Autopanegyric

Do I think I'm better than you? The only honest answer is yes. Yes, I do. But please understand, it's not because I find any particular fault with you. I find your desperate grasping at comprehenision, like a blind man flailing for the words to describe a rainbow, to be utterly charming and indicative of your adorable spirit of try-try-try. Watching a puppy chase a car is something I never tire of.

The relative difference has less to do with your ample shortcomings than with my undeserved and embarrassing overabundance of gifts. Am I tall, handsome, witty, patient, giving, forthright, understanding and kind? Yes, I am. But I find a way to be all those things with just the right amount of humor and self-effacing grace as to put people lesser than me at their ease. And damn, if they don't just love me all the more for it.

Beyond that, there are things about me that are truly remarkable (my prehensile vestigial tail is something about which textbooks have been written), but I don't advertise them. It's enough that people admire me. Admiration I can take. Awe might make me a little more uncomfortable. From there it's a short trip to people sacrificing virgins to effigies of your image and the last thing I want is the spoilation of a good virgin on account of me. There are so few left...

So I only post here once a week, work out twice a week, administer masked vigilante justice on the lawless streets of Greater Northwestern Riverside County a couple nights a month at most... I figure there's plenty of praise out there to go around. You don't need me hogging it all up, kicking off another self-esteem crisis like in the late '80s/early '90s when I volunteered for Habitat for Humanity that one summer and tipped the scales a wee bit too far in my direction. The ensuing spike in teen pregnancies and the rise of crack cocaine are consequences my conscience will never be free of.

The question then is: why write about this all now? Why risk the social upheaval, the backlash, the total collapse of conventional normative emotional order?

Well, depending on how schedules go, this may well be my final blogpost of the decade. I've done a lot this decade. I fathered two children, bought two houses, didn't get divorced, learned to eat fish, spoke no French, read some old books, got a job, murdered only when totally and absolutely necessary (in both legal and moral senses) and positively, absolutely turned down every single offer to commit adultery against my wife. Every. Single. One.

That's a lot. In light of recent events, I think you'd say the last one by itself should qualify me for some kind of Nobel or MacArthur prize.

But it's for all those reasons that I've decided to name the 2000s (wait for it...) the Me Decade.

I know that's been done. But Tom Wolfe, when he said it, wasn't talking about Me. He was talking about You. You and your petty little insular concerns with your poofy hairdo, your astrological sign gold medallions and your chocolate-brown flared trousers. Tom Wolfe, the man in the tired, affected I-wish-I-was-Mark-Twain white suit, was unironically making fun of You.

This Me, this 2000s Me, I think you'll agree, is much more specific, by an order of hundreds of millions in that it refers to just the one person (me).

It may seem self-serving to name a whole decade after me, but I think if you'll just give it a second to penetrate your precious, precious armodillo-plated skull, you'll find that this is me (again) doing you a favor.

We've all accomplished a great deal these past ten years. We ran two successful presidential elections and one very curious tie (GWB winner by shoot-out after extra time in 2000). We took over two different countries. We very nearly kept the Yankees from winning any World Series (pipped us at the final post... thanks for nothing, goddamn Phillies). We lost us two gigantor buildings in New York, a wing of the building housing a large portion of our defense infrastructure and one whole major American city (we love you New Orleans!). What other decade can say that?

But one thing we haven't been able to successfully accomplish? Naming the decade. None of the attempts have really caught on. Not the Zeroes or the Aughts or the Ohs or the 2000s. There's no catchy nickname for the rising generation like Generation X or Hippies or whatever. Identity for the last ten years have been as empty as its last three digits.

So, with humility and a heart bound only to service of you, my fellow man, I give you the Me Decade. Because that's who I am: dedicated to servicing as many men as I can.

You are welcome.

Another Word for Cat

If it was just one, I guess you could just go the traditional route and blame it on work, the kids, married too young, midlife crisis, drifting apart, losing the spark, blah blah blah... You know: make it her fault. It's as American as obesity.

If you get caught with up to three mistresses, you're going to be forced to go the David Duchovny route and claim sexual addiction. With the great social eraser of rehabilitation, the rigors of 21st century society gets to be the bad guy, with the magic intervention of psychopharmaceuticals as the cure. Thirty days of totally chaste inpatient living with a bunch of other coed self-identified deviants with compulsion issues, you come out mixing Xanax and Cialis and the slate, she is clean. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of your genitals, a slideshow of which is on permanent display at the CDC, but there are pills for most of that as well, thank God.

When you begin to approach double digits in the adultery tally, the numbers get all fuzzy and lose meaning. Basically, you'd fuck anything at this point. Provided, of course, you weren't married to it.

