Real answers, real quick.

1. I’m not thin enough.

You’re not drinking nearly enough coffee.

2. I’m not not happy enough.

See #1.

3. I’m not getting enough sex.

Are you a woman? You’re not drinking enough alcohol. Are you a man? You’re drinking too much.

4. I’m not getting enough sleep.

You’ll get plenty when you’re dead and that could be tomorrow for all you know. See #2 to feel better about it.

5. I don’t have as many friends as I’d like.

See #3 and reverse sexes.

6. I’m insecure and always unsure what I’m doing is the right thing.

You need immersion therapy if you are ever to be happy. Quit your job, end all personal relationships, sell or burn your possessions, put your pets to sleep, and move to any square state in the American west. Start over and see how you do. If in another year you aren’t more sure, consider suicide. It will solve your problems but we only recommend it as a penultimate choice; right before moving to Arkansas.

7. I have a lot of shame and regrets.

It sounds like you already drink. We suggest you are not yet drinking to capacity. Try harder.

8. My girlfriend wants me to join her church or she won’t marry me.

What do you care? You didn’t really believe in your god, you can go right on not really believing in hers. It’s also a ready-made out should you decide on divorce and wish to remain blameless.

9. I break all my resolutions by January 10^th every New Year.

Don’t make resolutions this year. Fooling yourself is a poor hobby. Incidentally, everyone else can last till the 14^th at least.

10. Should I tell my partner I think I might have a venereal disease?

Definitely not. It means one of you was cheating. That’s a conversation no one wants to have. Break-up, then hit the free clinic. Your partner will figure it out, or not and get cervical cancer. Oh well, that bitch was cheating on you anyway.

11. What’s the best Christmas present to get my spouse?

We revisit #3 yet again. If you’re a woman, get drunk and do anything, anything you are requested to do. If you’re a man, stay sober and keep your mouth shut unless it’s to say, “I can’t believe how much weight you lost this year—you look better than Brooke Burke,” or “Don’t touch those dishes! I’ll get them as soon as I’m done with the laundry and the cat box.”

12. I’m a soldier in Iraq and I am having trouble making my expenses on Army pay.

Make sure you’re checking dead Iraqis for gold teeth. If it was good enough for your grandpa at Iwo Jima, it should damn well be good enough for you.

13. I wrote, “Someone should kill the President,” on a blog comment and now I’m scared I’m going to jail.

Don’t be ridiculous. Jail is for short sentences, usually misdemeanors. For threatening the President you go to prison. You’re lucky you didn’t write, “I’m going to kill the President,” “I’m planning on shooting the President,” or “The President will be dead by Christmas Eve.” Any of those would turn up in automated searches and have the Secret Service knocking at your door the next day. The SS has no sense of humor.

14. Ann Landers said I should try to get to know my new in-laws to help smooth our differences.

Ann Landers means well but she’s dead. Don’t take advice from dead people.

15. I want to start my own website but I don’t know anything about it, I have no design skills, and lord help me, I’m just not that bright.

I’ve got 2 words, no, 3 words, no, wait. I’ve got an “acronym” for you. PHP.

16. The contractor screwed us on our house project and he lost his insurance so we can’t get reimbursed.

This is terrible of course, however, do not take matters into your own hands. Unless you’re certain you can get away with it. After all, he probably did the same to other clients so the police will have a hard time pinning motive on anyone in particular.

17. I got a vaccination but I got the flu anyway.

Sue your doctor. If we can’t count on our medical professionals to keep us alive and disease free to 120 years of age, who can we count on to do so?

18. I got into a flame war with someone on a BB and I feel too guilty about the things I wrote to go back.

Unplug your cable modem, let its parameter RAM clear, plug it back in, and you’ve got a new IP dynamically assigned. Start a new account on the BB in question. When you’re sure no one knows who you are you won’t feel bad. Guilt is tied to a sense of identity. Just erase your identity and you’ll never feel bad for long again.

19. My boyfriend thinks I should get breast enlargement surgery.

This is because he doesn’t know or doesn’t care what they will look like after 10 years. In other words, he is not going to marry you, and even if he does he won’t be around for the kids’ graduation because, presumably, his secretary will also take his advice over ours.

20. I think I might be a nymphomaniac and I don’t know what to do.

This is too important a question to address impersonally. Give us a call immediately.

