Preface

Marginally balanced thinking requires highly diffused mental dexterity. As Ellie May�s father told me before he sold the farm, you have to be able to maneuver the manure. If you get too hung up on one side of a paradigm or an enchilada, you can�t hustle back to the middle of an argument fast enough to avoid what the Swiss call rhetorical obfuscation.

Once your perspective vanishes into post-obscurity, you might as well burn your Social Security Card and hurl your own carcass in front of a fast-moving Hummer II. We won�t need you any more and you won�t need yourself either.

The brain is like a summer sunrise in central Missouri. Only the cosmos itself is larger than the horizon as El Sol peeks out from The Atlantic Ocean, beginning another day of literal domination of dinky little Planet Earth. If it�s hot at 5 A.M. you know it�s going to be cooking by noon. If you�re still wearing long johns by quitting time, we have some very inexpensive oregano we�d like to show you on payday.

The same principle applies to fluid thinking - if you�re too dumb to shave on the day you get married, why bother taking a razor on your honeymoon?

Huh? This book looks at dilemmas like this and takes no prisoners in failing to resolve any issue.

Other Than That is the crowning jewel in an aging artist�s ostensible literary career.

It reflects nearly every supposedly original thought within the alleged artist�s purported mind.

It speaks to experience in general and one political moderate�s experiences, specifically.

It elevates goofy reasoning and celebrates lousy grammar the same way drought-plagued farmers rejoice when extension agents inform them soybeans can thrive on seasonally adjusted mixtures of adolescent foot lint and crumbled Pringle chips (barbeque and salt & vinegar.)

In a world in which everything has already been said, at least once, this book represents a pleasant departure from old-fashioned plagiarism. Every sentence in this study of female foot bunions doth mightily wreak of unholy originality.

The stench of pure creativity increases as the work stumbles deep into an abyss of sub-sarcasm and crescendos with a less than fully brilliant cacophony of muted pith, heaped atop a brazen cast of senior citizen misfits and gullible young babes named Debbie.

The book you are about to read is brief but ponderous, easy but challenging, light but weighty. No one made the author write it. He did it for himself. He even thought about keeping it to himself on a permanent basis until he realized about 20-minutes ago you might want to read it too.

Like most writers, he only knows other writers, which explains why the concept of anyone being �a reader" is so difficult for this permanently perplexed polemicist to comprehend, let alone spell correctly.

If you�re a reader and your mind is entirely open, you will find in here a rapid dash to Gorno Altay Autonomous Region. So, get going, damn it. Other than that, do it anyways.

