Average American

7/11/05

I get a bit nervous whenever I come out of my alcoholic haze long enough to flip through the channels and realize that many of our elected officials are kind of stupid. Call me crazy, but I don’t feel comfortable with the idea that I am a fair sight smarter than the men and women running this country. I’m apparently alone on this subject, as far too many registered voters go around saying that they want an “average man” in the White House. Are you a deranged monkey? You want an average human representing America and having access to nuclear weapons?

Lots of average Americans still think dinosaurs lived at the same time as man, (to be fair, they’re only separated by 65 million years,) and don’t know that the Sun is a star. I think the figure who don’t know that is a staggering 40%. By the way, 72% of statistics are made up on the spot. I recently saw a web posting where a high school teacher was asking if someone could explain what the difference between a sun and a star was. Are all stars suns? she wondered. Apart from the fact that she’s teaching goddamn high school, there’s the stranger and more disturbing fact that she posted the question on a web message board as opposed to going to the library and, oh, I dunno…looking it the fuck up? These are the average Americans I’m talking about. Not exceptions…average.

Why on earth would we want average in the highest office in the land? You’re neighbor’s average; what do you think of his ideas on foreign policy? They’re probably something like, “Just bomb ‘em.” Hmm…maybe he could be president. You all got just what you wanted; we have an average man in the Oval Office. I was under the impression that the man most singularly responsible for our well-being and economy should be of a higher caliber than Myrtle down the street who took out a payday loan to buy scratcher tickets.

But no. Americans don’t want intelligent, complex solutions to problems that can’t be boiled down to black and white. They want someone with a shit-eating grin saying that the value of the dollar will go up if he gives you back some cash from your taxes and that the angry people over in the Middle East aren’t mad because of economic, religious and cultural issues and a sense of disenfranchisement that has ties going back thousands of years to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and rise of Christianity in Europe; no, no…they hate our freedom.

I think if I hear the President say “they hate our freedom,” one more time I’m just going to grab a mallet and start beating people about the head and neck until they take me into custody.

So Bush II won the election because he gave people dumbed-down, lowest common denominator solutions and they ate it up like candy. “Mr. President your justifications for declaring war out of the clear, blue sky on a country that’s no logistic threat to us are delicious, can we have some more?!” I’m not saying that John Kerry was the right man for the job; I don’t think he was the best candidate. I do think he was a damn sight better than the man who won, but that’s like comparing an eight year old bully to a sociopathic meth-addict with an AK-47 and nothing to lose.

Personally, I liked Howard Dean. You remember him; Governor from Vermont? I liked Dean not only because of his politics but because he, instead of being an “average” guy, struck me as someone who used common sense and his conscience. I thought he would do what was best for America and Americans regardless of his party or personal superstitions. Unfortunately Dean made the mistake of making a noise nobody had every heard before on national television. I’m not saying it cost him the election, but…well, yes...yes I am.

Another man who votes his conscience, and the only Republican I can ever see voting for, is Senator John McCain. But he, like Dean, would never win because they are too thoughtful. People don’t want thinking men who carefully examine the issues and don’t make irrational judgments based on personal bullshit. People want some dude who stands up and says “God is an American and I’m gonna kick ass.”

It seems to me that the trend in politics goes in waves, just like everything else. The Democrats are in charge for awhile and things get evened out and calmed down and what we end up with is a period of slow but steady economic growth. Granted, this is pretty boring. But it’s also comfortable; at least I think so; I really rather like a calm Universe. But people get bored or see us as weak or something like that and start salivating for the Republicans again. They start wanting the promise of easy money and the supposed power of intimidation in the world again. So in comes the big, gray elephant and they shake things up like a snow globe and it looks real flashy and it sounds good but a couple of years go by and what do we get? All...THIS, (Ryan gesturing wildly at the insanity of the country.)

With any luck, it'll all average out.

Belly Up

4/3/05

My fish died today. That’s right, dear reader, Mr. Tickles is no more. Of course I’m a little upset; I mean, he was only a goldfish but I’d had him for some four years and, if not quite emotionally attached to him, I was used to his quiet presence. Our relationship was pretty one-sided, I have to admit. It mostly consisted of him swimming around all day long with a vapid look on his face, waiting for me to come home and feed him strange flakes that smelled like spoiled lettuce. I don’t know for sure that he was vapid; for all I know he could have spent the day scrawling differential calculus on the interior walls of that little castle in the tank, but the fact that every single time I went to feed him he reacted as if he’d never seen me before, diving and spinning around inside the water, leads me to believe he was of limited intelligence.

