Debt Ceiling

All this talk about the debt ceiling has got me thinking, about our kitchen ceiling.

See, it's not that I don't want to be interested in the political ramifications of the nation having our rating lowered and interest rates rising and other terrible shit happening-- I want to be interested in that. But it's a little too... I don't know... macro for me.

I'm not a macro kind of guy.

I'm more micro.

Remember Micro Machines? They're more my speed. I could fix a Micro Machine if it broke. If, say, one of its wheels fell off, I could deal with that. If my big-boy car broke, 9.9 times out of 10, I couldn't fix that.

Why?

Because that's a macro machine. Mac. Roe.

Macro things are so much harder for me to conceptualize because, I feel, I don't have the appropriate tools in my toolbox. Actually, I'm not even sure I have the toolbox. In fact, let's be honest-- I don't have the toolbox. I just have a hammer and a wallpaper scraper and a couple of other shit tools kind of just strewn about in random places in my brain. And you can't do much on the macro level with a hammer and a wallpaper scraper and a couple of other shit tools kind of just lying about.

You certainly can't accurately grasp all of the key concepts of the current debacle revolving around the nation's debt and the geopolitical consequences that are both imminent and far-reaching should we really boehner this up.

So I retreat inward. To the world I understand. To... my kitchen.

We've got drop-ceiling in there, and God is it fuckall awful. Drop ceiling is wretched in church basement daycares and soul-violating cubicle-farms. It has no business being in houses. Residences. Places where people are supposed to enter and be moved.

Mark Twain said of his Hartford house, "We could not enter it unmoved."

When I enter our kitchen and look upward, I want to move my bowels. But I wouldn't do that, because my wife and I painstakingly laid down cork flooring all by ourselves (okay, with some help from her father) and I wouldn't dream of befouling said flooring with my arse-leavings.

But all this talk about the debt ceiling on NPR and such has really solidified the fact that this ceiling's got to go. Otherwise, there will be consequences, and consequences that I can actually understand.

Those consequences are, but are certainly not limited to:

* feeling the continued urge to move my bowels upon entering our kitchen and looking up

* feeling like I'm in the film "Office Space" when I enter our kitchen and look up, you no-talent ass-clown

* feeling the urge to cut myself, bang my head against the wall, burn myself with a cigarette, swallow a toothbrush, rub Brillo pads against my wrists, and engage in other self-destructive behaviors when I enter our kitchen and look up

* feeling the urge to prevent, at all costs, people I love and/or care for and/or respect and/or can see from entering our kitchen and looking up

* feeling the urge to smear peanut butter and deer viscera all over the drop-ceiling and unleash thirty wild brown bears clamor all over each other for the honor of being the first to eat significant portions of said drop-ceiling

* feeling the urge to invite over local clergy to exorcise the drop-ceiling

* feeling the urge to move my bowels while I blog (guess I should be doing this on my smartphone)

Just remember, kids: though the debt ceiling is important-- probably-- there are other ceilings to consider. Like mine. And that thing Michelangelo did or whatever.

I hate our ceiling. You can't come over to our house and play.

Ever.

Wanna Stay the Night?

One of the coolest things, I think, about being married (besides that AT&T wireless Family Plan and conjugal visits in prison) is that every night is a sleepover with your best friend.

If you happen to be married to yours, that is.

I try not to forget how lucky I am to be married to my best friend, and to know that. I call her "Buddy" and "Partner" as often as I call her "Wifey-doo" because, to me, she is just as much a partner and a buddy as she is a wife. And I get to have sleepovers with her all the fricking time.

When we're particularly wired at night and we complain that we can't fall asleep, we announce, "Slumbie Partie!" and we stay up until we're completely batty, joking around with each other in bed, saying stupid shit that wouldn't be funny if the sun were out, and generally being gay. Good old sleepovers.

I miss sleepovers.

Remember your sleepovers? They were probably awesome. Mine were. Well, the ones I went to were. I only had one (count 'em, ONE) genuine sleepover "party" at my house where there was more than just me and one other person. We slept in the basement, which, looking back on it, I cannot believe my mother permitted, as the basement in my parents' house is basically unfinished, with shuffle-board embedded in the floor tile. Sleepovers with just one friend were more frequent, but still sporadic and marginally successful.