David Trout Pomeroy

Pontiac, Michigan

April 2003

• Barry Manilow is a nerd. He combs his hair like a femi-Nazi and wears clothes popularized by 1930s-era sycophants. His songs are sappier than the forests of Vermont, more nauseating than a million fingernails scratched across five billion blackboards. His personality as embodied in his stage appearances reminds one of a bootblack in a community of 18th century loggers. Barry is barely man enough to boot out a boisterous ballad. Instead, he croons tunes guaranteed to make you wish you could turn your hearing on and off as easily as you can make your personal morality perform the same basic function. Songs like �Mandy" and/or "I Write The Songs" define a musical genre that can best be defined as "sinful." That this artist continues to perform these particular arrangements in public is testimony to the incalculable banality of America, Canada and any other country that will allow this entertainer to shower in any Holiday Inn lobby. Barry Manilow�s personae and wardrobe denigrate show business, culture, the Western Hemisphere and Biology 101. Other than that, I completely adore and respect the man.
• Hockey is pointless. They just skate around, shoot the puck, hit each other, slap a few butts and head for the penalty box, where most of them spit on the glass, live on the CBC. Hockey players are toothless cowards whose idea of a good fight involves pulling the opponents� jersey over the opponents� head until the referees skate in and goose everybody and I do mean, every body. Soon one team or another, eh?, has a power play, eh? They will keep the puck inside the blue line until one offensive player gets a rebound and slaps it past Jacques, eh? Then the light goes off, octopi are flung down from the stands, bee? You just sit there and wonder why in the deuce all these fans are yelling so loud when it�s just the players that are getting rich, see? And the fans are going ape-shit and buying more eight-dollar beers and calling it "fun" and people are watching all over Saskatchewan and South Dakota, eh?, and the announcers wear pink bowties and women�s suits and call themselves celebrities and the Canadians buy it, eh?, because they sure as heck don�t know any better, bee? Hockey moves too fast and rarely gets the puck out of here. Other than that, who�s playing tonight, see?
• Ozzie and Harriet were a fraud. The television show they produced was a big lie. Along with their alleged sons, David and Rick E., this 1950s-era show biz couple projected normality, tranquility, dignity, mirth, conventionality and canned tuna. In real life, however, they were a brawling, dysfunctional bunch, especially Ozzie, the patriarch, whose legendary outbursts were said to include furniture destruction, sofa wetting and punch poisoning, oftentimes simultaneously. Harriet, for her part, was a classic pool shark with an eye for real estate. David, the most subdued of all the Nelsons in his TV character, became a pill-popping health nut after his early retirement and founded Shaklee, Amway and NuSkin. For a program that literally gave life to the image of tranquil and boring Eisenhower-era America, "The Nelson�s" as a living reality was anything but that. In fact, the turmoil in their home led to the advent of drag racing, sidewalk surfing, wine coolers and the unforgettable TV horse, Mr. Ed. Holding this family up as some laudable example of familial cohesion is as laughable as the idea of a common barnyard animal speaking truth to power in primetime. The Nelson family was just like your family and mine - Anglo-Saxton. Other than that, we still want to be them.
• Calendars are overrated. We don�t really need to know any of that information. All of organized time is a threat to free thinking. If we did not know what day it was we could still put our pants on two legs at a time, so to zip. Calendars are inexact statements of ostensible societal oneness and can be easily debunked through attaining a solid understanding of cosmic history. We talk about Before Christ and After Christ, as if Christ was the end-all, be-all epochal vantage establishing guru of March 2003 or whatever you want to call it. And that is not necessarily true or false. None of us will know for sure until after we each die, after which it will be too late to set the record straight on anything, including whether Dale Earnhardt crashed his car on purpose in order to let his own son win the race. Other than that it remains March 2003.
• Music is the anti-Christ. It�s all just a big woosh of sound and spirit. Not everybody likes it. Even those who do like music disagree to the point of rebellion over which particular strain of music is justifiable in world already rendered too noisy by jackhammers and too many shooting ranges. Music diverts people from life�s real pleasures, namely composting lawn waste and napping. Music is entirely subjective and is therefore impervious to empirical evaluation, other than to say that darn Jackson Browne sure does sing real pretty. Music includes harmonizing, which has to be just about the silliest thing any three tenors could do on Public Television fund-raising night. Banjo playing in particular has to be the most pointless activity since the invention of the vegetable juicer. Music makes people dance, which proves we are only one fine manicure removed from chimpanzees. Music is for morons and their first cousins, midgets. Music is maniacal and mental, at the same time, while also tantalizing on a darkly primitive level. It can lure otherwise rationale beings into hypnotic states in which they, too, think they can sing, "Heh Jude," without taking acid or spending the summer with the Mahareeshi dude. Music turns minds to mush and hearts to ardor, explaining the origins of Ronald and Nancy Reagan and the entire Judd Family. Music is a harsh conspiracy unloosed by enemies of order and designed to render people like you and I wispy emotionalists. Other than that, "look sharp, feel sharp, B-sharp!"
• Earth ain�t no big deal. The universe has several trillion billion gad-zillion other planets, not to mention more Milky Ways than a wealthy undiagnosed diabetic. Even within our own vision, there are thousands of stars, any one of which could sustain life, let alone Rolling Stone. Even nearby Mars is said to possess all the qualities needed to enable man to exploit woman, specifically peep-holes. Earth may be a gas but it is subject to eventual explosion and therefore remains a controversial sphere upon which to invest in real estate. Earth, quite frankly, has way too much salt water and not enough fertile soil, leading only to one sure explanation, that being, we all came from the sea and it will be to the sea we will all eventually return, if Social Security lasts. Earth whirls through space, which explains why most of us are either exhausted, hungry, lustful or worrying about our stash. At any minute we could hit a meteorite or a meteorite could hit us. If both happen at the same approximate time, just remember you read it here first. Life on Earth is a scary deal, an experience none of us should take lightly. We would probably be better off living on space ships out in the cosmos, growing Dr. Spock ears and wiping oatmeal off of each others� chins. Earth is a fleeting and fickle phenomenon. Other than that, it�s home to you.
• Humor is a joke. Laughter in any guise is but a cruel gesture, disguised as a Whig. Mirth mongers play off the fears of loneliness, neurosis and having a roommate you despise. A joke is but a joke is but a butt of a joke. Anything that makes you smile prevents a sober stare, which is always more appropriate as facial expressions go in times of Biblical flooding. Humor is really silly. Humorists, for their part, would be bartenders in totalitarian countries, with fewer health benefits and more teeth. Comedy clubs proliferate because most people lack awareness sufficient to enable them to distinguish between a guffaw and a guffette. Ten-dollar drinks would make anyone roar at a slanderous remark, a fact that is borne out by the intense din that usually accompanies any comedian�s revelation that he or she is not only "gay," they are also "loosely bound." Humor should be illegal but it isn�t. Other than that, you must have heard what happened when the Pope went to Mt. Olive.
• Being underrated is over-rated. People may like the under-dog but exceptional people really love the over-dog. Cheering for the "little guy" is an American tradition that, upon serous examination, is really more like mistaken ideology in the guise of tattered consciousness. Always thinking the disadvantaged are that way in no way of their own making ignores the fact most disposed souls got that way by arriving late for church so many times they stopped going at all, to church and to Laundromats, unfortunately. Being under-rated may offer you the opportunity to silence your critics and somehow attain mediocrity. But it also stifles sound self-esteem and engenders hyper-bellicosity in some strains of the species. Underrated is a bad thing in a world of yuppies, ostentatious SUVs and advanced egotism. Other than that, you don�t have a chance.
• Summer is too hot. Pigs sweat like people. Basic movement is limited by languid climate change. Lawns wither in the July sun, trees emit gooey liquids, streets choke with trite melodies emitting from over-priced ice cream trucks, motorcycles roar in the moonlight and teenagers stay up too late, often oversleeping chiropractor appointments the next morning, to the chagrin of weary parents whose pocket money must then revert to rescheduled nightmare events, too sordid to evoke in this Sunday School primer. Summer is brutal on furnace technicians and hell on salt truck drivers. It seems to last forever and in some parts of Orange County, California, actually lasts at least from March until mid-January of the previous or forthcoming El Nino. Summer is a scorcher, a sickly season of rainstorms, weed-pulling and overall sassafras tea. It comes every year, as boring as that may sound. It just goes on and on until you think it will never end, which it doesn�t at The Tiki Lounge. Sitting outside in the summer is just about impossible in Natchez which is really a bitch knowing actual people live there - not just at Christmas time. Summer in the south is an eight-month sauna bath, a time when droopy-eyed dogs evaporate in even terrific neighborhoods. Summer is a mean son of a bitch if you work on a farm and the farm grows hay and the hay comes in. Summer will kick your ass whether you work outside or sleep inside. There is no escaping the heat, even with modern-day air conditioning and seminars for wealthy heirs. Heat permeates everything, including Adolph Hitler�s tomb, where it encounters nasty karma. Summer is baseball season and baseball is the slowest and potentially most complex of all adult kid games. Summer is when people go on vacation, which is when things really get dicey for the vacation industry, which must accommodate the various whims of this violent breed of Neanderthal. Summer is the sum of the sun in the son of the gun and summer, overall, really pisses me off, especially when it ends. Other than that, it�s almost here!
