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The Rise of Evil, Part 2

Not many disagreed with the claim in my previous post that evil always wins.

Maybe it’s more obvious than I thought. Everybody knows it, and your reaction upon seeing that I have discovered it, too, is “Duh.” On the other hand maybe this bleak side of Jones is too much of a downer. You don’t believe me, you think that Good can triumph and you don’t have time for an intervention right now.

But Theresa and Emma Goldman (whom I crudely call “Goldie”) both stood up for the forces of Good. My first reaction was “What planet are they living on?” Years ago, even before I read Crime and Punishment, I had a theory about how you could have anything you wanted in life. It was so simple I couldn’t believe everyone wasn’t already implementing it. Here it is: Take whatever you want by force and kill all the witnesses. I had noticed that hard work and talent do not necessarily lead to success in this world, so I was thinking of ways to get stuff, in case my own hard work and talent failed.

Stealing it was one of the options. Hey, it had to be at least considered. In considering it, one of my very first thoughts was “What if I get caught, and go to prison, and end up with a boyfriend?” This line of thinking lead to my theory. Criminals get caught because witnesses tell on them, therefore you should get rid of all the witnesses. Not just bribe them or threaten them, but kill them. That way you get to keep the spoils, and there are no repercussions.

I never put my theory into practice though. I didn’t want to kill anybody. I didn’t even want to steal the material things I wanted. I wanted to earn my own way and have the respect of others, and as Goldie remarked (sort of) in her comment, I wanted to be able to look in the mirror without cringing at the sleazy, double-dealing murderous thief I had become.

As a result I haven’t gotten rich or powerful. Gwyneth Paltrow doesn’t return my calls, because she knows in advance that she doesn’t want to meet me. Probably if I had followed my theory – with some modifications to account for security cameras and DNA tracing – I could have had Gwyneth in so many ways by now. But I opted for living the good life instead. Damn those Catholic schools.

But even though I am not much of a player, it seems obvious to me that if you’re willing to resort to cheating, lying, stealing, threatening and actually causing physical harm to others (in other words, if you’re willing to do Evil), you can come out on top in competitive situations, which is what life is. A dope like me would feel so bad about this that he would not be able to do it for long without breaking down and confessing, and then doing prison time. In my previous post I gave four simple examples of how this works, so I won’t belabor this here.

I suppose what Theresa and Goldie are trying to say is something along the lines of “If we’d all play fair, carry our own weight and help each other, it would be a better world.” Granted, and I’m all for it in principle. But if one guy decides to take what he wants and kill all the witnesses, he can negate a million good deeds.

And sadly, that guy is always out there.

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The Rise of Evil

Evil always wins.

Let’s say three roommates share a house. Everybody has jobs and schedules, places they have to be, people to meet, things to do. They are just trying to get over. Two of the roommates, because of their upbringing, or their moral superiority or guilt or whatever, do their share of household chores. Nothing too intense. They take out the trash, vacuum occasionally. The third roommate – the evil one – never helps. He never does the dishes or sweeps the kitchen floor. He gets peanut butter out of the refrigerator, eats what he wants and leaves the rest of it out. He spills potato chips on the sofa at night while watching reruns of Saturday Night Live, and the mess is still there in the morning, after he has risen and left the house for the day. The other roommates cover for him, because they are trying to maintain modern civilization, but he blithely goes on in his slobby ways, oblivious to the fact that his roommates are acting as his servants. Eventually, and here is where evil wins, the two roommates give up and stop taking care of their clueless brother. At this point, the house begins to smell funny, and the carpet crunches when you walk on it. Before long, all three roommates are slobs. Dates enter the house, their upper lips curl in revulsion, and people are not getting laid when they should. Pure evil, winning again.

Or consider a bully on a playground. He steals your lunch money, knocks your book bag to the ground and sometimes just bops you for the hell of it. You and the rest of the kids try to appease him, but this doesn’t satisfy him. He steps up his demands, telling you to get more lunch money, or else. As you can see, evil is winning here. After a while, you decide to challenge the bully. At this point, I have to warn you: Contrary to what your Uncle Dick told you when you were little, bullies don’t fold and run away crying just because you stand up to them. Sometimes they beat the shit out of you, and make you their bitch. But whatever the outcome, you and the bully have escalated the situation into open warfare. If you beat him up, perhaps you will become the bully. Or maybe he will beat you up. Either way, violence and terror are now rampant on the playground. Evil wins.