Sleepovers at friends' houses were better. Finished basements, relaxed rules and regs, lots of food of dubious nutritional value, attractive mothers, enormous televisions, and CINEMAX.

Can you say, "First Porn Ever"? I can.

I remember one sleepover where my friend's older brother recounted the story of how he got arrested for attempting to steal condoms at a local Rite-Aid because he was too chickenshit to bring them up to the counter to pay for them. That fucking moron is a doctor now.

At another sleepover, another friend of ours confessed that he got an erection while his elderly male physician was giving him the old turn-your-head-and-cough hernia test.

"Ooops," my friend said the doctor remarked, "it happens!"

Sidebar: "Ooops, it happens!" is exactly what a urologist told me, many years later after removing his gloved hand from my anus during a check of my pancreas when some poodie came out. If there was a gun anywhere in that zipcode, I would have found it and shot myself.

I can remember another sleepover where I went upstairs to the kitchen to get a glass of water and found my friend's younger sister, who must have been around seven years old at the time, seated at the kitchen counter on a stool consuming sour cream, right out of the container, with a gigantic wooden spoon. I almost threw up on her head. I mean, sour cream at two o'clock in the morning?

Ooops, it happens!

Sometimes, I want to have sleepovers again-- not just with my wife, with other people. And I'm not talking about orgies or cheating. I just mean staying up all night with people-- getting giddy and weird and very inappropriate and baring your soul and knowing things about others they'd never tell you with the lights on, talking about who was hot in high school, sharing memories and never-known facts or stories. I love stories-- especially at night. Not campfire stories, or war stories-- just stories. That's probably why I love folk ballads so much-- because they're just stories, with a couple innocuous chords.

I think, when foreign leaders visit the White House, they should be offered a sleepover with the President. Can you imagine Hu Jintao, on the floor of the Lincoln Bedroom, in a polyester sleeping bag, swapping stories with Obama at 3:30 in the morning in the whispering darkness?

God. How awesome would that be?

I wish I'd had more sleepovers as a kid. It's something you never know you're going to miss until it's gone. But thank God I have my buddy to get silly with beneath flannel, made safe and sound by the warmth of the dogs.

Okay, Fine-- You Got Me: I Wrote "O"

Simon & Schuster never got around to sending me the following email, but they should have.

"On January 25, we'll be publishing a secret novel simply titled O, about President Obama's campaign for re-election in 2012. The author of the novel wishes to remain anonymous. You may be asked to comment on whether or not you are the author. If so, it would be great if you refrained from commenting, in solidarity with the principle that a book should be judged on its content and not on the perceived ideology of its author.


The author, an individual with integrity and talent, is someone who has been in the room with Barack Obama and knows the political world intimately. In fact, you may know this person, or know of this person -- if you are not in fact the author yourself.


Thanks in advance for your consideration. I apologize for the impersonality of this blind group email, but this seems like the best way to protect the author's identity. I hope you enjoy the book. It's terrific.


For a sneak preview of O and a special video address from the President of the United States, go to www.othebook.com


Best regards,


Jonathan Karp


Publisher, Simon & Schuster"

Gosh, I so wanted to keep it a secret for just a little while longer, but I just couldn't help myself, you know? It's like, when you get a really good present for somebody, but their birthday isn't, like, for another four months, and you are just going to die outta piss if you don't give it to the person early? You know what I mean? Like, okay-- on Monday, my wife was in a thrift shop and saw this super-fun, vintagey, 1960s-era mod-like lamp with a base made entirely out of cork, and she told me all about it. So, what did I do on Tuesday? I bought the fucking thing and, because it's cork and all, I thumb-tacked a love note to it so she'd find it when she got home from work.

And it isn't even her BIRTHDAY! It's in OCTOBER! So, like, that's kind of what I felt like after writing "O." Like, I just couldn't stand it anymore. I HAD to tell someone! So, I chose you. Because you're my blogdience, and I think you're hot and attentive and everything.

I thought you should know the truth. From me.