• Being buried up to your eyeballs in the sand is horribly confining. You can�t rub your nose, wiggle your toes or walk to the men�s room. Any perspiration that occurs goes unknown to 99 percent of mankind and is absorbed into the environment, whether you like it or not. You can�t control your sweat, that�s for sure. Nearly all your freedoms are taken away from you when cool mud is in full-wrap around your entire lower-mid-and-upper torso, save one small cap of head mass jutting out from the northern coast of Martha�s Vineyard at full tide. You can�t vote, can�t crouch, can�t basically dance. You could have the biggest arm muscles in Virginia and little kids walking by would still think you were a wimp as they would have no way of knowing otherwise. Soon, you would even forget yourself. Without exercise, your muscles - all of them - would, in fact, experience entropy after which they would shrivel and eventually disintegrate. This would be a bad thing and all the beach attendants would be discouraged to find none of your remains several years later. Being cast rigid within a forlorn beach is claustrophobic, at its most ordinary level and downright hostile, if arranged by members of the opposition party. An otherwise positive person could find him or herself borderline catatonic unless a good Samaritan came by � with a fat Thai stick. Flies could prove to be somewhat annoying - even sanity threatening - and gale force winds would pose something of a problem, particularly if you did not live to tell about it. Other than that, being buried in the sand up to your eyeballs would offer a unique opportunity for intense concentration.
• Reconnecting with old girlfriends, boyfriends, lovers or debtors is risky business. It never accomplishes anything positive. You just muck-up something that is best left unexplored and alone. Anything that did not work in the past will definitely not work in the present, let alone the future, where wise men dare not tread. Lunging into the past is peril for eight or nine seconds from now. Dead ash cannot be revived or restored, no matter how much lighter fluid you squirt on it. Dead ash wants to go back to The Earth. Preventing that process is screwing with Ma Nature. Even though The Internet and e-mail make it easy to talk again with anyone you ever knew - let alone, loved - this practice should be discouraged among tribes of people committed to sane practices. Other than that, it�s interesting.
• Blood transfusions are controversial. Not everyone has the same type of blood. Red blood mixes poorly with white blood, for example, and there are other variations that further compound the idea of one person�s blood being applicable to another person�s Scarlet Fever. Worse yet, something bad could happen to the blood donor. An example of this would be having the check from the Red Cross bounce after you cash it at the party store. The owner of the party store might have you arrested. Another bad thing that could happen is, your blood could spoil between the time you let someone draw it from your body and when it gets to the blood bank or the blood recipient, also known as a gang member. If the blood spoils, they don�t just throw it away, they actually dump it on the mountain where their cousins get extremely wealthy manufacturing spring water. If people knew this, they�d drink a lot more tap water and people who used to waste their money on bottled water wouldn�t be such bloody idiots. Accepting someone else�s blood is risky business; you could also get their bad habits. You might find yourself watching foreign films nearly every night, whereas, before your blood transplant, before you accepted one pint of Truman Capote, you didn�t even go to the movies. Things you once thought of as funny, amusing, a real riot or hilarious become exhilarating, sublime, spiritually upsetting or transcendent. Unless you have someone remove what equates to "the bad blood" you can�t do anything about it except move to Paris. Buying blood or otherwise promoting the blood transfer industry is an act of moral surrender. It means you�ve essentially given up on the alternative - blood immersion. Other than that, it fosters the realization of worthwhile dreams.
• The twentieth century was a disaster. Joseph Stalin killed 25 million Russians. Adolph Hitler annihilated six million people of Hebrew descent. Colonialists and other conquerors laid waste to countless trillions of other innocent souls. We also saw the emergence of nuclear weaponry, incurable fatal diseases like AIDS which killed more than 20 million people, worldwide, gangster rap, cocaine addiction and the cartoon character, Barney. Other than that it was rather pleasant.
• Meat is murder. Eating animal flesh with all its chemicals, anti-biotic and other deathly swirl will destroy the human anatomy, kill you faster than a perfect storm. Animals pumped full of organ destroying, artery clogging anti-biotic chemicals comprise one entirely illogical formula for a decent meal. The best cure for feeling you need to eat meat is to swallow some LSD, then take a one-hour tour of your neighborhood slaughterhouse. Ask the friendly foreman if you can wield the killing prod, the clever device used to kill your meal before your body tries to digest it. Ponder the emotion of ending the animal�s life. Doesn�t this really "get you off?" Watch the innocent cow�s eyes as you take its life, to give alleged sustenance to your own. Ponder the food-chain truth that one creature must die so another can supposedly live. If this theory continues to make sense to you while you are under the spell of this profoundly psychedelic agent, follow the man in the bloody lab coat into the refrigerated area, where mammals like your ancestors are hung by their neck and whacked into dog food and ear wax remover. See insects festering on future spare ribs, lice laminated where pork chops dare not tread, fake red marble gook pasted on fat globules by small men named Ernesto and Angel. Take in the aroma. Imagine yourself a disgusting person. Before you leave, be sure to visit the gift shop to see the amazing Human Intestines display, where amazingly life-like mechanical contrivances simulate the process of meat digestion, featuring superfluous amino acid buildup at literally dozens of deeply illogical intestinal convening points. Other than that, I love hamburger.
• White hair is awful. It�s an extinguishing characteristic. Silver on the forehead says the amount of time you have left is less than the amount of time you�ve already been here, doing completely insane things such as lusting for the baby-sitter and otherwise regrettable yet memorable quirky behaviorisms that make you elderly in the last place. Graying hair tells you and anyone else interested that you are so close to geezer-dumb you might as well completely cave in and get a bolo tie. White hair is weird and what Elmer Fudd would call "we�gwet�able." White hair fosters dandruff, disappears in sunlight, lacks General Hue and makes you look like a cute little "wabbit." In fact, white hair is getting to be a wabbit with me. White hair is the scourge of growing older, the singular signature that distinguishes truly old bastards from their younger equivalents. White hair suggests your running days are over, if they ever existed to begin with. It means whatever color your hair used to be it isn�t that color any longer, even if it was once red which was why, back then, small children actually called you "Red," when asking you to buy beer for them, which we know you did. White hair means you can enter Col. Harlan Sanders look-alike contests and get free coffee at Senor Citizen franchises on Tuesdays, in certain sunbelt states, excluding Rejection. White hair on men turns certain young girls on; Boone�s Farm has the same effect. A man with gray hair in a business suit connotes power, maturity and dignity, while affirming only rats win "wat waces." White hair means you�re probably an old fart from the time candy cost a nickel, kids walked to school in several feet of snow and even hip cats liked the swinging sounds of the dope-addicted Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Massive silver in your hair means it may be damn-near time for you to lay your proverbial burden down, even if you know better. White hair is the worst because it means you�re so close to the end you might as well lie down now and stack about three Beatles� CDs in the nearest Boze Wavelength, shoulder-length-hair radio, lay around the shanty and get a good buzz on, Commander Buzz, �cuz there ain�t no time like the present and there ain�t no present quite as sublime as knowing that in the end, the love we take is equal to the love we make, we think. White hair means you may be gaining something resembling wisdom, which equates to awareness, which leads, inevitably to paranoia, which explains the whitening, lightning. White in this case is bad. Other than that, Jesus is just all white with me.
