Oh, Man-- Not Another One...

I'll be honest, some mornings, I'm just plain out of gas.

I got nothin'.

Those of you who blog (wait-- that's, like, all of you, isn't it?) know what I'm talking about. If you blog every day, chances are, one day or another, you're going to sit at your computer and stare at the monitor and go, "Shit. That's what I've got. Shit."

Bloggerblock. Sounds like a game you can download for your cellphone for $7.00.

When I get bloggerblocked, I tend to turn to newspapers for inspiration. Since I live in the 21st century, I don't actually get the newspaper, so I go to www.nytimes.com because I like to pretend that I'm highbrow, and oftentimes there will be a headline that will pique my interest enough to read a paragraph or two. Today there was a piece in the Automotive section about how, to prevent pedestrian injuries, hybrid vehicles may be fitted with "fake vroom vroom engine noises" so blind people and regular assholes who just aren't paying attention or are listening to their iPods won't get creamed by the next Prius or Insight that comes careening around the block at 60mph-- like hybrid motorists drive like that anyway.

And I thought to myself-- yeah, I could write a blog post about that.

But I didn't feel like it.

That's what writing for no boss and no deadline and no money gets you. Writers who "don't feel like it." What would happen if Andy Rooney just "didn't feel like" doing his 3 minute schtick every Sunday night? Oh, right-- they'd just air one of 7,000 re-run clips. I don't think anybody would notice. I don't think Andy would notice.

If nothing moves me sufficiently in the realm of the New York Times, I will turn my attention to the lesser, local offerings of the Philadelphia Inquirer and, if I'm really wandering the acrid desert, the Philadelphia Daily News. Well, the old DN came to my rescue, and speedily today, for I have struck gold with the following headline:

"Another Hunter Finds a Body in N.J. Woods"

When I read this headline, I read it in kind of a world-weary, exasperated way, as if to say, "Another Hunter Finds a Body in N.J. Woods." I mean, from the tone of the headline, the simple use of that word, "Another" leads one to believe that you can't even go for an hour's hike in New Jersey without stumbling over some human skulls or finding the Brower kid.

I have to say I was very disappointed when I read this article and found that, in the past year, only two hunters have come across bodies in New Jersey's wooded areas. From the tone of the headline, I would have thought this was happening every week. Or more.

I mean, I don't know-- I've never gone hiking in New Jersey, and I've never gone hunting anywhere, but now I'm kind of creeped out about what's lurking in New Jersey's woods. I know Jersey is "Sopranos" land, but they just whack people in the middle of the street and in Italian restaurants and leave them there-- badabing! Two to the head, you're fuckin' dead. They don't take the trouble of dragging the corpses of these poor bastards into the woods for hunters to find.

Who does?

Well, according to this article, in December of last year, some stupid little whore paid her boyfriend to have him kill her father, "because he was mean to her." Honest to God, that's a direct quote from the Daily News article. They tried to economize Daddy's body with a chainsaw, but they abandoned the idea, probably because it was too much work, and they ended up dumping his body "in the woods on opening day of shotgun season for white-tailed deer."

I mean-- who knew, right? God, when you're a murderer, you've got to think of everything!

My mother likes to say that, "everything happens for a reason." I think that, if you're a white female and you've reached the age of sixty, you are required by law to adopt this way of thinking. I think, if she's reading the paper this morning, she would read this article and say just that-- that these idiots dumped that body in the woods on the first day of shoot-em-up season so they could get caught, that this crime happened because this woman and this dude needed to be in jail, removed from society. I think she would also say that these hunters were meant to find these bodies, for whatever reason. She might even go so far as to say that, when you go into the woods to do violence, eventually, you're going to stumble upon violence.

She'd definitely say that about hunters who get iced by other hunters who mistook them for prey.

I probably would, too, if I thought that everything in life happened for a reason.