The two of us had a long and interesting history together. I was operating under the blissful hallucination that he would live to be the oldest fish in the world through the force of my will. How Mr. Tickles began life is a mystery to me as he was a very guarded cold blooded animal concerning his past; I have my suspicions that he was in the witness protection program. He looked Italian to me.

The two of us found each other at Twin Oaks Country Club, no lie. My roommate was working there at the time, myself having been summarily dismissed from that employer a year hence. At any rate, I had come to pick him up from work and was waiting around while he and the other tuxedo-clad peasants finished cleaning up after some function called Seafood Buffet. Apparently the proprietors of Twin Oaks thought it a brilliant stroke of marketing genius to set each table with a wine glass full of water, each containing a single depressed goldfish. This just strikes me as sadistic and evil; forcing a fish to float in a container not even big enough for it to turn around in and watch as large, white, bloated shapes shoveled cooked versions of their brethren into the gaping holes in their faces. Sick.
Back in the kitchen I found a large bucket of water full of the mentally damaged fish lucky enough to have survived sitting on someone’s table all night without being eaten by some drunken frat guy on a dare. On a whim I grabbed a Styrofoam cup and scooped one of the poor orange fellows inside, capping it off with the intention of taking him home and probably finding him dead the next morning from suicide. Much to my delight, Mr. Tickles as he came to be called, was still alive come daylight and thus began our long and twisting life together. I procured an old fifteen gallon aquarium from my mother’s garage and tried to make the lad as comfortable as possible down in the basement of my house. I like to think he was happy, though I would come to regret not saving more of the little fish from the demons at Twin Oaks. I could’ve been like some kind of aquatic Schindler or something! Ah well, could’a, would’a should’a.

The first real test of Mr. Tickle’s metal came on a night when numerous human beings had congregated at our home after the bars closed for a sort of drunken celebration of someone’s birthday or wedding or Bris or first menstruation or something; I don’t remember. Much revelry was had by all until an underage drunk girl who probably went on to star in someone’s amateur porn (not mine, I’m sad to say) lost her balance on the weight bench upon which she was perched, falling over and knocking the fish tank to the concrete floor where it shattered and bathed the basement in lots and lots of rather dirty aquarium water. It would take us weeks to get the area to smell like anything but a fish-packing plant in July. I rescued Mr. Tickles from the cold floor and kept him alive in a wine carafe until a new aquarium could be purchased the next day. The inebriated lady who had caused this madness was apologetic, but not sorry enough to the point where she would put out, apparently. What a bitch. When you, even accidentally, attempt to kill someone’s fish the least you could do is give him a hand-job, I mean come on.

Years passed and Mr. Tickles flourished, growing from the length of a quarter to the size and girth of a three-quarters eaten hot dog. A few months ago Mr. Tickles came down with a bacterial infection and I began to panic. His little fish eyes bulged from his skull as if he’d been inflated by a bicycle pump and a large, squishy protrusion swelled out of his side as if my pet had swallowed a large grape. I learned of the most likely cause of the situation and ordered an antidote that smelled not unlike angry turpentine. But it worked! Mr. Tickles got better and it seemed all would be well. Life was good again.

Then, today I fished my pet’s corpse out of the aquarium with one of those little green nets and secured my friend in a Ziploc bag, placing him in the crisper drawer of my refrigerator, where he still sits; he always did like vegetables. My plan is to have a Viking funeral for Mr. Tickles, probably on a boat made from popsicle sticks in a large saucepan filled with water out on my balcony.

I think Mr. Tickles had a good life, though I always wondered if he was freaked out by the fact that I masturbated in front of him; his home was right next to the TV.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll go get some hermit crabs. For now, dear readers I shall say goodnight. Anyone interested may attend the Viking funeral of my friend Mr. Tickles tomorrow sometime after the apartment manager leaves for the day so I do not get evicted for an open fish pyre on my wooden balcony. Bring cash in lieu of flowers.

Get In the Box

4/2/05

Warning: The following text is of a caustic, sarcastic, sacrilegious and salacious nature and probably shouldn’t be read by anyone who has a soul. Proceed at your own risk and save your hate mail for someone who deserves it like Jerry Falwell.