When the Odometer of Strange trips that second column, it's time to sit down with your wife, look her right in the eye and tell her "Look, I think it's obvious that I really really hate you."

Now that your Sherman-like campaign of scorched poon from Augusta to the sea and from Torrey Pines to the other sea and... really, to all the seas from various points of departure, has produced your clear and unadulterated goal of the absolute humiliation, degradation and dismissal of your spouse, it's time to settle accounts and part ways.

Not everyone knows this, but there is a very simple mathematical equation to find out what is equitable in such a forced separation. Every act of penetration into a vagina other than the one that bore a man's children is multiplied by a dollar amount variable gauged in relative terms of actual wealth (liquid and in other holdings) and potential earnings, factored again by the length of marriage, number of children, potential child support. Let's plug in a nice round number for Tiger Woods just to ballpark it, say $1 billion, and wow... it's going to be a high number. Add in the multiplier premium if you don't want the soon-to-be-ex to call you a douchebag on "Oprah" and the final settlement tally comes out to... let me see... carry the five... ah yes: All.

Every single dollar.

Do you have any idea how much that works out to in Swedish kronor? And they have free health care there. She'd be the queen of that place if they didn't already have one. I'm not sure, but it might be one of the ABBA ladies.

Squeak!

My fear of mice is irrational, I admit it. There comes a time in every father's relationship with his son when the veil of invincible manly dad-ness is pierced, once and forever, never to be made whole again. Once the imperforable aegis of paternal idealization has been perforated, it more shatters than deflates, sending shards of false bravado and unearned adoration in all directions at once, at the deafening speed of Fuck You Old Man, You're Not The Boss Of Me. The demotion from larger-than-life to regular-size is all the more shocking, as the boy must suddenly struggle with the realization that instead of an Olympian son of Zeus, god of gods, he is the accidental offspring of Bruce, unhappy cubicle zombie who kind of runs like a girl.

For me, I fear, this happened when I opened the door between the laundry room and the garage and found myself punim à punim with a local variety of Mus musculus, your common, everyday house mouse.

I didn't scream. I'm not quite that much of a 1940s Tom and Jerry cartoon lady with the polka dot dress, low heels and cankles. My calves are very well defined, thanks very much. There may have been a gasp or two and a slight--slight--clutching of the chestal area where a string of pearls might not go amiss. But I was brave enough to get the dog to chase it into the imaginary hole of nonexistence (which begins exactly where my line of sight ends) so I could get in the car and drive to Home Depot, where they sell little bags of Evil Rat Infestor Disgusting Parasite Killer poison, which I dutifully dispatched.

I don't fish because I'm not really interested in interacting in any way with what I catch. A boated fish is the saddest, most pathetic sight in all of nature. Plus there's no way I'm eating anything caught in any water system in SoCal without a full panel of shots like they give to people traveling to Tanzania. The point is, in that respect, I am thoughtfully circumspect about my actions, i.e. I don't fish.

I put out rat poison to kill the mouses, but then I have to remember: now I have to deal with a dead mouse.

My extreme negative reaction to mice and rats is out of revulsion more than any fear of physical danger. If it comes down to a fight, I like my chances against your average 11 oz. critter, no matter what its disposition. But bleh, they're just so... gross. They touch all your stuff where you can't see them, at night when you're sleeping, they sneak stray bits of dog food, gnaw through your Costco boxes of Nature Valley granola bars in the garage, murder 2/3 of Europe's population as vectors of the Black Death... I believe my shock-horror response is more out of an earned evolutionary preservation instinct rather than just me being a pussy.

So I had to ask my 10-year-old son to help me scoop up the dead mouse and throw it away. He was bemused by this in a very now-I-see-through-you-you-pathetic-coward kind of a way.

But look, the only thing more gross and potentially disease ridden than a house mouse? Dead house mouse.

Just because I don't want to get typhus doesn't make me a coward. It's still a rodent. I know they're small and mostly harmless, but you'd be surprised what kind of damage something that seemingly delicate and defenseless can do when roused. When you see one coming at you, even though logically you know it can't do you any real harm, your instinct is to back your Escalade up as fast as it will go, obstacles be damned. It may be small, but put a golf club in its hands and you've got trouble.

Bad Medicine

We have not, as yet, gotten our three precious sons (Jaden-Braden, Scramjett and LaJeff) vaccinated against the dreaded Mexican Swine InstaDeath Influenza. This is, I have been told, because I do not love my children and want them to die. If the State finds out they are unvaccinated and we took them to Costco and further still allowed them to partake of the free samples, I think the wife and I are looking at an airtight criminal negligence rap.