Maybe you work in a sales job, on commission plus bonuses. (In case you haven’t noticed, almost all jobs can be sales jobs to some extent.) You believe in your product, and you are convinced that it is beneficial to most of your customers. You tell your clients the truth, and in some cases the truth prevents them from purchasing, because you help them to understand that the product would not suit their needs, or perhaps they cannot afford it. You lose a sale and a commission, but this is OK with you, because, after all, you are helping people, and you don’t have to close every deal in order to put food on your table. But Slick Rick – the evil salesperson on your team – doesn’t feel the same. He feels that every client can and should be closed, whether it is good for them or not. Because it is good for him. He leaves out any information that the customer “doesn’t need to know,” and sometimes obscures the long-term financial consequences of his clients’ decision to buy, if that’s what it takes to make a deal. Because of these and other shady tactics, he is the top producer, lives extremely well, collects most of the bonuses and sales incentives and is the darling of management. Customers are hurt, but it is possible to prove that they signed the documents of their own free will, so the attitude of the company is “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.” You, on the other hand, are repeatedly called in to the manager’s office and asked what’s wrong, is there trouble at home, we’d really hate to lose you, but you’re just not keeping up. Eventually you get fired (evil wins), or you quit in disgust (evil wins and you blame yourself) or you adopt Slick Rick’s methods and start shaking down everyone you see (you lose your self-respect, more people get hurt, the integrity of the company is compromised and evil wins big time).

You see how this works?

Or you are a candidate for political office. You and your opponent strongly disagree on solutions to the challenges facing your constituents, and you vigorously present your well-researched and prepared proposals at town meetings throughout the district. Your opponent may have good ideas too, or he may not, but he realizes that the public is unconcerned about the wonkery of good government, and voters won’t or can’t be educated. So he attacks you personally on the ground that you smoked pot in college, or one of your aides was busted for drunk driving in 1979. Since you bailed him out, you are “soft on crime,” and cannot be trusted to deal harshly with child molesters. Blindsided, you deny the charges and say that you hate those kid-rapers too, but it’s too late. Your tough stance appears phony, and your supporters abandon you. Evil has won, and in the election you go down 59% to 37%. Your political career is over, unless you jump on the personal attack shitwagon in the next election.

Try to be good, folks. But watch your back, and don’t expect too much from the rest of us.

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An Unnumbered List

That post below this one has been there long enough.

“Next Blog” visitors here will think that I am using the internet to shop for sex. Heh, heh. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I am using the internet to shop for porn. But you have to admit, the person who wrote that ad (see the previous post if you must read it) was pretty clever. I thought about contacting her to tell her that I had used her ad as a blog post, and to let her know that I appreciated her writing. But then she probably would have sued me. Is plagiarism a crime? Even if I acknowledge it right in the plagiarism itself? But I guess you can be sued for things that aren’t criminal. Look at O.J.Simpson: Not a criminal according to the court, but so sue-able. So if any of you were thinking about giving the ad writer a jingle, please don’t mention me, OK?

I’m writing this to blot out the memory of my previous tawdry post, so I have to think of things to discuss, so as to push that other thing as far down the screen as possible. I usually don’t do current events, because I have lived forever already and nothing much surprises me or outrages me, at least not enough to expose my thoughts to the world. Also, as I have mentioned elsewhere on this site, there are professional writers with press credentials and lots of access, not to mention their own personal fact-checkers, who are able to do a better job of punditry than I could, so mostly I stick to trolling for comments from naked women. Some of you have been obliging in that regard, and I can’t thank you enough.

Nonetheless, because I am at a creative impasse, let me try a list of stuff:

  • THE LONDON BOMBINGS. A lot of people hate us. I’m including the Brits and Americans in the group known as “us.” There are other countries that are hated, too, sort of a coalition of the arrogant. Blowing things up and killing people you don’t even know really pisses me off. Of course, it must really piss off the people who are blown up and killed. We’ve been doing it to whomever we want for centuries, so you’ve got to think they must be angry. So now they’re blowing us up and killing us. Everybody in the West wants to know “Why do they hate us?” The real question is “Why did it take them so long?” Get used to it, people. This is not the kind of war you can win. In fact, the very act of engaging this type of adversary sort of guarantees that it won’t end. The terrorists, who, let’s face it, are fundamentalist Islamic radicals, don’t have a political agenda, so we can’t even surrender. We can’t say, “OK, you win, we give up, you can have what you want.” Because they only want to kill infidels. If we give up, they’ll kill us all. So we have to take away their incentives to hate us. We have to treat the Arab and Islamic worlds with respect, instead of stealing all their stuff that isn’t nailed down, installing murderous dictators in their countries and sneering at their culture and religion. It will take a couple of generations to pull something like this off, and the healing won’t start until we in the U.S. dump our current crop of “leaders,” who are, not coincidentally, fundamentalist Christian radicals.
  • TOM CRUISE. What a terrible spot this poor guy is in! He is as queer as Rock Hudson. A gay Scientologist. You know The Church wouldn’t approve. You know his twenty-million-dollar-a-picture career would take a nose dive if he came out. At least you’ve got to hand it to him for managing to get Nicole Kidman and Penelope Cruz and Katie Holmes to go along with the ruse. All he needs is to be married or paired off, and for that he could use anybody, but he went out and hooked himself three world-class babes. I’m trying to imagine being repulsed by doing the nasty with any one of these women. Not working for me, but I think I can simulate the feeling (of revulsion) by imagining myself with Tom Cruise! So not my type. One night with him and I’d be going on talk shows admitting my heterosexuality. And yet he has posed as lover or husband for these hot women for years! Has he won an Academy award yet? He deserves one for this ongoing performance. Maybe after a couple of years with little Katie he will cop. According to my calculations, sometime in the next 18 months he will have accumulated more money than God, and so who cares about the career anymore? He can “get back to his roots” and do some off-Broadway theater. But whoops! Here comes The Church of Scientology. They will have to lock him in a room and cure him, or else come out themselves. I can hardly wait.
  • KARL ROVE. This is a non-story. But first, what kind of name is Plame? I’ve never known anyone with that name. It sounds made up. Is that the best the CIA can do? Making up names for their secret agents that sound made up? No wonder thay can’t catch Bin Laden. Anyway, Bush said he’d fire anyone who leaked information about Valerie Plame two years ago, and now it looks like it was Karl, the guy who sort of created Bush and still pulls most of the strings. So there will be some awkward moments between George and Karl, the President and his mentor. Despite the fact that half the people in Washington already knew about Valerie Plame’s job, if it can be proved that Karl did the leaking Bush will have to fire him. And the loyal opposition will grind on this interminably, so if there’s any evidence it will be found, and even if there’s no evidence the whole thing could bring the government to a standstill. Some of you will say “Good,” and you are probably right, but Bush has to think of his legacy, such as it is, and so Karl must be canned. But wait – is this a bad thing? Certainly not for Karl. The Heritage Foundation or some other right-wing “think tank” will gladly pay Rove a million bucks to join them, and once he is free of the fetters of being a “public servant” he should be ble to make twenty grand a night in speaking fees. That’s more than I make in a week. He doesn’t strike me as a guy who cares if people like him, so even if he faces the public humiliation of an indictment and a trial, he’ll still be able to laugh, especially when he is sentenced to six months in some low-security Martha Stewart clink (suspended, of course). Not to mention that he cannot do anything bad enough for the millions of ditto-heads in this country to lose their love for all things Rove. So this is a win-win: Joe Wilson is made an example of and Karl Rove becomes a millionaire. Because I don’t have a fact-checker, I have to state here that I don’t know if maybe he already is a millionaire. But either way I’m sure he won’t mind getting the hell out of D.C., and getting started on his “civilian” life.
  • THE PROTEST SONG. You thought maybe this was going away, didn’t you? Well it’s not. I won’t bother to link back to the relevant posts about this debacle. If you were here, you know what I’m talking about. If not, you missed a great party. I am actually working on the protest song, using as much of what you sent me as I can, without violating the Hayes Act. When it’s finished I will record it and post it here, as I have previously threatened. I only wish I could somehow invade all your computers, you lazy do-nothings who have not helped me with this project, and force you to listen. It will not be pretty, but it will be done.
  • THE DA VINCI CODE. Yes, I am reading it. I was forced to. Someone at work bought the book and loaned it to me, against my wishes. But I have to read it now, because I refused to read Atlas Shrugged when this same woman forcibly loaned that one to me a few years ago, and so I owe her one. This book has swept America, and it has been recommended to me vigorously by so many people that I expected it to be, well, really good. I will say this: It is a classic page-turner. Every chapter ends in a cliff-hanger, and since there are three (or four) storylines, you often have to read a couple of chapters to find out the resolution of one of the cliffhangers. But while you are doing that, you discover a couple more cliffhangers, and so on. I am only half way through it, so I don’t think I know enough to spoil it for anyone, so for God’s sake, don’t click away from here. For me the problem with the book is that the descriptions are dull and the characters are simply props. They don’t feel like real people, and therefore one does not get involved much with them. I think the world likes this book a lot because it says many bad things about the Roman Catholic Church (hooray), and because it piles on a lot of little “facts” about history and language and philosophy and religion, and makes it seem as if you are learning something by reading it. This is an illusion. Still, I have to say I like all the stuff about Goddess worship, yin and yang, and the sacrament of fucking. In my big-budget blockbuster movie, which will be out late next spring, I will cast Keannu Reeves as Robert Langdon and Isabelle Huppert as Sophie Neveu. The film will flop, but I will get to meet Isabelle Huppert, and share a sacrament.
  • I APOLOGIZE to any of my blogging buddies whom I may have offended in private email. I didn’t mean to, I was thoughtless and crude, and I beg forgiveness.