I always knew I wanted to write a book called "O," ever since I was old enough to realize that "O" was my third favorite letter, after "Q" and "9." I didn't know what the hell the book was going to be about-- but I had my title. Some writers choose the title last-- not me. I start with the title, because I'm a man-- like Hemmingway and Ann Coulter. I mean-- look at the title for this blog post:

"Okay, Fine-- You Got Me: I Wrote "O."" Like, does it get any cleverer than that? I'm clever. I deserve that big advance Simon & Schuster gave me. A lifetime paid membership to http://www.indianchicksssxxx.com/ doesn't come cheap.

So, I had my title. "O." Clever, right? And I was all like, "Okay, well, what should the book be about?" And I was thinking I could write a book about Oprah, but I knew right away that this would be way too annoying. Because I'd probably have to talk to her-- and I would never want to do that. Besides, it didn't go so well for Piers Morgan.

What is with that name anyway? Seriously.

Then I was thinking that I could write a book about orgasms. But I was conflicted. While I had a lot to say about orgasms-- and while I knew that the 10 pages of photographs in the middle of the book would be devoted to black-and-white depictions of people making funny "O Faces," and, as a joke, two random pages in the book would be "stuck" together, I just knew that reading, and for that matter writing a book about orgasms could never compare to just having one. And so back to http://www.indianchicksssxxx.com/ I went.

My step-nephew (stephew?) is really into dinosaurs, and, even though he just turned six, I know that, one day, he'll really appreciate a book about Oviraptors. You know, those charming Mongolian theropods. But then I was like, I'm not even related to this kid. So why bother?

Ophiuchus is a pretty bangin' constellation, as constellations go. It's often depicted as a guy with an impossibly small penis grabbing onto a snake, presumably because the snake was making fun of the guy's mini-whang. See below:

Take that, snake.

I just wasn't sure that lots of people would read the book-- outside of astronomers with micropenis, that is-- and I knew I needed a subject with greater curb appeal-- like a cheerleading team hosting a car wash in the middle of August or a clean needle program run by some scruffy ex-celebrity.

And then it hit me: O.... bama.

BAM. There's the book. There's my money.

I like money.

A final note: Simon & Schuster wants you to judge this book "on its content, not on the perceived ideology of its author." You should totally be doing that with every book, article, blog, website, journal, and post you read.

Because that makes sense. Right?

Because you can rightfully be expected to separate an author from his/her prose. Right?

One day, when books and articles are written by robots or iJournalists, we won't have to worry about pesky, troublesome things like integrity, or lack thereof, impartiality, bias, opinion, or trustworthiness. Until that time of motorized, computerized authorship arrives, just, you know, pretend.

Beautiful White Children Are Missing

20somethings amuse me, and I guess, as a twenty-nine-year-old, I can still say that and sound self-aware without sounding crusty. I often balk at the things they say and do-- the vapidity, the insipidity, the shameless vanity and unapologetic trendiness, the egomaniacal self-engorgement.

The overwhelming propensity to treat "The Daily Show" as an actual news source.

Oh, is this what being "counterculture" has become? Lame!

Then again, if you want lame, come join me, my snoozing wife, and the dogs on the couch for a round of "The Today Show." If you only got your news from "The Today Show," you would be convinced that the most pressing issues of import in our world are Tiger Woods' pink-seeking missiledick and Joe Biden proclaiming healthcare to be a "big fucking deal."

Which, by the way, it is.

Also, if all you watched for news was "The Today Show," you would be unalterably convinced that only beautiful white children go missing in America.

While I don't have real, hard-n-fast statistics to back up my claim (I don't need them-- this isn't a scholarly article-- I was never very good at writing those anyway-- far too much passion, you know) I can tell you that my anecdotal observance of "The Today Show" missing child content is overwhelmingly tilted towards photogenic white children. Just this morning, they announced that a girl named "Kayleah" was missing. Now, I admit that this is probably racist of me, but, when I saw the spelling of the name on the screen, I said to my wife, "Oh my God, are they finally profiling a missing black girl?"

My wife, of course, was asleep, her head thrown back on the sofa cushion and her mouth unceremoniously open, trying to catch another few minutes of pre-commute sleep. Needless to say, she didn't respond.

Then, a moment or two later, they showed a picture of the missing girl. White.

