After one week of scoring standardized tests, I can state with certainty that they are not teaching classical Latin in the public high schools of Pocatello, Idaho.

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain — and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

~ Robert Frost

I love our national anthem. I used to think that “America the Beautiful” would have been a better choice, because it’s a much simpler song. “The Star-Spangled Banner” is a wonderful song, but it is a regal bitch to sing. Very few people can pull it off (how many recordings are there of professional and talented singers just botching the thing?). And it seems that even fewer people can remember (or have ever learned) all the words.

But as time has gone by, I’ve decided that we made the right choice with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” if for no other reason than it’s got both bombs and rockets right there in the song. It’s wonderful. Go listen to “Oh Canada.” Lovely song for a lovely country, but you get to the end of it and you really do feel like you just heard an Anne Murray song. There is something incomplete about it to the ear. There is not one bomb or rocket or anything else cool in “Oh Canadia.” And that is why Canadia will always be America’s hat. (We kid, of course….love to all my Canadian friends).

Okay. Time to go make things explode and strike blows for freedom via whiskey. Enjoy your freedoms, thank a vet, and God bless America.

It’s the summer solstice. The longest goddamn day of the year. Well, there’s no point in fighting it: it’s summer in our neck of the hemisphere, and summer sucks ass. It’s the opposite of winter, which makes it de facto shitty. As you likely already know, I am in a bad mood, meteorologically, from Cinco de Mayo until Halloween. But the months of June, July, and August are just as bad as it gets for yrs. truly.

Oh sweet shit how I hate the summer. I dislike heat and children equally, and during these three wretched summer months, I can’t even stick my head out of the front door without having to deal with both. Kids everywhere, suddenly with nothing to do except make noise and commit crimes. Plus it’s 107F. The entire mammal kingdom is programmed to handle such heat the same way: get skinny, flat, low to the ground, and move as little as possible until the rain comes again. Which will hopefully be on Halloween. A rainy Halloween is the purest revenge for all of this summer nonsense: seeing all of these same underage hooligans who seem to thrive so well in the heat driven back into their suburban holes by cold and rain, dressed up in moronic costumes, candyless, forced to spend the winter listening to their parents masturbate in separate rooms. Ah yes…our time will come again, as it always does.

In the meantime, happy solstice.

Calling it “animal protein” changes nothing: that is meat you are eating. Mmmmm…yeah…delicious. It is the red, bloody flesh of something that used to moo and dream.

A famous musician once told me that he doesn’t eat meat because he thought he would “inherit the dreams” of the animals he ate. I immediately doubled my meat consumption. Turns out he was wrong. Unless cows and pigs routinely dream of belly dancers. I expanded my palette to include exotic beasts, like alligator and crocodile, deer and elk. I hoped to dream of stalking the bayous in Louisiana or lying in wait in an African wadi for a baby zebra to get thirsty. No dice. More belly dancers.



Anyway, eat your meat. Own it. Deal with it. Drink whiskey with it. And get your goddamn kids vaccinated.

If this life was a movie, now would probably be the point in the third act when I tear up the house, lock myself in my room, sit at my desk, unmoving, for a couple of days, then, on the morning of the third day, suddenly pick up my pen and pound out an instant classic in a week or two.

In the words of the late John Lennon, nobody told me there’d be days like these. Strange days indeed. Most peculiar, mama. Whoa.

Today was a strange day. Then again, they’ve all been strange days lately.

Today I cussed out a rose bush. But after a good minute-long tirade, it still hadn’t seemed to have gotten the message. It was still giving me sass. So I threatened it with karate. “Do you want karate?” I demanded. More sass. So I attempted karate upon the rose bush, whereupon I fell immediately on my ass. Hard. That’s when I saw the priest, just standing there, watching me. Continue reading →