Why are the hyper-religious Christians always the people most afraid of death? You’d think they’d be the first ones signing up to go hang out with God, but you’d be wrong. Specifically, I’m thinking of Pope John Paul II (the original was better than the sequel, it had a better plot) here. He’s been hanging on deaths door for some ten odd years now, just steadfastly refusing to get into the coffin despite the fact he can’t talk, feed or wipe himself. I have a sneaking suspicion he’s been dead already for some time now and the Vatican is using a complex system of fluid-filled bladders to animate his corpse. To date I haven’t been able to prove it. At any rate, as I write this his holiness The Pope is stubbornly holding onto Death’s doorframe, arms and legs pinned against it, refusing to acquiesce like a dog who just knows you’re taking him to the vet.

Ten, count ‘em, ten of my television channels are devoted to Pope Death Watch ‘05. Not that I’m completely unsympathetic to the fact that many, many people around the globe have some manner of vested interest in The Pope’s condition, but ten channels? Twelve percent of my cable programming jammed with, essentially, a bunch of priests you’ve never heard of speculating about how long ol’ John’s gonna grip that thin filament of life with his gnarled claw. A life, mind you, that essentially consists of a lot of shaking and shitting yourself interrupted by incoherent babbling at crowds from a window. Yeah, I’d wanna hang onto that for all I’m worth. And don’t you just know all the priests are practically wetting themselves hoping the next dude in that pointy hat abolishes the practice of celibacy? Bet your ass. I happen to be with them on this one, with any luck it’ll cut down on the number of alter boys penetrated in confessionals. But I doubt it; call me a pessimist. So ten channels full of sexually frustrated dudes in black talking about things that may or may not happen; waiting for a man to die. Great.

What is it, a slow news day? We’re concerned with one fucking guy, no matter how important, possibly kicking the bucket? Anyone remember that there’s a goddamn war on? How many people are dying over in the desert right now? I don’t know either, but I bet it’s more than one. I wonder how many soldiers, Iraqi civilians and religious extremists would have to die all at once to break into Pope Death Watch ‘05. A thousand? Would a thousand be enough? Probably not. No, it would have to be something like three thousand normal people dying horribly real close together. Or five hundred children, but they’d have to expire real special like; maybe flogged to death and lit on fire by a mob of midgets high on Moonshine and PCP. Or maybe three really hot celebrities in a plane crash. Not normal celebrities, mind you; no, these would have to be real stars like Britney Spears, (hey, she’s pregnant, that’s a two-for-one deal!) Brad Pitt and maybe a real wildcard like Harvey Keitel. Or a celebrity could kill somebody! Imagine Paul McCartney strangling a hot dog vendor to death with a length of cat intestine! That might break the stranglehold one 84 year old has on the media today.

Closely linked to this whole fiasco with The Holy Father buying the farm is the case of Terry Schiavo. You remember her, she was that chick in a persistent vegetative state for the past fifteen years who recently “expired” (nobody dies anymore) when the courts ordered her husband had the right to remove her feeding tube despite her parents’ wish she remain alive so she could, I dunno, drool and look vapidly into a news camera. Living in an Orwellian state as we are under this administration, naturally the President and his lunatic religious cronies found this a prime opportunity to argue about something that doesn’t concern them and just generally not get anything done in Washington for a few months. The Republican-controlled Senate even went so far as to consider calling Terry the Veggie as a witness before Congress just to force the hospital to replace her feeding tube. What a staggering collection of assholes. Here’s what they and the Prez must have been thinking:

“Health care reform? Social Security hemorrhaging funds and on the brink of being privatized? The war in Iraq and Osama Bin Laden on the loose? Nah, fuck all that, we wanna stick our big fat Christian noses into a private concern that has nothing to do with us. I mean, we can’t be allowing people to go unplugging family members who have the brain activity of a sea cucumber! Those are our prime voting demographic!”

Something like that; I wasn’t in the room for the conversation so I don’t know. I’m baffled by what right-wing Christians define as “life.” They’re anti-abortion and anti-euthanasia, so they hit the market from both ends; the years in between really don’t concern them. Unless you commit a crime. Then you’ll ride the lightning even if you’re retarded; don’t mess with Texas!