Living as I do just a couple of short minutes away from Philadelphia, I know that black children go missing-- because I sometimes watch the local news. The local news cannot possibly get away with singlemindedly promoting and publicizing the plight of grief-stricken Caucasian families whose children have been plucked from their grasp. In Philly-- black kids get abducted all the time: by perverts hanging around playgrounds and schools, by their parents or relatives, by their Baby Daddies, by criminals and by miscreants and by ne'er-do-wells, by, well, kidnappers. Sometimes they're returned safely. Sometimes, they're returned in bodybags.

Somehow, neither event seems to warrant the national spotlight.

There's an old news maxim: "If it bleeds, it leads." I suppose a mantra for the new age of news about abductees, and even murder victims could be: "If it's white, it sees the light."

When I had my old blog, I wrote a post that slammed the "New York Daily News" for repeatedly profiling the murders of young, attractive, white women. One was a former model, slashed to death on the subway, an inglorious end for anyone, one was found tossed in a dumpster like, well, like yesterday's "New York Daily News." One was stuffed between a mattress and a wall, killed by a jealous boyfriend. In the text of these articles, there was almost always some reference to the victim's physical beauty. The references were never in quotation marks, the comments of a family friend or a relative, but they were embedded within the text of the article, presented by the reporter as just another fact-- no different than the location of the crime or the description of the murder weapon. Words like "attractive," "beautiful," "very pretty" were all used liberally. And, after reading the fourth or fifth story like this, I started to think, "do ugly people get murdered in New York City?" and, if they do, do the reporters write:

"Silvio Carnacci, a foul-smelling, unshaven 54-year-old Italian immigrant with three real teeth and one hair-covered mole on his forehead was found dead in his apartment yesterday morning by two patrolmen from the 9th Precinct answering a distress call. One of the officers was 6'2" and handsome in a classic way with a Romanesque nose and broad shoulders, his partner, however, had chin acne and a slight limp."

Sometimes I think back to the night when Barack Obama got elected President of this country. At that time, my wife and I lived in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, and people were blaring their car horns all goddamn night, even banging on kitchen pots and pans with spoons in the middle of the street. I think maybe some of those people were heralding Obama's election as the beginning of the end of racism in America.

I don't know. I still only see pictures of missing white children on TV.

A New Job Applicant

We all know that my final day of employment at my quaint little non-profit is August 27th. Well, okay, maybe "we all" didn't know that, but now we all do. Sorry-- sometimes I think you're a little more involved in my life than you probably are. After all, I'm not the only one on your blog-roll, even though I should be.

(Love me. Pet me. Reassure me and, while you're at it, switch on the nightlight, too, please.)

The current plan is to go back on the street as an emergency medical technician, scoring a job at a first-rate ambulance company and enjoying the pleasures of a uniform allowance, twirling and flashing red lights, a stiff pay cut, and coming home to my wife smelling like a mixture of blood, urine and diesel fuel every day until my back gives out.

While that's the plan, it doesn't hurt to have a contingency plan. That's just what my parents advocated when I told them I was going to major in theatre in college. And look what happened.

After last night's passage of the historic health care bill, I think I've decided what my contingency plan is going to be. On the off-chance that I do not get hired at an ambulance company, I am going to apply for a position on one of these new-fangled "death panels" everybody's talking about.

While they haven't officially been formed yet, I know President Obama is hard at work on the creation of these panels, which will be critical to the success of his new healthcare initiative. After all, nothing says "healthcare" quite like "death panels."

I think I would truly be an ideal candidate to participate on a death panel. While I admit that I don't have any actual, practical experience in killing people, I certainly have enough scholarly knowledge about anatomy and physiology to complete the task expeditiously. I know all about the choice killing points in the human body: the carotid artery is a good one to slice & dice, as is the femoral. Of course, if you're not into gore, you can always smother grammaw with a pillow. Pillowcases are easy to wash and there's no insidious-looking "murder weapon" that you need to worry about hiding from the po-po.

There are other key points that make me a superior death panel candidate:

* I despise old people.

Let's face it: they smell and are relatively useless. Get one to start yammering on about the price of a loaf of mayonnaise in 1937 and you'll need to ram a loofah bar down his throat just to get him to shut the fuck up. I'm not some teary-eyed sentimentalist who would leap at the opportunity to sit at the gnarled, hammer-toed feet of some crinkly-assed cardboard-face and listen to her drone on and on about shingles or Sears & Roebuck or whatever the fuck old people talk about and pretend I'm getting pearls of wisdom dripping from the corners of Merlin's eyebrows. Man-- fuck that. Let's ice these creaky people.