• Breathing is a pain in the ass as well as a struggle in the mouth. Taking in oxygen is no easy task for otherwise lazy people. You have to think about it, then, do it. In other words, in its most basic context, breathing is at least a two-step process, one requiring dedication, skill, solid commitment and bad tonsils. Breathing is an act of will that necessarily summons air into your oral cavity, where said air begins to immediately sully the appearance of your teeth, which are on an inevitable descent into eventual decay to begin with. Breathing only hastens the process, even if you breath through the nose which takes even more effort than breathing through the mouth or ears, which only show biz types like the Smothers Brothers have perfected, backstage of course. Breathing is noisy, impersonal, intrusive, messy, airy, mystical, organic and rather clumsy when you really think about it. Think about this: Did you ever see a camel gasp? I didn�t either. Which proves one of two things: Camels are either intrinsically invisible or no one cares. Bats breath only two or three times per evening; the rest of the time they merely float from rotted tree branches and window peep at select homes in your subdivision. Breathing induces dreams, many of which are unpleasant during the time you experience them and almost impossible to recall after you wake up, get out of bed and step into a small pile of cat barf. Breathing becomes damn near impossible in the moments immediately after death occurs. This poses a certain problem for certain existentialists and other fair weather moralists who logically surmise that a still carcass could still be valid in an open-ended and extreme metaphysical sense, leading their partisans to rally in the street for more barbiturates. Breathing is culturally obtuse, distinctly mammalian and grossly offensive to sticklers for absolute quiet. Other than that, I live for it.
• Leaving the home of people you are visiting in the dead of the night while your hosts are sleeping is a fine how do you do. Not only do you deprive the people who invited you to sleep at their house the opportunity to cook you greasy potatoes in the morning, you also take away their God-given right to hug you in their driveways before you pull away, revealing the pool of oil beneath where your engine block was before you began driving to Phoenix. You may think you�re doing your alleged friends a favor by not making them get up, use mouth wash, stand there smiling at you when they wish they were still in bed procreating and wish you bon voyage, whatever in the hell that means. But you�re not. They would not have minded getting up since they were going to do that anyways. They may not have planned on using mouthwash that early but it would not have been necessarily a bad idea. And they were probably too Puritanical to do it at 4 a.m. any way, unless you got them so stoned the night before their bodies were just doing it without their brains having any awareness of the sexual exchange rate in Juarez. You really disgrace the people who let you sleep on their dining room floor when you wake up before they do, steal all their stash and sneak out their driveways with only the sound of your tires running over empty Coors cans disturbing your peaceful reverie, until you need to stop to relieve yourself again for the third time in frigging ten minutes and the paperboy sees you, calling the incident in on his bullhorn. Not saying goodbye is almost worse than saying hello too often. Both require acute rudeness on the part of the speaker while the listener is left to eat yesterday�s tortilla chips alone, unable to tell the guest how much they appreciated all the coins they left in the sofa. You may think you�re doing the right thing by hitting the highway before dawn but, the truth is, the highway will still be there later in the afternoon, when it�s really hot in Pima County. Other than that, you see a lot of stars.
• Moralists are implicitly obnoxious manifestations of inappropriateness. Their need to impose their values on people like you and members of the vocal group, The Ramones, strikes me as spiritually bereft and wanton, as in Wonton soup. What they want and why they want it will always be illusive concepts in the mind of an entirely subjective bodyguard like your host in this essay, Jose Jimenez. For one thing, no living being requires abstract direction. For another thing, no living being could comprehend it, even if that human being needed it. Moralists - and the morality they promote - would be better off practicing what they preach than preaching what they don�t practice. The only morality any of us need comes with the franchise. All we need to achieve contemporary salvation was imbued within us. Our stature and sheer moral platitudinous nature are pre-wired deep in our genetic core by mothers, sisters, aunts and piano teachers. Goodness within, from what we can tell, essentially goes without saying. Other than that, we are evil.
• Gossip is the scourge of America, a deadly virus in Venezuela and anathema to the rest of the peeved world. Gossip is a womanly way of conveying falsehood in the guise of religion. It seeks to destroy the most common of our citizenry, beginning with those who have the least ability to see it coming, let alone, recognize it going into their Swiss bank accounts. Gossip features mean-spirited people telling other craven victims their versions of alleged events that register supposedly on the scale of social value in the minds of thinking librarians. Gossip is a shallow way of filling the void that exists when any two or more people convene at a bus stop or tanning salon and find themselves in want of anything to talk about. When the talk turns to the petty, gossip is legitimized as acceptable discourse, when, of course, it has nothing to do with civility, illumination or emotional growth. Wallowing in the mud of anyone else�s failings is a poor substitute for lifting yourself higher. False superiority has led to more than one obscene beer gut and egocentrism in general is thought to be responsible for almost all the psychological damage inflicted on adolescent youth in many suburban Fargo, North Dakota Democratic precinct caucus simulations. Gossip is gruesome, ugly, corrosive and unmanly, to say the most. Gossip exists beneath the primary indicators on most personality measurement devices, including but not limited to the heated jockstrap. Gossip goes for the jugular when settling for the entrails would probably make a heck of a lot more sense, given society�s overall rejection of polyester as an illogical substitute for gene therapy. Gossip gives me a headache and I don�t even have a head. It is bad for the karma, worse for the urethra and plays havoc with most radar detection gadgets, except for the rear view mirror. Gossip pits person against person and is therefore anti-human. Other than that, what do you know?
• Winter is beyond awful. You spend three or four months freezing your ass off and they call it a season. Heating bills - and most of the heat itself - go through the roof, into the atmosphere, into some sultan�s multi-billion dollar investment portfolio. Winter is a weird waste of time, a season in which darkness dominates to a degree unheard of on the set of the film, "Ben Hur." Winter wears out otherwise-vibrant mammals, from minnow to squirrel, bison to bisexual, biorhythm to botulism. You can bet on it - winter is no day at the beach, unless that beach is Beech-Daly Road in suburban Detroit, where tailgaters rule and turn indicator use is socially frowned upon. Winter makes you weaker than a bag full of burned-out light bulbs and evokes a definite sense of nausea not unlike the way a patch of earth fills after a battery of bulldozers passes by. Winter ruins your shoes, induces flu, colds and hypothermia and hurts the hair. Winter is cold, as in obnoxious, indifferent, sacrosanct in nature and great for the Kleenex industry. Winter lasts too long, makes breath visible and freezes the earth, almost destroying it. Toilet seats adhere to fanny flesh in northern climes and even insects in the south find themselves retreating into bags of rice and flour in pantries and supermarkets, wherever folks say "ya�all" and the sheriff�s department offers prisoners grits with their Spam flakes. Winter is wretched, maligned, under-stated, vicious and vexatious, perhaps the worst season among the four. Other than that, it�s almost over.
• Dentists are a virulently unique and difficult lot. They inflict pain, in the jaw and in the checkbook. They pose questions when their hands are in your mouth, leaving most patients to believe their opinions don�t matter. Dentists play soft-rock radio stations or, worse yet, oldies-formatted AM outlets with too many commercials and no artistic standards. Dentists always "find more work" in mouths designed to degenerate. In allowing their minions to poke and probe for possible Florida condominium payment agents in your lower jaw, they set in play a process that never ends, especially for fathers of several children, husbands of men whose wives grind their teeth at night. Dentists don�t deserve the time of day yet most receive keys to the kingdom of Heaven. They wash their hands too much, kid with their assistants way more than any discriminating professionals should and rarely accept Blue Cross. They like to tower over you and mutter highly-jargoned "shop talk" to their underlings, most of whom dress in crepe paper ensembles that have come to define the term "contemporary sloth," all the way down to tennis shoes called "sneakers" which actually squeak as said minions negotiate from sick patient to cash-poor parent, always in quest of accounts receivable. Dentists have no logical place in contemporary society. Other than that, we need these people.
• Capitalism is a virulent and intensely anti-human economic system. Because it rewards those who show initiative, perseverance and ethical conduct, it stifles the success of the average Joe as normal individuals aren�t always endowed with patrician characteristics and are, therefore, unable to march in the parade as they can�t even put their left foot consistently ahead of their right foot, let alone step lively to the cadence of a thousand drum masters� calculated cacophonies. That only rats win this rat race demonstrates the rodent-like nature of an every-man-for-himself paradigm and drives home the fact the phrase "dog eat dog" could just as easily mean, "pup eat caviar." Laissez faire economics may be good for blue bloods, Ph.D.�s and other pointy-headed members of Mensa, or their overweight counterparts, members of Immensa. But still, not everyone is cut out for an aggressive economic model which favors people of solid pedigree, as evidenced by the Broadway musical production, "Soot," in which cast members filter among the audience, stealing credit card numbers amid the confusion. As long as there are winners and losers in this heartless monetary scheme, there will also be whiners and boozers and people who simply cannot get a job, not this week at least, not until The Winter Olympics are over. Other than that, I�d better get back to work.