So you can’t suck out a tiny collection of cells from your womb and you can’t decide to die if you want when you’re old or infirm. I think if they had their way men would be arrested for jerking off and women for having a menstrual period because both of these things are “potential babies,” and you couldn’t be declared dead until several weeks after your heart stops; don’t mind those circling vultures. They say it’s because all life is precious. Uh-huh. What world are they walking around in? I have been a human on earth almost all my life and I can tell you that most of the homo sapian flotsam mindlessly wandering around the streets and just generally being assholes to each other are not precious. Just off the top of my head I can think of no less than ten precious little darlings that could have done with a little aborting much earlier in life. Had Barbara Bush availed herself of such a service I don’t think our country would be such an increasingly non-secular economic wasteland disliked the world over. But that’s just a guess.

We’ve covered a lot of ground here today, and if you’re actually still reading this I’m impressed. You have an uncommonly high tolerance for some of the darkest thoughts I’ve ever put to paper. We should get together for dinner. But right now, if you’ll excuse me, I think The Pope has finally given up the ghost and I have to turn the TV off before it implodes and rips through space-time as every single station converges on one subject. I can hardly wait to not watch tomorrow as Christians the world over hold their breath waiting for the Phoenix to rise from the Pope’s chest or whatever the fuck happens to choose the next guy in line. I’ll be drinking heavily. Have a nice day.

Burden of Debt

7/20/05

Good news! I am pre-approved for a Platinum VISA featuring a low 9.9% APR and exclusive Platinum status! How deliriously wonderful! Upon hearing this rare news I felt like bolting right out onto my balcony and shouting my newfound wealth and position from the rooftops. Then I remembered that my balcony is the size of a postage stamp, has several bags of garbage on it because I’m too lazy to walk down to the dumpster and is dotted with hundreds of turd land mines because of the doves who live under the gutters, so running around shouting on the balcony would probably be a tragically bad idea. Oh, and also, this credit card offer stunk out loud.

I’m sure you receive somewhere in the neighborhood of twelve similar offers in your mailbox daily just like me; that is, provided you meet the stringent standards set up by the credit card company’s crack team of loan specialists. Near as I can figure, these standards include:

1. Being a person, alive or dead.

2. Possessing brainpower sufficient to sign your name. (Optional.)

I have four or five credit cards at this moment because, like many of you, I enjoy immediate gratification, and saving up for the DVD box set of Adult Swim cartoons would take upwards of a week when I can just break out the plastic. I also operate under the delusion that this magic little square will allow me to pay for things in increments over a period of time during which I will ignore the monthly statements and forget to pay the bill incurring late fees and finance charges until a $19.99 purchase costs somewhere in the neighborhood of a NASA Martian lander.

But back to making fun of Fat Harry’s Bank or whoever the crap sent me this credit card “offer.” First of all, they stick this little cardboard rectangle on the application, mocked-up to look like a credit card until you turn it over! The back is blank save these words: THIS IS NOT A CREDIT CARD. You’re kidding me. You mean this flimsy little paper card without my name, any expiration date or magnetic strip is not a valid tool for financial liberation? Color me shocked, my good man! Do you not agree with me, dear reader, that if I’m inept enough to actually take this slip of garbage and attempt to procure goods and services with it I do not deserve the embarrassment and ridicule of the village? All this assuming, of course, that I could get out of my house with all the complications of working a doorknob with a load full of excrement in my pants.

Now, onto the really good stuff; the fees, rates, cost, limitations, “available” credit and other terms for my new fantabulous VISA. Nothing could be simpler or more convenient! All I must do is sign this demonic thing and the company will do me the favor of charging me an Account Set Up Fee of $29 (one time only!), Program Fee of $95 (also one time only, keep reading, sucker!), Annual Fee of $48, Participation Fee of $72 (but it’s billed at a low $6 monthly!), and Super Secret Special Customer Fee of $799. Okay, I made that last one up, but the rest are staggeringly right there in black and white. The minimum available credit for this type of card is $250, and if I should be so lucky as to get that, I’ll only have a balance of $172 when my new VISA card comes in the mail, possibly accompanied with a tiny fork to stab myself in the eye for my own stupidity.

Oh, and this is really special; if I perform the duties of a cardholder (namely bending over and taking it up the tail-pipe with my wallet open,) I may be eligible for that prize most coveted by the working class; a Credit Line Increase! And because, by that point, I’ll have been such a good little debt monkey, the company will do me the favor of increasing the size of the hole I’m digging for a meager charge of $25. I wish I were kidding. I don’t know what an “Internet Access Fee” is, but that costs me $3.95. Sweet mother of crap. Then, if I manage to take my mouth from around the corporate teat of these credit demons and close my account, I’ll be accessed an Account Maintenance Fee of $3 per month for every month I carry a balance of more than twenty dollars.