As always, my heart is filled with love for you all, but tinged with vague unease.

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Personal


Here’s an actual personal ad that I found. I’ll give you the link to it later in this post:

Hate the media? Fuck me! – w4m

Date: Mon Mar 21 21:26:55 2005Hi. I’m a journalist. Or a reporter. Whatever word pisses you off more, I’m part of the mainstream media, the liberal media, the so-called liberal media. I am the epitome of all that is wrong with contemporary journalism.

That is why I need you to fuck me until I feel as disgraced sexually as I do professionally.

Look, I started my career with a great deal of optimism. I thought I was going to expose some hard truths. I thought I was going to tell stories that mattered to people. I thought I was going to write clever, piquant critiques of popular culture and politics that turned conventional wisdom on its head and opened new avenues of understanding and appreciating the world we live in.

Maybe I did some of that in the years I’ve been slaving in the salt mines. But mostly, I’ve capitulated to The Man.

Now, I want to capitulate to an actual man.

There’s some sort of odiousness in my professional life that will irritate you no matter what your political stripe.

If you are Republican, I am indeed a liberal. There, I said it. I’ve left Republican voter quotes out of election stories because they were too infuriating; unless, that is, the quotes made the subject ridiculous and then I played them up. I’ve ignored your fucking women’s clubs and your business “luncheons” (for fuck’s sake, “lunch” will suffice!) and I would never deign to profile your pathetic loser hateful whitebread “Pioneers.” I have a pitiful, wretched bias against asshole honkies like yourselves that manifests itself in small, ultimately meaningless ways since you never seem to realize the joke is on you.

You are arrogant, deluded and selfish assholes, and if you’d act like a supercilious pig who hates poor people — oh, excuse me, government handouts — and non-WASPs while jamming me with your arrogant cock that’d be great.

If you are a Democrat or progressive, there are reasons aplenty for you to hate me as well. I consistently toe the publisher’s line; anytime there’s an issue that a certain, moneyed sector of the community helps the publisher adopt as a cause of the publisher’s own, I make sure all the coverage of said issue is superficial. Hey, I used to fight this, but after I nearly lost my lousy-paying shitty-benefits job because I told the truth about a community group with powerful vested interests, I decided the community would lose whether or not I caved. I don’t file FOIA letters, either.

You are right about people like me, and if you could lord it over me while fucking my brains out, that might just do the trick.

If you don’t hew to any political interests there’s plenty to revile about my professional life which, sad to say, is the only life I seem to have. I capitalize Web site and Internet. I never use the passive voice. This is the longest thing I’ve written for publication in ages. I don’t use a comma after the terminal “and” in a series. I rely on the press releases of boring and often insane community groups to develop stories around that you don’t give a shit about, and I can’t blame you for that!

I’m better-looking than your average reporter — God knows it’s goblins and gnomes all over the newsrooms of the world — so that isn’t saying much. Mostly, I expect my half-assed way of getting my shit pulled together to fuel your aggressive, angry libido.

I am everything that is wrong with the media, incarnated in human form. If you’ve ever said “Fuck the media,” this is your chance.