21. I’m asocial and I just can’t seem to get through anything that involves other people.

Pick up some web-programming; build a web-site; wreck the lives of those you can neither respect nor endure. Now isn’t that better?

22. I took your fucking advice on #1–21 and now I’m a malfunctioning wreck.

The Pfizer corporation makes several extremely effective antidotes to reality. Pester your doctor about it.

I weep with you, my little brothers. Your pain is my name.

It just doesn’t matter, does it, that Baryshnikov had Jessica Lange in her breeding prime and scored like Wilt Chamberlain. At 10 years of age this fact is irrelevant. They will make you wear tights in front of an audience. The girl you like who has no interest in ballet will be there. She will see. A group of 13 year-olds, unconcerned with the inequity of prejudicial gender roles, will make you walk home the long way because they know.

I can save you.

Sneak out. Take karate and savate and ninjutsu and use your Christmas money to order the cocobolo nunchucks with a chain and ball-bearings. Ditch chess club to break fluorescent light bulbs behind the Wal*Mart. Catch a squirrel and let it loose at the Shakey’s during your next post-game pizza party. Learn to swear in Korean, Spanish, and Chinese. Practice your parents’ signatures for the day when excuse slips will be at a premium. Start a free range ant farm in your favorite aunt’s basement. Mix the Extra-Hot with the Mild picante in the refrigerator and ask your mom if you can have tacos for dinner the night the PTA is coming over.

And remember: When you are grown and moved far from the little community that punished you for even knowing what a leotard is, no one will remember. No one will know, even if your Grandmother is a ballet teacher to the very day. They won’t even suspect.

You waving a dismissive hand. He has anger issues. Highly unstable. I mean, what is there to be so angry about? Must be insane, at least disturbed, probably off his meds.

But why aren’t you angry?

The Pentagon cannot account for 2 trillion dollars in their budget. They simply refuse to publicly even try to figure out where it went. If you worked minimum wage to pay that off, you’d have to work for 194 million years. If everyone in America had to pay it off at minimum wage, it would take two years but as the Pentagon loses money annually it would be difficult to ever catch up.

Twelve more children were killed by Americans in Afghanistan for no apparent reason just a few hours ago but if I don’t “support the troops” with a pro-war stance, I’m somehow in the wrong.

Last week, some dead civilian—too stupid to stay out of a civil-war-zone in life—bumped a plane of dead soldiers heading home from Vietnam, to get full on military honors at the taxpayer expense just because the corpse was related to some guy named Dean who is running for President of the US in part on a position of not abusing the system.

This week, a 7-year-old boy in Louisiana was disciplined and assigned ongoing reprogramming in a “behavior clinic” for telling a school-mate that his mom was gay; which she is. School personnel Virginia Bonvillain and Terry Bethea narrowly missed becoming the next chapter in the dumb bitch series for it. Not for lack of qualifications, though. Mostly because I can’t keep using the c-word so much.

The US government is acting like heroes for digging up mass graves and catching Saddam Hussein in the murder of about 300,000 Iraqis during his 24 year run. The US government (George²), perhaps looking to better the figure, has already killed about 150,000 Iraqis in the last 12 years and is putting many of the former homicidal maniacs right back in power; Baathists who were torturing and executing the enemies of Saddam Hussein just a year ago are back in the game as police officers at the behest of the US.

So the question: Why aren’t you angry?

You can use all the canned ham and defensive platitudes in the world to dismiss anger. The reasons for it don’t go away by pretending there are no reasons. Your lack of anger doesn’t make you right, or even happy. It just puts another lien on your soul. Another reason for your children to hate you, because they won’t understand how you couldn’t have been angry. Another link in the ever growing 90-penny bracelet that no combination of ghosts is gonna be able to help you lay down.

At work on my desk I had most of the things that mattered to me. I had about 250 CDs, mostly good ones that are still selling, so that was about $2,000-$4,000 there. I had a CD player, obviously. Various toys, models. A sweet reproduction of a deinonychus skull. A beautiful blue 4" high carcharodon megalodon tooth. My prized full keichousaur fossil where you can see his last meal in his little ribs and everything. A handful of trilobites, spinosaur teeth and such like and so on. My whole collection. My personal laptop. A couple hundred bucks in technical books. Any number of other irreplaceable small personal artifacts from the reliquary. All right there on my desk. In a building with 300 employees, open 24 hours a day with little or no security. The lights rarely on because the place was lighted by desk lamps and creatively strung Christmas lights and Chinese lanterns.