• Suntans are insane. As your skin burns, it�s replaced with nefarious tissue vulnerable to scaling and other legal forms of load determination. Having dark skin doesn�t say anything about you except for the verifiable fact having dark skin is of such apparent importance to you that good judgment was otherwise abdicated in the name of one more idiot�s shallow, pointless and extremely dubious narcissism. Just because The Marlboro Man is browner than a Ronald Reagan suit doesn�t mean you should subject your back or neck to the harmful rays of the primary energy source of our solar system. Time wasted in pursuit of an unnatural appearance could be better spent practicing card shuffling or finger picking a replicated 12-string guitar. Projecting a bronzed look precludes sensibility and implies the bronzed party is either out of his or her mind or is at least so close to that distinction they should consider liquidating all of their assets and wrapping their arms and legs in discarded gauze stripping before fixing me another fruit smoothie. Other than that, I remain a lifeguard.
• Talk radio is stupid. They�re all a bunch of idiots, opinionated opiates of optimism, weird weenies with wacky ways of internalizing more than they can masticate within the limitations of the average lifespan of an average humanoid�s dental work. Between the commercials and the personal homilies, little of substance occurs in the context of most talk-radio broadcasts. Because certain ads appear regularly, listeners are subject to the syndrome known as torture. Add to that the brain-numbing effect of anti-Fascist ideology presented as entertainment and you have all the ingredients for one fine mess. Listeners who think they�re being educated never know they�re actually abdicating their God-given right to being Geraldo Rivera themselves. Believing any talk-radio host proves you are either systematically gullible or chronically fatigued. You would have to be completely stupid to even think about listening to talk-radio, let alone do it. Other than that, double-ditto.
• Violent dogs should be put to death. Dogs trained to kill serve only one purpose - they help sustain the dog food industry. If they�re not kept in cages, they could end up on your biceps. They show their teeth more than people with recently capped teeth do. They�re viscous even though most of them can�t spell the word. Their instinct is to bite your arm off while your instinct is to remove the same arm from their mouth before their brain realizes how scared shitless you are. Signals go from their saliva to their cerebral cortex which tell their brain your skin and blood are so implicitly delicious they need to digest as much as possible before the hall guards arrive with doggie Mace. Violent dogs tend to be ugly as canines go and often have scruffy appearances, mangy limbs, ratty tails, scarred-up ears and noses and despicable hygiene. They growl out of context and intimidate other dogs, mostly poodles and senior citizen dogs, even revered animals like Rin Tin Tin, Lassie and - certainly my favorite - Brandy, the Craig�s old bi-polar St. Bernard who used to slobber on any pants I might have been wearing at the time that had just come back from the dry cleaners. This malicious mark making bordered on early white-collar crime. Victims slobbered in dog drool. More overt examples of dog violence include backyard yipping, late night gas passing in the proximity of either the male or female "master�s" side of the army cot and stealing human food from tables or counter tops, especially tables. Violent dogs that also snatch entire hamburger patties or tofu desserts should be executed at sunrise even though most of them will be getting you up BEFORE sunrise to let them out so they can roll around on the hibiscus bushes and get all the other mentally compromised dogs in your neighborhood barking, which most of them were already doing, so it�s not that violent, really. Violent dogs serve no apparent purpose and, as a result, would do all of us a favor by moving, en masse, to somewhere south of Central America, preferably South America. Other than that, most are loyal beasts that do not necessarily eat the people who feed them unless they get generic brands.
• Missionaries are an odd lot. They grow up in one obscure place only to move themselves and all of their knitting materials to extremely remote places on the earth where there are no telephones, bathrooms or pet rocks. Their purpose in life is to save the savages, so to speak, even though the last savage got trampled at Vicksburg. They think preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ to people who would just as soon praise Allah on their way to Pitaville is a sure-fire way to escape Hell, embrace Heaven and have the church pay all the bills. Missionaries are devout souls whose faith is greater than their need to lead conventional lives "stateside," reading garbage like this, watching pro sports on television and being stuck in traffic jams with a Bose Wavelength car radio blasting pleasant rock anthems such as "Born To Be Wild" and "Little Deuce Coup." Missionaries believe they are children of God, which no one would deny even if some would entertain some skepticism. They think God sent them here to do HIS work, which, in this case, means traipsing off to distant kingdoms where former serfs eat bugs on Christmas and floods kill millions of dreams and mosquitoes, justifying giant eradication projects that employ thousands of zealots and non-believers and subsidize entire industries of religious definition, including Bible verse transcription services and blasphemy busters, a sub-Satanic casual sport involving both the lower back muscles and the former libido. Missionaries wear too much khaki clothing and strut about like they are some kind of mission, which is rather weird, knowing most of them would probably be Mr. Rogers imitators in another life. Missionaries ignore poverty in their own backyard in order to set up camp in Ghana, where avocado grow on trees and native housekeepers will do all your laundry for the cost of a cup of Starbucks in Tokyo. They promulgate religion but chew psychedelic tree root. Other than that, they�re nice.
• Hooded sweatshirts are menacing. Owning one or wearing one is a provocative social gesture, in ghetto communities or farm towns. The police can�t see your face and your mother can�t, either. Because your face is invisible, even you - the person WITH the face - inevitably lose track of the face, leading to full Afghanistan beard configurations and major Mountain Dan Adams manifestation. Hooded sweatshirts lack essential style, restrict arm movement, create a bulging effect and use up much more cotton and other subtle textiles than FIVE T-shirts use. Wasteful, wanton and un-we-lie-able, hooded sweatshirts pose a menace to propriety and truly overwhelm the senses of generations of older people whose notion of too much clothing never exceeded the common woman�s blouse. Hooded sweatshirts are a sin in Argentina and an embarrassment in The Bronx. They connote low-life, beer & wine store lack of synchronicity and confine devotees to lives of economic despair and complete identity loss. Other than that, I�m wearing one.
• The USA is too big. Imagine trying to walk from one side of this whacked-out country to the other. You�d need a lot more than a canteen of ice water. The country is ridiculously wide. States like Kansas and Kentucky have so much grandiosity, east to west, they should at least be called territories. And goodness gracious, Texas is bigger than several continents and it still hasn�t been fully explored. Walking across Colorado is impossible and the same applies to the southern portion of Florida, where the great interior is primarily inhabited by unholy killer mosquitoes, poisonous snakes and ravenous alligators, with virtually zero restrooms. And those are just the players on full scholarship! Tennessee is so wide yet of such narrow-mindedness, its citizens are both alert and compressed, often with no awareness of either diversion. And tiny Delaware, often rebuked as miniscule, puny, obscure and finite, achieves massive geographic awareness when experienced one-square-inch at a time. No, America is larger than it should be, way too diverse for its own good and generally redundant, let alone, generally, redundant. Consider Pennsylvania. Rectangular in nature, this state is wider than the cultural divide between female impersonators on Long Island and Nazis on the lamb in Brazil. If you were to drive at 50 miles-per-hour from the extreme southern tip of Texas to the even-more extreme northern tip of North Dakota, you would be several weeks older at the end of the journey than you were before stealing the vehicle you used. Chances are, you would be sort-of exhausted and it is almost guaranteed you will have thought you saw a few more cows than you might have ever deemed necessary prior to holding up that Yugo dealership. From northern North Dakota you would have either turn left or right or keep going right up into Canada. Saskatchewan and Manitoba are your two most obvious choices in Canada, a country that is even too much bigger than the USA is. Both nations maintain way too much acreage. They need to scale down. America in particular is so large no one can comprehend it and few even try. There are too many franchises, too many slaughter-houses, too many trucks and too few places like Yellow Springs, Ohio. America is choking on its own physicality and needs to give some real estate back to Mexico. The place is too el gordo. Other than that, it�s just a little dink shit _expression of mass in the middle of a fairly inconsequential continent on Planet Earth.
• Carnage in general isn�t as bad as is it�s reported to be. During what was commonly denied as being the Vietnam War, former president Richard Nixon was nominated for the Nobel War Prize. "Yes, we have no bombing raids today," was a prominent theme of the time. The large plane in the sky was not a B-52. The items falling out of it were not bombs. The country they landed on was not called Cambodia. The dead people below were not killed. The random limb was not an arm. The charred corpse was not burned to death. Other than that, the proof was in the napalm.