OK, so here are my questions:

  1. Smart, sexy broad or desperate skank?
  2. Serious reaching out or amusing hoax?
  3. Guys – Are you going to answer the ad? (The link is below.)
  4. Girls – Should I answer the ad?
  5. Is there any chance that liberals/progressives/Democrats will hate her enough to give her true satisfaction?
  6. Or will she hear only from Republicans?
  7. Who knows what FOIA means?
  8. Great opportunity or sad commentary on modern life?

Because you won’t believe that this is a real personal ad that I found – I mean stumbled across while researching oil reserves in Colorado – on the internet, you can go to the actual post and read it yourself by clicking here. If any of you decide to respond, I’ll expect a full report.

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Tappin’ It Out

I love this blogging thing! It’s almost exactly like writing.

If I were a real writer, I mean like a professional writer, a guy who actually got paid for, you know, writing, I think it would be a lot like this. You sit down at the computer – I’d use a computer because that whole typewriter thing, while it looks cool in the movies, you have to keep ripping out the paper with the crappy false starts on it and crumpling it up and throwing it away in disgust, missing the waste basket at least half the time, plus you have to use whiteout. Have you ever used whiteout? As The Oldest Blogger, it’s possible that I have more experience with whiteout than all of you combined. Oh, sure, it’s got a kick. I’ve seen the antelope-sized jackrabbits galloping alongside my car on the freeway. But it will give you a righteous headache, too, and it takes like five years to develop enough skill to use it and not make a big, soft lump of whiteout on your page, a wet mass of paste that will not dry anytime soon. You might as well rip that page out and toss it at the waste basket, because you will never be able to type over that goo-covered mistake. Plus, the high is not worth the headache.

So I’d use a computer.

Where was I? I’d sit down at the computer and start my professional writing. I’d have a beginning, a middle and an end, every time I sat down. Or at least I’d want to. And here’s another way that blogging is like writing: Writer’s block. Only you don’t get writer’s block. That’s for the writers. What you get is Blogger’s Block. You think you’re going to have a beginning, a middle and an end, but maybe you don’t have an end, or a middle. Maybe right now you’re like me, and you don’t have shit.

Don’t worry! This is Blogger’s Block. It’s not a bad thing. It is the proof that you’re a blogger! If the blogosphere gives you lemons – say it with me now – you make lemon-fucking-ade!

Welcome to Blogger’s Block. That extremely brief moment when you have nothing to say. Work through it. Chances are, your “readers” won’t even notice if you fill the screen with meaningless nonsense. I know that when I’m a reader, all my bloggin’ buddies get the full benefit of all my doubts. Was that a stupid, thoughtless remark? Of course not. Facts a little, ah, wrong? Nah – just a matter of interpretation. Was that a conclusion she just jumped to? Couldn’t be – she’s too smart. See how that works? Blog through your block, and you can’t go wrong.

Hey, and how about readers? Writers have readers. Well, so do bloggers. Bloggers have technical ways to check up on their readers, too, find out if they are being loyal. So I guess that’s a little different than it would be for a writer. A writer would go to bookstores and read his book out loud to a bunch of readers, and then he’d take his pick of the nubile coeds who had attended his reading. Bloggers don’t get out as much, but they do have stats. And they make up for being just a little withdrawn at times by being in the forefront of a new medium. Bloggers are in the vanguard, so they’re cool, and you can take that to the bank.

I wish I had a gray wool houndstooth sport coat with leather patches on the elbows. That would be something a writer would have. But that’s another post.

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My Stick-On Family

If I were a loving husband and doting father of two I would certainly have these things on the back window of my SUV:

That would be me there with the bowtie, beaming and waving at the world behind my big V8 Expedition/Navigator/Tahoe/Armada. Doing a little jig, too, because I am so happy with my little stick-on family and my 420 cubic inch engine.

Next to me is Mrs. Jones, in a demure calf-length skirt. Mrs. Jones is happy, too, because she just took a whole handful of Prozac. She’s got those telltale Prozac eyebrows, doesn’t she? But, oh-oh, what’s this? Mrs. Jones has no tits at all! No stomach or intestines, heart or lungs, either. Well, I guess that’s how the little vixen keeps her weight down. Good for you, Mrs. Jones!

Then there are the kids. Little Madison with her polka dot skirt and that adorable crooked smile. She’s got her mother’s tits, don’t you think? Somebody’s got ’em, that’s for sure!

And my boy Justin, the apple of my eye, always scaring the pigeons, that dickens. His mother picked that name. I wanted to name him Ken, after Kenny G. “K-Man!” I’d say to him, “whassup?” But Mrs. Jones said it would always remind her of Kenneth Starr. I was happy to let her give him a fairy name. Because I am the loving stick-husband and she gives me stick sex if I don’t ever contradict her. Secretly, though, I call him Ken.