When they all came over sick after we got home, I thought for sure we were done for, but it turned out to be a false alarm. A mixture of acai juice, spiral-cut ham, smoked gouda, coconut-macadamia chewy granola bars, carob covered raisins (sugar free!) and pesto-parmesan flavored potato chips can effectively mirror the symptoms of swine flu, no matter how small the servings. A day or two with a rented steam cleaner and we were right as rain.

Right now, I'll be honest, the main reason we've been lax on the whole anti-death vaccine thing is out of laziness. But what if it wasn't just the fact that I'd rather catch up on back episodes of V? What if I didn't want to get the vaccines for my kids at all and thus avoid their implanation with the secret government-corporate identification and consumer habits tracking chip contained therein?

We know that mandatory health-care prescriptions are written into the Obama-Stalinist health care yoke, or as I call it, the Gulag-ing of America. If I decide I don't want my kids to be immune to the German measles and therefore automatically autistic, too fucking bad, it happens. Death panels, sterilization, steroid testing, human/hamster cross-breeding... read the bill, it's all in there and it's all Obama. Well, except the steroid thing, that was holdover from the Bush days.

But the rest of it, all Barack Hussein. And I don't like it. Not one bit. If I want to watch my child die a slow, burning, agonizing death from a disease that has been preventable since the Hoover administration, that should be my right as a parent. But no, Big Brother insists that my child live AND denies him the right to infect those around him with the disease of his choosing.

Less choice equals less freedom. Less freedom equals more communism. More communism means ladies in drab gray, functional clothing, modest haircuts and sensible shoes. Do you want that, America, or do you want Heidi Klum?

I want Heidi Klum. I mean really really, I do. Who's with me?

The OiA Book Club Presents

Going Rogue by Sarah Jessica Liberty Heath Palin.

I read it so you don't have to.

A lot of professional commentators and non-professional bloggers are excerpting parts of it, but it's all the same bits (John McCain is mean, John McCain's staff is mean, Barack Obama is mean and also black, etc.). As a service, I read it a little more closely and found some interesting tidbits that have slipped under the evil MSM radar. To wit:

-For Thanksgiving dinner every year, Todd brings home a live seal and eight spoons. And yes, it's an adult seal; reports to the contrary are another example of the big Fake America elite media trying to spin family wholesomeness into something icky and weird. Gosh.

-If you look really close, Katie Couric has a thin little moustache.

-Stopped being governor abruptly specifically to finish her thesis on loop quantum gravity. But then Oprah called and, darn it, it goes on the back burner AGAIN. At least the delaying factor wasn't another baby this time.

-John McCain not nearly as handsy as his reputation suggested. At least not above waist level, anyway.

-Secret Service codename for Sarah Palin: Governor Handjob.

-Secret Service codename for John McCain: Death-pallor.

-Once you get accustomed to the long travel times and the taste of fresh moose blood, governor of Alaska is not a hard job.

-Accepted the Oprah invitation not for the money or book publicity, but specifically to build in the "I have black friends" defense against racism charges. Checkmate, haters.

-Very hurt by cynics suggesting that, just because she drags out her special-needs child onto stage at events only long enough to be photographed holding him and then immediately hands him off to an aide does NOT mean she is using him as a political prop. Turns out that he's just really, really heavy.

-Has been extended free room and board at every La Quinta Inn located within the borders of "Real America." She intends to exploit this very generous offer just as soon as Real America gets a Barneys.

-Knows, obviously, that she cannot see Russia from her backyard. This is a political lie spun up by late night talk show hosts who want to molest her daughters. She did, however, invent the internet.

-On the night he died, had Ol' Dirty Bastard's initials tattooed on her torso, just below her left breast.

-Believes left-handed people to be "unclean."

-Drafts of her original election-night concession speech angrily rejected by McCain staffers simply because she insisted on ending with "Allahu akbar!"

-Would never, under any circumstances, pose for Playboy. And Maxim simply refuses to meet her number.

-Enjoys "Scrable [sic], time with (parts of) my family and the unrelenting persecution of my perceived enemies past capitulation and unto agony, defilement and death."

There's much more on the other 300+ pages, but honestly, most of it is just the typical self-serving boilerplate political blatherings you would expect. You know, alienation of the worker from the product of his labor, the rising of the proletariat to seize to means of production, the unsustainable contradictions inherent in bourgeois society, revolution, worker's paradise, blah blah blah.

I Only Do What MTV News Tells Me

Holy shit, what day is it? Oh my God, I think I forgot to vote!