• Life is an inexplicable march to death. As soon as you get good at it, the party is over and all the caterers go out behind the garage to promptly pass around tooth-pick-like tiny white fuming projectiles that ultimately renders said caterer sublime. Taxes, dental bills and educational expenses exhaust every nickel you earn, while the dimes you make go for toiletries, staples and tummy tuck procedures. Men go to war and women go to the dollar store. Women have periods and men have awesome responsibilities. And children have a sorry lot, what with homework, cruel principals and acne. Even at the peak of our lives most of us are so consumed in neurotic anxiety we might as well be pylons at a tank plant. Life is coughing spells and tombstones, replacing automotive brake pads and paying for electricity and health insurance. Existence, per say, is really mean to people whose appearances will never be considered attractive and to the particularly dull of mind, for they shall find most doors closed to them, yet all saloons open until 2 a.m. Life is a series of dreaded encounters with beefy men wearing badges, bilingual babes with swarthy thighs and fleets of foreigners, too lazy to learn your language. If you�re not cold, you�re hot. If you�re not hot, you�re superfluous. Life is a bitch and then you die. Other than that, human sexuality makes it worthwhile.
• Gravity stifles levitation. Even with trampolines or Michael Jordan�s sneakers, none of us are going to be spending a lot of time drifting through cloud matter while we�re here unless we�re in the airlines industry, in which case we�re in real trouble as people prefer turnpikes. Gravity is the ultimate bring-down. It screws with kites and accompanying kite-fliers attitudes, keeps gliders low and suffocates us with our own doo-doo. Gravity takes no prisoners, shows no mercy and is invisible, particularly to those who are not necessarily looking for it or getting all caught up in its various yet seldom discussed ramifications. Gravity - although most are not aware of it - rather owns us. We shuffle through life as that is gravity�s design. Shoes are not meant to last on a planet doomed to kick its own heals on its own repressed tundra. That people sleep lying down is no mystery on a hurtling rock in space unfortunately ruled by reverse wind thrust and anti-atmospheric platitudes such as, "Pshaw." Being locked to the ground, quite literally, stifles creativity, hurts the torso and keeps a lot of people from flying past your bathroom window. Gravity is the great enforcer, along with wind, rain, pestilence and sloth, as well as the Giant Sloth. Other than that, I�m airborne.
• All great thoughts have been asserted. Everything worth saying has already been said. There can never another "The Beatles" simply because no single planet is entitled to have more than any four geniuses come together and make harmony together like they did during any one global life span. Original _expression is no longer possible. Too many great thinkers preceded you and I to this moment in history. In the final analysis, there exist only a finite set of permutations within the spectrum of human experience. Writers like Shakespeare and Jonathon Livingston Seagull already exhausted most of them. The former was prolific, the latter, terrific. Plus, there were nearly millions of other "scribes" in the last 300-600 years who dwelt so seriously over the human condition and all the variations of relationships and experiences that spring up from her loins, so to wretch, that the thought of anyone today evoking anything at all novel or hitherto untouched upon seems less than one smidgeon in a trillion landfills. Libraries are overflowing with great literature, or, at least one publisher thought it was worthy, or, surely, it would not be in a library, let alone an incinerator. Only in visiting a library and seeing how infrequently many books are read, let alone, stolen, does one come fully to terms with the sad fact originality or primal thinking is about as likely as the second coming of the Hendrix fellow. Keen insights aren�t as keen as some would think. Freud pretty much owns everything on the psychiatric front and Buckminster Fuller and Timothy Leary laid claim to all the heavy cerebral stuff that Gunnar Myrdal missed. Other than that, keep trying.
• Marihuana use is insane. Not only is this common herb illegal to possess, let alone, smoke, it is also intrinsically unhealthy to smoke anything, let alone something that takes you out of your normal senses. Worse yet, pot is basically controlled by organized crime and is therefore ridiculously expensive to purchase, with the profits going to thugs and Mafia bosses whose brutish behavior belies the pacifistic overtones of what pot users call the "buzz" they get from tokin� on reefer. Being way too high is never a good idea and being just high enough is questionable, given the toll this stuff takes on every aspect of the human body rolling it. Pot can make your gut fat, your tits large, your voice scratchy and your manner laid-back, as in never picking a fight with a karate instructor. Rolling joints is a major waste of time, growing herb a disgrace to soil and getting stoned with your friends merely allows everyone to clothe their various neurotic impulses for yet another interlude in a foggy curtain of false serenity. Other than that, it�s fun.
• Profundity is pathetic. No one really cares what the smartest thought actually is. Most people are perfectly happy with diluted versions of the above, with a lot of salt on them. Deep thinking eludes the attention span of 99 percent of the general public and an even higher percentage of urban cowboys. They would just as soon NOT hear anything that requires them to do anything more than ignore it all in the last place. Engaging their brain is about as likely as me licking this computer screen instead of casting electronic "words" on a plastic page that looks about as tasty as a large scoop of vanilla ice cream. Profundity has no place in the modern world, where unscrupulously deceitful minions of socialized medicine take their marching orders from machines and computers, time clocks and sterilized women named Miss Randolph and Harriet Gutchaulk. Let them decide what�s smart and what�s almost smart; the rest of us are too busy reading hair style magazines to give a flying fig about international economics, micro surgery or macrobiotics, for crissakes. Does anyone have any clue how hard it is on the brain to actually utilize more than 10 percent of it? I can tell you how hard it is: it�s hard, darn it. You have to shut other stuff out, like your own neurotic messaging, primarily. You can�t have that patter. You need to focus, which is something I suspect most people would rather avoid as focusing causes wrinkles. Anything that damages physical appearance is probably not exactly a prize-winning idea in a society that promulgates the virtues of professional wrestling as acceptable conflict resolution strategy and elevates toxic concoctions like martinis and Manhattans to must-have status, despite the toll these mixed drinks take on both the pocket book and the pot belly. Profundity is too hard to comprehend, too intellectually illusive upon closer extrication and is bad for the body politic, most of which exists beneath the cerebral waistline. Other than that, it�s mentally stimulating.
• Chewing one�s own fingernails is a sure sign of insecurity and bad manners. Ugly fingernails telegraph the presence of a weak personality, a paranoid schizophrenic, a pathological liar or a cross-dressing iguana. On top of that, every cuticle a person chews and digests, ends up in a permanent reservoir in the lower intestines, never to be seen until you and I are finally embalmed, at which point the mortician of their choice beholds everyone�s respective nail residue, icky, pointed, scaly and - by now - literally of the membrane. Nail-chewers need not apply for high office for sooner or later the other national leaders will examine your hands and see what it is you cannot keep from their inquisitive stares - nine Super Bowl rings! Chewing fingernails is not only bad for the nails themselves but imagine the excessive wear-and-tear that occurs upon the tips of the various incisors and other teeth you use to rip them from your fingertips! This can be ghastly, especially if you are the host of the NBC Nightly News. Bad fingers and awful teeth will not help your cause, in New York City or Plattsburgh, New York. Nail-biters are lousy citizens, horrific neighbors and archrivals of earwax cleaners, who themselves have been stigmatized since The Reformation. If you chew your fingernails, we already know you shouldn�t be president of anyone�s condominium association, let alone your own. Nail-biters long for their mother�s teat and fear their father�s heat. They usually have oily skin and nasty hair. Nail-biters stand alone in the arena of great deeds and shop during off-hours at obscure flea markets and stores that are about to go completely out of business. To chew your fingernails is to say to the world, "Sorry, I was hungry." Other than that, they�re shorter afterwards.
• Living in the past is so stupid I wish no one would ever do it again. Because we can�t go back to yesterday, let alone five seconds ago, it�s crazy enough for any of us to even think about visiting. Plus, the past we tend to remember is the past that really never existed in the first place. The farther out we get from the past, the more we�re apt to impose variations on the theme so as to liven up many a drunken story-telling session and at least 40 or 50 bad dreams - per Quarter. People who live in the past tend to miss the present and usually have no idea of what lies ahead, as if that matters, either. Living in the past indicates you are not only off your rocker, it proves you never had a rocker to begin with, even if you still think you might have had sex with Christine McVey in 1962. People who spend their lives thinking about yesterday do yesterday a disservice for which yesterday has no apparent method of rectification. In revising the truth as they recall it, people who live in the past practice the art of embellishment, with an emphasis on the "bell," as in, "Bell�s Beer." Too much Bell�s Beer - say, anything more than two bottles at a single sitting - and you won�t be able to remember 10 seconds ago, let alone, ten more beers. Focusing on where we or you or they have been is an egotistical exercise best left for loony tunes writers, cultural anthropologists like the Clinton daughter and Smithsonian Institute dilettantes, most of whom wouldn�t know how to skin a deer even if you showed them. Living in the past is an idea whose time has gone. It makes no sense in a present tense featuring televised wrestling, proliferating sex in the media, including Braille versions of certain livestock posters and endless emancipation of one formerly outlawed societal faction after another, to the point you want to throw your hands up and say something like, "boulevard." Living in the past is a nowhere pastime and should be frowned upon with anyone with any sense of personal style or fledging hygiene. Other than that, it offers a certain perspective.