But I would never put these guys on the back window of the big ol’ rockin’ SUV:

Because if a stalker followed me home, or some hoodlums intent on committing a home invasion, I would want them to think that it was just me and Mrs. Jones and our beautiful children. Then, after they tied us all up (but before they fooled around with little Maddy, bless her heart), out would come good old Rex and Fluffy, snarling and hissing, and rip those home invaders some new butt-holes!

That’s the way I think, because I am Stick Man, and I take care of my stick family.

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Angel of Death

Molly the Cat was sitting motionless on the back stoop.

She’s the first cat I’ve ever had, having grown up more of a dog person, so she is teaching me all about cats. One of the things I’ve learned is that cats often sit motionless for long periods of time. When they are not sleeping, I think they are trying to demonstrate what they might look like stuffed. Most of the time, they’re sleeping.

But I am standing quietly behind her, in the kitchen, watching her through the screen door, when I detect a slight variation in her stance. Her body tenses slightly, her ears swivel toward a certain point in the backyard and her feet gather up under her as she slowly lowers herself into a crouch. Her back legs tense and flex a few times. I am about to learn something new, firsthand…

I know a girl, her name is Kristin. She’ll never see this, so I am using her real name. She is a beautiful child, just eighteen years old, or maybe seventeen, a fresh, vibrant new bloom. She is my niece’s best friend, has been for a decade. They are rarely apart. They might as well be sisters, for all the sleepovers they have had at each others’ homes. They have studied together, played together, caroused around Southern California together, and I have no doubt have drunk together and started to learn about boys together. Last week, just last week, they graduated from high school together. They rigged it so they could walk together in the procession, and then they partied together until dawn.

As long as I have known Kristin, she has lived alone with her mother, in an apartment, just the two of them. I talked to her mom twice. Once on the phone when I took the girls to Disneyland (naturally I had to be checked out), and once when I found an unrecognized phone number programmed into my cell phone. It was hers, and we spoke for a minute, not knowing each other. She figured out who I was first, before I could solve the puzzle, so I thought she must be pretty smart.

I missed the graduation ceremony myself, and I still had not met Kristin’s mom when I made a little photo slide show of the affair, using what was on the memory card of someone’s digital camera. One shot that I included was of the two graduates just after the ceremony, posing in their caps and gowns, holding their bouquets and flanked by their two proud mothers. Smiles of pride, joy, relief and mischief. Just a week ago.

Kristin’s mom was a waitress, so it can’t have been easy to get the kid through high school, and who knows what might come next? We sometimes think we know, but we don’t, really. Last night, coming home from work sometime after midnight, her car was struck by another, and she was killed.

She was two blocks from the apartment, making the last left turn. The other car rammed hers broadside and pushed it at least a hundred feet down the street, into a tree, where it stopped and caught fire. It must have been all over in a matter of seconds, and the other driver fled.

There are some older sisters, but they have been out of the nest for a long time. So Kristin won’t be completely alone. Just more alone than she has ever been. I try to think how I would handle this myself, at her age, and my mind just won’t look at it. We think we know, but we don’t, really.

It happens so fast I hardly believe it. Molly the Cat rockets off the back stoop, and in about a second she is at the cinderblock wall at the distant end of the yard, 60 feet away. She looks into the bougainvillea there for another second, then stands on her hind legs and bats something from a branch to the ground, floomp. There is the momentary peeping and shrieking of the baby mockingbird, and then Molly the Cat is running, bird in her mouth, into my kitchen. In those ten seconds, she has brought mindless, meaningless, inexplicable death, but she has done nothing wrong, nothing I can punish her for, and she is confused at my raised voice.

We think we know, but we don’t, really.

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Protest, Schmrotest

One day I will hit upon a traffic-generating scam that will make this blog the Most Popular Destination on the Web.