I never had so much as a coprolite stolen. In fact, when my Kyuss CDs disappeared, I sent a note out asking for them back. Now I have two sets of them b/c someone returned mine and someone else gave me theirs because they thought mine might have been stolen.

In 1998. That was at Amazon.com in 1998. That’s what Amazon.com was like then. Most every desk in the place was like mine. Every damn employee in the house at that time had full SQL access to everything in the store. A new customer service representative could steal or even erase the entire Amazon.com store of knowledge (till the tapes were retrieved anyway) in just a few keystrokes if one wanted to and knew how. There were never any breaches of trust then. Lord, I do miss it.

Right before I left, a few months ago already, there were several laptops stolen. Various other things. It was pretty bad. Everyone was locking their offices and even their desks. A long list of managers were each caught making up to $5,000 a month in personal calls on their corporate cell-phones while kids in the trenches of actually doing things for customers now need Director level approval to get a $150 software license for something crucial to doing daily work.

I read recently that 83% of the employed are not that happy with their situation and would change it if they could. Where Amazon.com is concerned, that seems a pretty kind estimate. The abhorrent job market in Seattle is all that keeps most of the shop in their chairs.

I still have about 20 friends there, though at one point I knew at least 400 people and counted many of them friends. One of the 20 still at the ’Zon recently said it this way:

My job seems more and more like the “Shawshank Redemption”–a daily ass rape marathon that will eventually end in a big payoff.

There’s nothing I can add to that.

I think you’ll admit, readily, yes? that the very worst thing, the really intolerable thing is the race traitor. The race mixer. Yeah?

I know you boys at the Aryan Nations, National Alliance, Christian Identity, Thule and so on would agree. Stop me if I’m wrong! The thought of your sister in a hip-hop video can’t feel good. The unknown pedigree of your step-dad must have itched like chiggers.

For your continued white supremacy pride, I offer this: if you or any member of your entire family has brown eyes, you are not white. There’s just no chance.

You might look white. Probably do. You might even really believe you are. But the simple fact is that if you have a single pair of brown eyes, or hazel, or anything but blue or green in the line then you have one in the wood pile, my friend. One second cousin, one great aunt. Maybe a full on quinteroon—born of Shongo or maybe Eshu—but as Louisiana once taught us, that much isn’t even necessary. 1/64th not-white means ain’t white at all. All it takes is a single 4th-great-grandmother. Say, she probably would’ve been around quite a few years before the Civil War. How about that!

You are descended from race traitors. Hell, even brown hair and freckles don’t look right, do they?

There’s a bright side. You could possibly still be Aryan. You wouldn’t know it b/c it involves learning but Aryan is a Sanskrit word. Sanskrit is a language from over there in one of those places you can’t find on a map.

But if you can’t live with the thought of that either, I think we’d all understand. If you really couldn’t live with it…why that would be great.

Thanksgiving dinner. I can’t remember why it came up. I used to be the most talkative one at any family function, mine or yours. But I was quiet this Thanksgiving until I told the story of being on the Rio Grande Gorge bridge when it took a lightning bolt and how much it hurt. It felt like having a lead helmet full of pins slammed down on my head. And the flash of light, though I’m fairly sure it was behind me on the other side of the bridge.

Julie’s cousin Tom said, “You’re really lucky you didn’t get killed.”

And I had nothing I could reply. How do you explain to someone that you spent the years between 15 and 22 persistently and enthusiastically trying to be struck by lightning? Getting out immediately and as long as possible into every thundershower in varying states of undress. Hurling threats and vows of love into the sky—to be fought fairly or collected home forthright.

How do you explain that you’d already been on the bridge for 30 minutes watching the electricity build. Watching the glowing motes on the tips of the dry hair under your hat and the sparks crawl on your finger nails. Hearing the metal of your knife buzz as it threw blue-white sparks whenever it was raised above the bridge’s rail—650 feet over the Rio Grande—the only significant piece of metal on the plain for miles. Waiting for the evening of forces; the unwinding of the sky. Run now! Or stand, last. Knowing this was the final and only perfect chance to return to Her or prove stronger than Him.

You don’t explain.

I had two important experiences with the headmaster, Mr. K. They made great bookends to my time in Korea. In my first week of employment at the Kuk Je International Language Institute, he nearly took my life. About a year later, in my last months of employment, I hurt him to tears.