• Traveling around America in a large mobile home is a gross example of Yankee Me-First-ism. Why more people don�t use commercial means of transportation like the modern day relay team or the ever-popular rickshaw is a question best left to tomorrow�s social research establishment. We�re not here to dissect a tire or anything. We�re here to say large mobile homes look like pre-manufactured dinosaurs coming down the road. If large is gross, these things are truly grossaria indulged upon. They burn too much gas, hog the highway, make it difficult for other motorists to see around, let alone, through, and can barely maintain momentum up the slightest of inclines, say, for example, Lombard Avenue. No one knows what is going on inside a mobile home while its driver guides it down the sun-cooked Interstate. You could have utter mayhem or mutter amen, no one on the outside will have anything resembling a clue although most of them will surely wonder, wonder why, in fact, and how, what and what the hell? You would have to be a fully baked hayseed idiot to own a mobile home, let alone make it mobile. You would have to think you were the ultimate Czar of the world or something to pull into a service station and charge $135 worth of high lead gasoline on your Mexico City Library Card, before trying to guide the rig past the drive-through window at the Taco Bell in Vacuum, Indiana. Individuals driving their own building-sized personal transportation devices around the cities and redneck villages of provincial America personify why it is people from most of the rest of the world think we are sovereign assholes, even though we ourselves know better, recognizing that extending extravagance to this level of obscene visibility actually verifies the credibility of our collective claim that we are, indeed, God�s chosen peep holes. Mobile homes are gross, ugly, unnecessary and beyond redemption. They are hideous, heathen, unhealthy and hilarious, although not always in the same Laundromat parking lot. Other than that, they have bathrooms.
• Reading another�s words is a poor substitute for finding your own voice. Seeking truth outside your own inner temple is impossible and possibly even disgusting. Enlightenment is just a long word and peace of mind a misnomer in a world gone, frankly, to the EPA clean-up site. Getting "your jollies" from going deep inside someone else�s head, imagination and willingness to type it all down is a clear and certain indicator of personal hyper-limitation, with an emphasis on the hyper. Anyone who would spend any more than four or five seconds digesting someone else�s "art" (c�mon) is, for sure, a deprived individual with a definite lack of taste, let alone aesthetic priority. Just because someone else can spin a phrase or tackle a thought or hold onto a compelling moral argument or make sense of history, culture, science or wrestling doesn�t mean anyone else needs to tune-in on that person�s insights. It�s not as if all of us aren�t capable ourselves of conceiving "War And Peace" or "Bonfire Of The Vanities." Normal people can crank this shit out. These just need a few years at a monastery to get their thoughts straight and learn how to make the word processor work for them instead of having to work the stupid son of a bitch themselves. Why anyone would want to suspend their own neurotic agenda long enough to open their minds to someone else�s twisted take on reality surely escapes the understanding of this junior high school dropout. Other than that, I read matchbook covers.
• Women cannot be understood. They�re as different from men as gerbils are from hamsters. They blow their noses more frequently, cry more pathetically, drink for different reasons than gents do and generally harbor a multitude of deep-seated emotional issues starkly incomprehensible to members of other gender distinctions. Women rely on other women more than men rely on other hamsters. Worse yet, women actually care about how they look while men don�t look at all. Women change their clothes several times a day, men, several times a month. Women are so strange, many of them wear shoes with heals. Women are too tired for sex, too fragile for boxing, too complex for analysis and too short for advanced hedge trimming. Women are loosely wired to the point many of them have never used the "puree" setting on their food processors. They actually believe the color of their finger nail polish will somehow effect the likelihood of their husband, spouse, creditor or hit-man cooking dinner on any given night and they�re clairvoyant enough to believe they know what others are thinking, even when the other person often has nothing resembling a clue to any of the aforementioned hyperbole. Women are emerging from centuries of gender domination and therefore feel an oppressive need to rectify the sins of everyone�s grandfathers, much to the consternation of males, who just went through the same exercise with Gays, Blacks and Scientologists. Women want you to open the door for them, then blame you for not saying the right words while you do so, assuming you even want to say anything, which most men don�t, consequently. Women are south of mysterious, bordering on the entirely hysterical. Other than that, they sure are pretty.
• Professional sport is a huge sham, a monumental diversion in contemporary culture. The potential for corruption in this abjectly malleable proposition crests above the floodgates of plausibility. As a metaphor for violence and exploitation, football and other organized games fuel anti-societal thinking, engender impersonality in the body politic and ruin many an otherwise lousy Sunday afternoon. Watching grown men playing little boys� sports is a perfect example of what happens when you give partially brain-dead male individual tickets to the game and a cooler. Seasons are much too long, actual drama much too rare. The players are millionaire hypocritical power-monger fiends, the owners are billionaires with enormous Beagles and the fans, well, what a joke. Most fans don�t have a pan to smoke pot in, let alone a working grip on the greater priorities of life, mainly wine. Hockey�s potential for violence and the hard-hitting that accompanies most professional football match-ups prove that fans will pay tons of money for the opportunity to see modern-day gladiators endure life-long injuries and get mud in their eye-ball sockets. By keeping their eye on the ball the grownup children called professional athletes are playing with, fanatics called fans take their eyes of the balls of their life, not to mention the mounds of their wives, be they as they may not be. Men watching kids� games on television late at night while the missus is sleeping do surely miss�eth many a fine encouraging word, it being seldom heard. Their need to stay up late enough to see which professional team beats another professional team is a dominant indicator of the fact America and other allegedly civilized countries are really no more sophisticated than a collection of Uriah Heap albums. Other than that, I�m a Lions� fan.
• Cars and trucks consume precious fossil fuels and ruin the environment with their deadly fumes. Motor vehicles have contributed to the decentralization of urban areas and pitted maniac against maniac in heartless traffic jams, on racetracks called freeways and throughout our lives. People spend more money on their car insurance than they do on Sweet Baby Jesus. People disconnect from one another as they drive about, going from nowhere to Jiveville, listening to oldies that never should have been new�ies in the first place, on redundant satellite radio that no one needs, wasting what should have been actual lives in pursuit of the perfect pit-stop. Other than that, there isn�t anything quite as enervating as downshifting a Porsche into a tight, uphill curve.
• Organized religion reeks of hypocrisy and attracts an unusual concentration of phonies, losers, fanatics and pure fools. Large sects spend even larger amounts of peoples� money on causes more commonly associated with what the French call self-aggrandizement. In harkening back to scrolled messages from ancient times, they pander in pursuit of the mindless promulgation of vexatious voodoo and supercilious superstition, alienating thinking people, extending plausibility to comic characters like the church lady and Miss Yvonne from Pee Wee Herman�s Playhouse, singing mostly unmelodic hymns while often ruining an otherwise perfectly acceptable pair of Dockers. Other than that, I enjoy worship.
• Money is a lousy way of keeping score. You can�t take it with you. If you don�t have your health, all the money in the world won�t do you a lick of good. Greed corrodes character, turns otherwise well-intended men and women into societal zombies. Coins are inherently dirty, carrying the germs of every peon and immigrant who carried them before you put them in your mouth. Paper money is a cruel fraud and can become entirely useless in times of rapid inflation or cultural upheaval. Any investment is implicitly evil for the entire notion of getting something for nothing flies in the face of responsible spiritual conduct. Large clumps of cash attract thieves, maggots and lint, not always in that order. And too many pennies in your house are bad for the circulation of currency, not to mention your house�s weak foundation. Other than that, I want more.
• Memorizing the collected works of Gandhi, Mao, Dubois, Mannheim, Trotsky, Brecht, Reich, Joyce, Picasso, Freud, Nietzsche, Edison, McLuhan, Marcuse, Phillip Rief, Emerson, Thoreau and the generally misunderstood Martin Buber would predictably enhance the intellectualism of anyone in quest of knowledge, insight or mental acuity. Other than that, I cloud gaze.
• Michigan has too many people, too many wig Shoppe�s, too many party stores and too many intersections. Its climate is frequently hostile and its atmosphere is conducive to various diseases, given the unusual concentration of industrial activities occurring in such a limited biosphere. You can�t eat the fish from its lakes and septic fields, mostly because the fish won�t let you catch them. Even when you do lure them into your mega-dinghy, you know the fish contain many deadly chemicals and other man-made agents, which, if consumed in a sandwich with mayonnaise every day of your life will indeed shorten that life, less than Ed McMahon will ever know. The State is run by a coalition of defrock nihilists whose only interest is fiduciary malfeasance, I can assure you. What might be referred to as "the legitimate legal establishment" in other territories here is more often regarded as no more than a rag-tag, ad hoc assembly of Hindu castoffs. Other than that, I remain of the place.