* I can make the tough decisions.

Not that it's a tough decision to pull the plug on some wasted away, Chicklet-toothed, ventilator-hogging great-great-grammaw with one lung and a partially-deflated basketball for a head. Just like at the Colosseum: Thumbs DOWN, motherfuckers!

* I like the word "panel."

Discussion panel. Wood panel. Panel curtains. Panel saw. Solar panels. The National Mathematics Advisory Panel. The Walt Disney World Moms Advisory Panel (for real). Crossing the English Panel. Seriously-- I'm all about that word. I even like the sound of it. "Panel." It's not pronunced "Pain-ul." Because that would be too close to the word "Anal." And that's just wrong.

* I'm obsessed with death.

What better job could there be for someone who can't get enough fetid detritus, decomposition, and demise? I mean, besides being an on-scene accident investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board or a vulture.

I'm always talking about death in one respect or another, and I live in constant fear of my own death, contrary to my mother's instructions. I constantly go to doctors and have them inspect moles and cut them out and show them my penis because I'm convinced I have some life-altering social disease and I am always looking for sores inside my mouth because I know I have oral cancer because I smoked cigars when I was twenty and maybe being around actual as opposed to imaginary illness and death would be a good thing for me.

* I like to get dressed up.

I'm assuming that, being on something as serious-sounding as a Death Panel would require at least a shirt and tie, if not a sport coat or an outright suit-- at least on decision dates.

I certainly hope these panels get started up and that the White House starts disseminating application materials for interested applicants soon. I'm sure they will-- I know it's the Obama administration's ultimate desire to murder as many elderly and infirmed people as humanly possible. And he'll be great at it, too. If he hires me to help out, of course.

I can't wait to get started on my new career!

And Now, A Word From Our Sponsors

We all know that commercials have persistently and painfully suckled all the joy out of watching network television. If I never see another ad for Tucks Medicated Pads, endure Sally Field and her disintegrating bones, grind my teeth through a thousandth bitchy woman in a sweaterset preparing rich, chocolate Ovaltine for a hoard of Mormon children or hear Wilford Brimley utter the word "Dia-beat-us" ever again, I will die a happy man.

The internet, though it is a free-flowing river of social liberties, endless, creative pornography and clickable shopping, is no freer from the chains of advertising than television. I spent a little time this past week collecting some of my favorite banner ads that appear over my Yahoo Mail. Rest assured, I didn't save any of the banner ads that appear of all the sites I visit, or I'd be in trouble with some of my more conservative readers (Hi, Salt Lake City!)

We'll start with my favorite one:

I mean-- why do I need to click on this? Isn't it obvious?

She's a drug dealer. And/or a prostitute.

Personally, I'm afraid to click on banner ads. I've never done it, and I'm reasonably convinced that something terrible will happen to my computer and/or my humanity if I do click on one. I was actually afraid just to right-click on them to save them to my hard-drive. I mean, does your brain get slow and sloppy once you start clicking banner ads? Do you become a fat woman named Gladys who sits in a fart-enrobed La-Z-Boy watching The Price is Right while Fritos adhere themselves to your ass dimples? I mean, I'm sure it's not an instantaneous process, but that's how it starts at any rate.

What the hell were we talking about? Oh, right-- banner ads. We're used to thinking of ads and commercials as existing to sell us a product of some kind. Well, the internet has changed all that. Now, we need to acclimate ourselves to the idea that there are some ads that exist, ostensibly, to ask us dumbfuck questions like:

And,

Lots of people love to give their opinions on things (scientists call these people "bloggers") and I'm sure that fat Gladys' the world over are thrilled to think that their opinion about a Jacko rebirth or Madonna's ill-achieved 1989 Diane Keaton look, and that they might actually receive something of value in return for their meaningless opinions. Which they won't. No Old Navy gift card for you, Bad Gladys! You'd just spend it on solid color t-shirts that you would sew together to make a hammock for your dimple-ass.

Don't worry, though, there are still banner ads that are trying to sell us shit we don't need.