The revision99 Protest Song UnContest was not it, however. I am reviewing the entries this evening, and I have a few thoughts:

  • Thank you, thank you, thank you to those who wrote lyrics and proposed song ideas. My creative days are long in the past, so I really need this stuff if I am going to maintain any sort of illusion of vitality.
  • I will not name names at this time, because then everyone will know what a flop the UnContest was. Besides, you know who you are. If any of you “win,” – and this is a big if – I will request permission to identify you in this blog.
  • Apparently, not many of you are very angry, and those who are, aren’t really angry, just a little annoyed. You have to stoke up a pretty heavy head of steam to actually want to write a protest song (or, apparently, even to say a protest sentence), and I guess I just didn’t piss off enough of you, enough.
  • I thought my list of things to be angry about would get your creative juices flowing, and just in case, my reprint of the lyrics to “Eve of Destruction” should have made it obvious that there would be no reason for embarrassment, no matter what you wrote. But most of you who said anything, said you “didn’t know how” to write song lyrics, or that you “suck at” writing song lyrics. You should listen to “Achy Breaky Heart” a few times.

But, whatever. I warned you what the punishment would be if you didn’t cooperate on this: I will write a protest song myself. God knows I am angry enough. I will steal what I can from the songs and ideas you have sent me, mix in a little tambourine and acoustic guitar, and try to put them together into a rousing anthem for the New Revolution. When it’s finished I will record it and post it for you all to hear. Then you’ll be sorry. Get your picket signs ready.

If you’re here for the first time, details about the UnContest (which is over unless you want to enter now) can be found here and here.

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Pomp, Circumstance and Sleep Deprivation

Jesus X. Fucking Christ in a gypsy cab, I am tired tonight.

Last week I drove to The University of California at Santa Cruz for the graduation ceremony of my goddaughter. If you’ve only heard about godfathers in reference to Mafia bosses, be advised that a godparent is supposed to be responsible for the spiritual upbringing of the child if something happens to the bioparents. Due to a warp in the time-space continuum, I was picked to be a godfather twenty-four years ago. Luckily, nothing happened to the girl’s parents, or else by now she would probably be a Hong Kong call girl. Regular readers will know that I am a deeply spiritual person, but during her formative years I was, shall we say, otherwise occupied.

The girl grew up to be a pretty good young woman, but I was never convinced that she would graduate from college. Frankly, I didn’t think she wanted to. A few years after I myself finished college I had a lot of friends who were still attending. Most of them never accomplished enough to trigger a graduation ceremony, and some of them are taking classes to this day, with no graduation in sight.

I thought that would be the path my goddaughter would take. I mean, when she traveled to Spain to study, it was only a matter of weeks before she moved out of the safe boarding house arranged by the university and into god knows what dive. Then she stopped going to classes, and instead joined an itinerant street theater troupe. When I got the news that she had broken her arm falling off the table she was dancing on in a Madrid bar, I was pretty sure I’d never be attending a graduation, and, spiritual guru that I am, I became one with that.

When she returned to the U.S. and enrolled at Santa Cruz, the Hippie Campus, I still felt I had nothing to worry about. I mean, the school mascot is the banana slug. Need I say more?

But life has its twists and turns, and eventually she found a calling and not only earned a degree, but with honors, and a job offer to boot. And the whole procedure took less than seven years, which is less time than my friend Mike took to pass English 1A. (Note: I am jealous, because I am still looking for my first job offer related in any way to my major, which was Semantics.).

Since it costs the same to fly to Santa Cruz from L.A. as it does to charter a jet to Antarctica, I decided to drive up there for the big weekend. So I had a nine-hour drive the Friday before last, including three hours of traffic jams in the middle of fucking nowhere, which is what central California looks like. I don’t know why there would be traffic jams when we were so far away from anything that we could see the curvature of the earth, but there you go.

To add to the fun, all the rooms in Santa Cruz and environs were booked, so I had to be smuggled into someone else’s motel room for the weekend. The last time this kind of pajama party/sleepover was actually fun was Cub Scouts. But I was 35 then, and a lot of things were more fun in those days.

The town was alive with freethinking and strong coffee, and I got very little sleep, except during the graduation ceremony itself. Governor Schwarznegger, our answer to Jesse Ventura, did not speak at this affair, which took place in an open meadow, so the quiet drone of the various valedictorians and faculty members combined with the hot sun and a lazy breeze to create the perfect nap time, and I nearly fell off my folding chair three times.

Following the ceremony there was a forced march several miles up a steep hill to some sort of quad, where we attended a reception, which, I think, was mainly a chance for our rather large group to get separated from one another over and over as we kept telling ourselves that we were leaving as soon as Uncle Jack (or cousin Mildred) came out of the bathroom, or got back from the food concession, or had their picture taken in one previously untried permutation of relatives, graduate and friends.