• America is too big, too arrogant, too unwieldy and too much, man. America is a mongrel nation comprised of so many nationalities you can no longer distinguish someone whose ancestors came to this country on the Mayflower from someone who just fell off a turnip truck, unless you train the eye on possible turnip smearing on the trousers. Even if you can identify the Muslim extremist who lives next door, you can�t talk to him for long, unless you want to keep saying "Go Wings" all evening. Mexicans, Asians and Indonesians all say, "What up, dude?" to trees, parking meters and Catholic nuns, leading the rest of us to wonder what exactly it was they ate for diner, for the last several thousand years. America has no culture to speak of, except for thousands of world-class theatres, museums, restaurants and genuine cowboy bowling alleys, in which scores are kept in the dust instead of the beer. Its people know very little of the outside world, other than how to buy Heineken�s. They think everyone else in the world wants to come to America when the real truth is, the only people who really want to come here are doctors from India and an occasional Puerto Rican professional basketball player. Americans believe they are the envy of the outside world when the outside world actually remains very unaware of the fact the rapper M&M is a white kid with fake blonde hair and a formerly bad disposition. To them, the letters USA stand for freedom and justice while to most of the rest of the world they stand for, "Usa, the gas-guzzling Uncle Sam guy." America has been way too smug ever since World War II ended in a virtual draw, with Russia and America sharing Berlin and everyone else sharing a bathroom. Brazen American tourists have done much to sustain that bad image by doing everything by calling Mexican intellectuals, "jovenes," to leaving chewing gum wrappers on the floor of The Taj Mahal, from behaving like louts in pristine French cafes to shouting college cheers outside the Vatican when a Pope dies. They are known to eat live animal flesh while driving and believe everything they read in their newspapers, most of which are owned by Jewish cabals that just want everyone to like Arial Sharon and eat a lot of corned beef. Americans don�t have a clue how shallow they appear in their Levi�s and hair-curlers at what is never more than just another routine Wall-Mart opening. America is a weird trip, a fatal experiment and a bad joke on Spanish conquistadors whose only real goal was to get to China in time for Sienfeld. Other than that, many stay.
• Jogging is pointless. You pound the heck out of your feet, your knees, your entire body, for that matter. Jogging implies that getting anywhere as quickly as possible is more sensible than getting there in due time. People who jog harbor superior feelings for people who find jogging superfluous in a world where you have to get up early in the morning in the first place. Joggers are strident, probably too fit for their own good and rarely have stomachs suggesting they ate solid food in the past decade. Their angular aspirations instill envy in the rotund masses, where mere mortals find themselves out of breath in such relatively non- strenuous scenarios as blowing ones nose or walking across the living room of a conventionally sized trailer. Jogging eats up tennis shoe soles and leaves sweat in your subdivision. Jogging requires finely color-coded clothing ensembles in your better zip codes and Mexican blankets in areas where only drug addicts and members of the clergy visit during daylight hours. Joggers create significant bewilderment among minions of the law, otherwise sanguine officers who find themselves never quite sure if the jogger is running from something, or to something, like, perhaps, a rodeo event, featuring naked female clowns and vegetarian little doggies. Jogging is hazardous to non-joggers, whose shared guilt alone could be enough to sink a fragile governmental coalition. Jogging wears you out, actually kills some devotees, and should be banned in a country where potato chips originated and the Hula Hoop was conceived. Jogging is for masochists and women who should be avoiding runs. It uses too much oxygen and borders on the truly bizarre, right up there with bad-mitten on battleships. Other than that, cruising is amusing.
• Authority figures are in over their heads. Most of them feel they�re quite a bit larger than most of the rest of us and are therefore willing to throw their weight around, as long as you don�t mind waiting. They get pushy under even the flimsiest of circumstance. It may be some other family�s Polish wedding. The guests might just be standing around and some rent-a-cop comes busting in, demanding to see peoples� driver�s licenses. I know, I know, it�s really horrible and I don�t think any of it is required either. You can have midget police who treat people with respect and get just as many arrests, as long as you station the patrol cars outside the saloons after 1 a.m. and make all the drunks blow in the small device without getting the drunks� breath in the vicinity of the suspicious officer�s nostrils. Even polite female police officers have a place in a society that also allows former presidents� wives to dominate a certain troubled faction of one country�s essentially tawdry political rump movements. Those with bold imagination and no restraint on lack of propriety can envision even animal officers of high pedigree, dogs or cats, perhaps, with enough �lan to outdo most of their comrades in animal-dumb by reaching into the human dimension, far enough to break up a fight between a married couple or eat every variety of doughnut ("That�s on the house, officer.") in every possible breakfast nook surrounding the precinct station where Officer Jim Sanders first learned pig Latin. Bossy people should be ashamed although none are. They should be going to therapy, although most are going to a discount home improvement center. They should stop pushing people around yet most tend to become even more assaultive as their careers go from awkward to prestigious, usually just by kissing someone�s ass to the point of lip-lock. Waddling from alleged triumph to perceived success, they keep their backs close to walls, believing that their manner is common to all and unaware that most average folk would rather be normal than domineering. Authority figures figure their ca-ca don�t smell when, in fact, it wreaks. Other than that, we need them, like we need flags, stretchers, adult undergarments and Tarot cards.
• Toenail hygiene is over-valued. Proper care of one�s feet and literal toe mass is actually one of the greatest plots against casual existence in the history of the Puritan Movement. Toenails are not now nor have they ever been logical items of obsession, not in a world of Frito Lay products and cartoon classics in various media. People who judge other people by the quality of their toenails miss an important point, which is, no single part of the human body is farther from the crown of the skull than the celluloid physicality of a hobo�s toenail. Think about that while I run the rest of my body through a car wash. A dirty toenail will never offend your girlfriend�s mother because this wretched bitch doesn�t need to see its gruesome nature. Clever men have been known to conceal poor toenail maintenance to the second and third decades of marriage depending on how often couples go swimming with their in-laws. A popular story describes how one ugly-toed husband deceived his wife�s parents - and all of their neighbors - more than 50 years during which time they foolishly assumed the feet they saw were actually his feet when, in fact, the man borrowed the feet of male foot models he knew from the gym whenever the larger family went to the gene pool. The deceit of this crass imposter was revealed when one of the models showed up at a family wedding, claiming they were all at the wrong Holiday Inn and drawing specific attention to the real son-in-laws toenails, which, in fact, were embalmed in Bloody Mary mix. Toenail perfection is inane and socially regressive. Other than that, I hear you, honey.
• Classical music is dull. At best, it evokes languid euphemisms and verifies the image of western civilization as no more than a trumped-up version of "Amos And Andy" racial stereotyping, a process which slowly saps a nation�s will, eventually rendering all but the truly demented crazed and pathetically twisted versions of their former serf-like selves. While Bach and other composers were said be of genius stature, it is just as possible their best inspirations came to them at times when they were actually either under the influence of brandy or organized religion. No one knows for sure whether Mozart�s most memorable work came from Austria, Australia or even New Guinea and the entire Renaissance has been cast into doubt with the discovery of the former White House intern�s dry cleaning receipts. Even though legions of educated denizens of the opera adore violin concertos, most contemporary Socialists seem more inclined to simply endure the music, rather than use it in their daily rituals like some people do chewing gum commercial sound tracks. Musicians who rely on tuxedos and evening gowns to earn the ultimate respect of snobby socialites and relatives of the legendary Biff and Muffie belie their suburban roots and cast doubt on the legitimacy of everything from the vacuum cleaner to the gas-driven abacus. Symphonic elegance can often be mistaken for ripe Arian malicious behavior, although very few critics have the professional awareness needed to distinguish improvisation from disorientation and fewer yet have ever been far enough away from home to know the song "Old Shep" has made more listeners cry than all the European masters combined. Crisp crescendos aren�t all they�re cracked up to be and maestros with ponytails aren�t necessarily as with-it as bluejeans. Other than that, Beethoven is a friend of mine.
• Overkill equates to cruel excess. Saying too much really says it all. Other than that, this is too short.