I can't even remember what the issues were this year in California, but I know there had to be something. Immigrants, gays... there's always some minority group we come together as one to condemn, villify and rebuke every early-November. It's a rite of fall, like Guy Fawkes Day in the UK, but instead of bonfires and fireworks, we legally ostracize entire groups for the great and glorious benefit of the white, English-speaking, odd-number-of-penises-in-every-act-of-sexual-congress-only-please population of our state. It sounds mean, yes, but remember, we have to do it to them before the demographics tip and then they can do it to us.

Although I should point out that, like Guy Fawkes Day, we will occasionally hang the pope in effigy. But that's because he's a) a non-native English speaker b) hangs out with mostly only dudes and c) wears a dress and fancy I-talian slippers. All kinda squirrelly homo. Can't be too careful.

As a direct democracy state, I'm used to having SOMEthing to bore me on my television through the early part of the new TV season with confusing, directly conflicting, community-college-production-level commercials telling me which organization of firefighters endorses what initiative. But no, apparently nobody wanted my opinion about whom should be governor of Virginia or New Jersey or congressman in someplace in New York or even if we should stick it to the gays one more time, this time in Maine. That last one really irked me; as a Californian, my vast anti-gay political experience really could have shed some light on the issue for them.

As it turned out, that Tuesday (whichever it was) came and went without me even noticing. I thought certainly, with all the buildup, we were coming to some kind of public vote on health care reform or what the proper public corporal humiliation would be in store for the soon-to-be-forcefully-deposed President Barack Saddam Hussein Osama. I watch cable news, so I consider myself informed matters of national import. But it turns out that July and August and September was all a bunch of sound and fury (and ire and terror and rage and anger and wrath and rancor and enmity and delirium and antipathy and contempt and I have a thesaurus, I do) signifying a significant return on investment for corporations buying advertising on the Rush Limbaugh radio program.

But really nothing else.

The only two votes in the whole country that matter, it seems, belong to Senators Olympia Snowe and Joe Lieberman. Nobody else's vote really seems to have affected anything.

Well, unless you're a gay Mainer.

Inquire Within

With Veterans Day approaching (and no, I didn't forget the apostrophe), I would like to point out that I have nothing either clever or particularly amusing to say about all those Army people being shot by one of their own out at Fort Hood last week.

Although, I will say that noting the shooter, an active-duty U.S. Army major, shouted "Allahu Akbar!" before he commenced with the Class-A assholery, I now have to revise the absolute bottom order of my list of Best Jobs In The Whole Wide World.

The top of the list, obviously, remains unchanged with Female Body Inspector just edging out Professional Ice Cream Taster, exactly as they have since I was 11.

After Fort Hood, the bottom five has experienced something of a shake-up and now looks like this:

11,224. Obama Secret Service detail.
11,225. U.S. military service member with a Muslim-sounding last name.
11,226. Crackwhore.
11,227. Funeral home plumber.
11,228. Corey Feldman's agent.

U.S. military service member with a Muslim-sounding last name is now a full 871 slots below "Fluffer" and 1,216 spots worse than "Gay Marine." At least the gay Marines have the option of Not Telling whereas if your name is Adnan Farouk Jilal Hamzah, they put that shit right there on your uniform breast pocket for you.

If you're in the military with a Muslim-sounding name now, you have to more than watch your step. Just to be safe, they have to move in exaggerated slow motion, as though constantly under water, fingers splayed out to show they are unarmed and stripped to the waist to show no hidden explosives. And the self-censorship they have to practice is brutal, if not demeaning. Anything remotely sounding like "Allahu Akbar" must be stricken from speech in order to avoid any kind of unfortunate misunderstandings involving live ammunition. In BXs and PXs all over this world, it has been 8 years since any serviceman or woman named Aziz or Hussein has uttered the phrase "I'll have a Clark Bar." The Zagnut people, as you can imagine, are OK with this.

This is unfortunate as there are thousands upon thousands of men and women--first, second third generation Arab-, Persian- or Turkish-Americans and beyond--serving in any of the branches of the armed forces whose loyalty is beyond reproach, whose professionalism daily saves the lives of dozens of their comrades, the exact same way the 442nd Regimental Combat Team became the most decorated military unit in U.S. history despite being made up of "suspect" Japanese during World War II.

But now because of the increased scrutiny, it isn't hard to imagine brave Americans with real skills, like Arabic or Farsi speakers, being reluctant to join and serve because of the stigma earned by one derailed fucked-up soft-headed douchebag and not for the old reasons they would stay out, because they were just gay.