I mean, I certainly don't need Resveratrol. I'm a twenty-eight year old male. And I'm pretty sure that you don't need it either, whether you've got wrinkles or not. First of all, Dr. Oz likes this, so you automatically know it's bullshit. Second of all, if you have wrinkles, learn to love them-- they ain't going anywhere.

I have to admit, though, I started feeling kind of weird about my life when I kept seeing these kinds of ads popping up over my inbox:

And, um, this one:

I mean-- hasn't internet trolling and tracking gotten better than this? Aren't they supposed to be monitoring my shopping and viewing and clicking habits? Aren't they supposed to know I don't look like I'm ready to start up a canasta league with Betty White? Why are you trying to sell me stairchairs, bedpans and Botox? Come on, interwebz, I thought ye knew me better than ye do.

Then I see a banner ad like that and I say, "Ah. They've got me." Two things of which I am very much afraid: my mortgage, and my death. Good job, interwebz.

They've also really got my number with this beauty, too:

No, I don't have a flabby mancrush for Hugh Downs-- but I do always think I'm having a heart attack. I'm reasonably convinced I'm having one right now, actually. Will you pay off my mortgage in the event of my death?

I joke about the necessity for these heart attack symptom ads that allow Mr. Hugh Downs to continue to make his mortgage payments prior to the event of his death, but, evidently, there is a need, a real need for ads like his. Because products exist in this society that were invented, it seems, for the sole purpose of hastening our demise...

Like Bacon. Salt.

Other ads play to our insecurities and our competitive nature, by asking us, in much the same vein as "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader" if we think our intellect can best that of someone else's.

They often post Miley Cyrus', Sarah Palin's and, to make the playing field fair, Tiny Tim. On a whim, inspired by this ad, I went to a website that offers free IQ tests, because I'd never taken one. The first question read something like this:

"Three dogs, six chickens and four llamas are standing in a farmyard in Chernobyl. How many legs do they have?"

I froze. Math. I clicked the beautiful red X in the upper right-hand corner of my screen immediately. Obviously, I am not smarter than Barack Obama, but I'm probably not smarter than Miley or Tiny either.

Oh well, at least I know what to season my food with.

More of the Same

People are funny.

They say they want one thing, and then, when they get it, they profess never to have wanted it in the first place.

This unalterably human paradox is now manifesting itself very early on in the presidency of Barack Obama. People who once were rabidly behind him, chomping at the bit for his every word, unmistakably on his jaun are now starting to turn.

Oh, yeah. It's happening.

People are now making the claim that Obama is "not acting Presidential enough."

He's been on late night talk shows. He's giggled on "60 Minutes." He's... black.

He's not like all the other presidents, people are saying.

Well, good for you for noticing!

It's funny because, I thought this man ran, and got overwhelmingly elected on the platform of "Change." I thought we said we were tired of what had come before, and now, here we are, yearning for the consistency and comfort of some old, white fart to bring back the familiarity of yesterday.

The trouble with this country is, we don't want change. We want sameness. Deep in our prejudiced, frightened, conservative hearts, we want some old, white guy in a suit to sit and pose for portraits. We want someone to appear on the $15.00 bill looking like he has an apartment complex stuck up his ass. We want conformity over progress. We want... well...

"I don't want a movie star, I want a president," I heard one Democrat recently complain.

Oh, you mean someone like him?

They say that Obama isn't acting "presidential enough," and I'm not quite sure what that means. What, exactly, does acting "presidential" look like? Does it look like this? Or perhaps it looks something like this. Or like this?

No, no-- it must look like this.

You get my point, I'm sure. You want someone who looks "presidential"? Call up Bea Arthur-- she looks just like George Washington.

I could go on and on (which is my way) but I think my father said it best when he came over for literally three minutes last night to have me sign a birthday card for his sister,

"Fuckin' America retards! 'Oh, Obama-- thank you!' Two weeks later, they already sick of him and want something different. 'Oh, can we have another fuckin' election now?' Fuckin' assholes."

Frankly, I'm not sure this country deserves a leader like him. I think, by and large, we deserve what we get, and we get what we deserve. I think this man is a remarkable, and rare exception, and I hope we don't let it pass by unnoticed or unappreciated because he isn't kissing enough babies or kissing enough ass.