You know what? This is so patently ridiculous that no further scathing remarks can make it look more foolish so I’m going to sign off here before my head explodes from any continued contemplation of this malarkey. One last thing before I go, though. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but right now there’s a bill before Congress to make credit card debt exempt from being written-off when you declare bankruptcy. Yeah, that’s right, partner; if you happen to incur debt for any reason, the most common being from medical bills, you still have to pay for the frayed hammock and broken water pick you put on the plastic because banks give millions upon millions in “contributions” to the government; which is another word for kick-backs. Just something to chew on while you’re living out of your car and getting threatening letters from your exclusive Platinum VISA provider.

I’m moving to Fiji.

Icebox

4/22/05

By: Ryan Jett

It’s very cold in my office. By “my office,” I don’t mean one of those private boxes with such amenities as a door or walls; I mean the large building in which my tiny cubicle sits exposed to the comings and goings of people I’d cross the street to avoid. And it’s cold. Really cold.

I am comforted by the fact that I no longer have to keep the food I bring to work in the terminally packed refrigerators provided for us, owing to the fact that management keeps the lunchroom temperature at roughly thirty-six degrees. It’s nice, not to have to worry about cramming your half-eaten burrito from last night into a cold box between somebody’s leftover double-breaded deep-fried Crisco-injected cheez-bombs and that jar of yellow liquid that looks dangerously like a urine sample. The reason the lunchroom, and by extension, the entire rest of the building, is kept cold enough to render carbon dioxide into a solid has something to do with the high number of menopausal females working in my office. The fact that most of them are rather corpulent, (though they seem to believe complaining about it as they shovel M&Ms and cheesy-poofs into their faces at the speed of sound should cause the pounds to just melt away,) only exacerbates the situation.

You would never need infrared goggles with these ladies around, as they are now capable of detecting a temperature increase as minute as 0.25 degrees. (That’s Celsius, not Fahrenheit!) And they’re not shy about it. I can only assume they feel that simply because they’ve been fortunate enough to reach the age of “The Change” by the dumb luck of not being eaten by an alligator or driving their cars into wayward petroleum tanks, this somehow entitles them to have dominion over the excited state of the air molecules we all share. In short, they complain at great length and volume about it being “just so hot!” until the magical fairy with the blue key or some bullshit shows up and unlocks the thermostat (always lock up your thermostats otherwise they’ll jump down and abscond with your valuables while you sleep,) and cranks that bad boy down to “Penguin.”

You know these women of which I speak; middle-aged, heavy-set, lonely yet somehow jovial females with a “hot firemen” calendar who practically wet themselves with joy whenever someone brings in a baby. Now I have nothing against fat people, as long as they don’t impair my daily functioning in any way by either smelling curiously of cheese or falling on top of me. But let’s be real; you’re fat, and you’re hot because you’re fat and menopausal. Recently one of these lovely creatures (a woman easily 300 pounds, I’m not kidding,) actually had the audacity to say, “I’m just hot-natured.” What?! You’re not fucking hot-natured, iguanas are hot-natured, you are fat. Not big-boned, either; whales are big-boned, you, my dear, are fat, okay? I’m just looking for some reality here.

So the rest of us, those still possessed of a normal, functioning internal thermometer, are forced to huddle around our CPUs warming our blue hands over the minimal heat that escapes from the little vents. I’m considering bringing in a flaming oil drum. Maybe I can steal one from the homeless people in movies. (Despite the fact that I have indeed encountered many homeless people I have never once seen one hunched over a flaming oil drum or trashcan.) I think all of this is awful and wrong. Surely the minority of us not currently treading swiftly toward Death’s door should be allowed to control the temperature. We have more life left to get through; it’s hard enough without missing body parts due to hypothermia. Or maybe we could set up a color-coded chart of alternating days. We could take the even ones and sit around in what the older women must think comes close to the temperature of hell; the outrageous environment of around 73 degrees. On the odd days the frost queens of the workforce could crank it down and I would know to come into the office dressed as if preparing to cross the Antarctic tundra; though I don’t know if management would let the Huskies stay under my desk all day.