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 →

We need to talk. I’ll be brief. But I won’t be nice. The time for nice has passed. The situation has gotten so out of control that only unniceness will do. Also, I am grumpy, and you know how I get when I’m grumpy. I apologize in advance for any undue grumpiness, but say also tough titty: something has to be done. So let’s get this over with. Here goes.

I swear to Christ I am going to pumpkin the next person who responds to anything that I say with, “I know…right?” Bam. A pumpkin right to the face. A gourd to the gourd. The “I know” is irritating, but asking me “right?” is downright offensive. Of course it’s right, you nebbish! Otherwise I wouldn’t have said it. Your endorsement is unneeded and unsolicited.

I’m sure you’re suddenly pissed off at me, but save it: there’s more. If you are an American in 2014 saying “At the end of the day,” just shut your word hole and walk away. That expression had achieved shameful cliche status in England by 1998. Just eliminate it from your speech and say what you really want to say. For example, instead of saying, “At the end of the day, I still think that Michelle is a vapid twat,” just cut out the cliche. Hell, cut out the “I still think.” Just be bold and speak the truth: “Michelle is a vapid twat.” Isn’t that better?

Okay. Now for the big one. This one is likely to alienate everybody I know, because virtually everybody I know does it…that’s what makes it so insidious. “It is what it is.” God. This is, perhaps, the most existentially useless statement ever uttered by a soccer mom. I can only assume that what people like about it is that it is a balanced sentence. Someone recently told me that it is Zen. I assure you it is not. It is to Buddhist thought what Hootie and the Blowfish was to classical music.

Continue reading →

Sorry I’ve been all incommunicado. Here’s what’s been going on. A couple months ago, an old friend showed up with a the biggest bottle of what appeared to be NyQuil I’ve ever seen, squawking about wanting to play his new drinking game.

“It’s called ‘Look,'” he said, waving the bottle around.

“What’s in that? Absinthe?”

“Fuck Absinthe…that stuff is terrible. This…this is the green Chartreuse!”
“Whatever. Tell me about your silly-ass game.”

“The game is simple. To play Look, tune to any round-table discussion on any cable news network. CNN, MSNBC, FNC…doesn’t matter. Personally, I like Special Report on Fox because Krauthammer.”

“Charles Krauthammer is a fucking superstar.”

“Okay, so everybody who’s playing needs a glass.”

“A shot glass?”

“Nope. A big, fuck off glass. This game is not for the timid.”

“Okay…we’ve got glasses. Now what?”

Continue reading →