the nation’s first black president’s response to a cataclysmic natural disaster among a whole bunch of darkies is tailor made for said Pres to gain street cred among U.S. darkies (I’m paraphrasing here but not by much in word or dickishness), can it be a conversation that only Limbaugh and the lonely bottle of lotion on his nightstand needs to hear?

Yes, dicks rule now…but after a certain point even the followers of a dick need to step back and say, “Dude, what the fuck?”

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Lady Gaga

Marilyn Manson crossed with Hanna Montana. Miley Cyrus. Whatever. End of message. Death of culture. Goodbye.