When we finally overcame this inertia and got the hell out of there, we had to wait for a shuttle bus to take us back to the parking structure concealed some miles away in the redwoods. When the bus arrived, there were too many people at the bus stop, but we all got on anyway, and the little tram got as crowded as a municipal bus in Baja. I must compliment the manners of the students who were on that tram, however. One of them actually stood to let me have his seat, although it is possible that he was influenced by my Crazy-Eyed Killer stare. Still, he got out of my way, and that’s what counts.

Then there was a drive to another small town nearby, a dinner at an Italian restaurant with heavily accented waiters (no Mafia bosses, though), several toasts, a session of gift-opening, a great deal of earnest after-dinner conversation and a drive back to Santa Cruz where I was re-smuggled into the room for a refreshing four hours of sleep before getting back on the road for Southern California.

You’d think that sitting in a comfortable car seat for eight hours would be easy and restful, but there is nothing like hurtling down a freeway in a vibrating steel box at ninety miles per hour, a hideous death only seconds away if you lose your concentration at any time. There is nothing like that to get you all stressed out and fatigued, which is what I was by the time I got home on Sunday night (the Sunday before last).

It was a wonderful weekend with great sights, the electric buzz of young brains and a pretty coed who wanted to discuss Linguistics with me, and I can have no complaints, but jeez, the driving and the eating and the speeches and the not sleeping, well, it wore me out. And I was only halfway through the graduation festivities. The following week (this past week) I had another graduation, this one right here in my town, with me acting as the host for out-of-towners and throwing a party for the graduate and her rowdy teenage homies.

But I see that I have been typing so long now that probably no one is still reading, so I will just say that I have survived two graduations in a row, I am thoroughly burned out, and I am thankful that I have no dad and I am not myself a dad, or else I would have had a Father’s Day thing added on. Luckily I started back to work today, so I will be getting some much-needed rest there.

As always, my heart overflows with tender joy and bittersweet affection.

Remember, tomorrow is the first day of Summer, so the deadline for the revision99 Protest Song UnContest looms. You still have time to submit lyrics and song ideas to vent your rage against The Establishment (or whatever pisses you off). Details can be found here and here.

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Clocking Out

Au revoir, my friends.

Last week I went away to attend a graduation, and I was completely disconnected from the internet for almost four days. I got so far behind in the daily serial that is my bloggin’ buddies’ lives that I felt guilty. Every blog I visited had three or four (or five) posts that I had not read. I was not just disconnected from the internet. I felt like I had been disconnected from life itself.

I tried to catch up, but I am hopelessly behind. Whatever was discussed is gone forever, and I am destined always to be out of the loop when references are made to the occurences of that long weekend. Oh, wait. I’ve been out of the loop since Reagan was shot, anyway, so what’s new?

Now, the very next weekend, I have another graduation. This one is right here in my town, and the wrap party is right here in my house. Due to the close family connection of this graduate (my niece), many relatives are descending on my town, and I will be entertaining them, probably every second from Friday early in the morning (who flies at 6:30 AM? My sisters.) until late Sunday evening. My only plans for entertaining all these people is a backyard party and barbecue on Saturday. Other than that all I’ve got is getting ready for the party, and cleaning up after the party.

The party might not be so bad, because my niece may have hot teenage girlfriends, and I have made it clear that there will be no underage drinking at my home. So I’m assuming they will be loaded to the gills when they get here, and you never know what those crazy kids will do.

So again I will be out of the blogging loop, in the dark, incommunicado. Naturally, I’ll be right here close to my computer much of the time, so I might be able to sneak in and check some blogs. But I have a large, demanding family, and I’m not in any way ready to throw a party for hot teenage girls (OK, and boys), so with all the last-minute running around I will be doing I anticipate that I will be offline again for the next few frantic days.

I’m guessing this is going to be mildly disappointing to about eight people. I don’t seem to have as many readers as Pops, or MPH, or Theresa, and they (you) don’t seem to be as fiercely loyal. But they make up for that with their intense, uh, their, ah, occasional mild curiosity, or something. Maybe. I’m not jealous or anything. All those people who don’t visit me here, well, it’s their loss. This really is one of the only places on the internet where “to, two, too, there, their and they’re” are never misused, and all apostrophes are placed correctly. Oh. Maybe that’s why no one visits me here.

Well, I just thought I should let you know. About my upcoming busy weekend and all. Busy, busy, busy.

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