My Si-sa Korean-English dictionary says Ki-bun (기분) means: feeling, sentiment, state/frame of mind. But I understood it to mean more; because feeling all right is more important to Koreans than Occidentals. So important that lying or manipulation or acquiescence is obligatory in support of everyone feeling right for as long as possible.

This can and did lead to a great deal of stress as the North American teachers wanted things up front while the managers, all Korean, wanted everyone to feel good even when something bad was coming a month or two down the road. No point in sharing it till the last minute. It would just make things harder than they had to be, after all.

My second or third day at the office my new boss, Mr. K, asked me to take care of some electrical wiring. There is nothing on my résumé to indicate I had that kind of skill but I happen to so I said, “Sure thing.”

I was wiring an outlet in one office to a plain old extension cord that ran through the wall from the next room (hey, it’s what he wanted). Customs didn’t catch my skinning knife (at 3.5" it’s probably legal in most countries) so I had no trouble scoring the wire to strip. I made sure the extension cord was unplugged in the other room and came back to strip the cord. As any electrician who’s lived a charmed life will tell you, there is simply nothing better for stripping wire than your teeth.

So I put the 16ga plastic coated copper in my mouth, bit down and pulled.

Mr. K had decided to help; to make sure things went smoothly. He had plugged the cord back in as soon as I left the room. So I stripped a live wire with my teeth. Fortunately, I’m only partially stupid—I had my lips pulled back and caught the volts in my thumb instead of my mouth.

His 45 minute welcome-lecture “Never Have Sexual-Intercourse with the Students” aside I knew Mr. K was a kind, well-meaning man. It was my first days in a year long contract in a foreign country. I didn’t kill him. I didn’t even act that mad. I know how to leave a room and count to ten so it never needed to come up again.

A year later—I’d been an expatriate for even longer—and things were getting a little flakey. I was drinking the export version of Early Times and playing “Doom II” non-stop all night for a few weekends to cope and unwind. No lie, I can beat that damn thing in one sitting, without dying, on any difficulty level short of the laughable “Nightmare.”

There was a nice young Kanajian teacher named Jason Blokhuis. I mention his full name so he’ll be good enough to drop me a line sometime. He’d started a school news-rag called the “Kuk Je Chronicle,” I think it was. It was done well but it made me a bit jealous as I’d just left a small publishing business behind. Instead of doing fun stuff like that, I was teaching 50 hours a week and doing lesson plans another 10. You can see how that was just one more thing that was weighing on me. Not because of anything Jason did, he was generally a prince and a damn fine breakfast chef besides.

So one weekend my roomie Ken was hanging around playing Doom with me in the office. We were drunk again. I mocked-up a phony broadsheet of the school paper with articles to get square with everything that was bothering me. Entirely satirical. Really pretty funny. Ken helped me with a couple pieces because it looked good.

We were done with the first issue of the “Kuk-Je Byung-Shin Hag-Won News.” Kuk-Je means international. Hag-Won means school or institute. Byung-shin means a few things, among them: retard. We laughed our asses off. The International Retard Institute. We felt better. I enjoyed the therapy and I was ready to be a little more sober, a little happier, and get back to living more and escaping less.

Ken took his copy, I took mine and we were never planning on showing them to anyone. Especially not any Koreans, friends or otherwise, because they just wouldn’t think it was funny at any level of intoxication.

As you know, God and I don’t get along. What happened was inevitable. Probably I left it on the printer but I prefer to blame Bill Gates for a latent print queue file making it out of the buffer after we were gone. However it happened, a copy of the satirical paper was left on the printer and given to Mr. K in the morning.

The punchline is better than you’re guessing. It wasn’t just cultural crossed wires, as it were. Mr. K’s son is autistic, I think. I’m not even sure because I’d been told about it a year before and never thought about it again. Byung-shin can translate as cripple or defective or, I suppose, autistic.

Mr. K was sure that the joke was made about him and his son.

I was hard hit because I knew how much he was hurt and there was nothing I could do about it. The culture bridge is just too narrow and weak to support the traffic it took to explain it. There is no way he could understand that Americans, especially stressed-out, intoxicated ones, absolutely will make jokes in poor taste; maybe even without meaning any harm. No way he would believe the joke wasn’t about him and was never meant for him to see. Watching him mist up with tears while refusing to hear my apology or believe my explanation almost made me cry. Watching him fumble with his own English to try to explain to me how awful this was…My God, I must have hurt him.

So I think you can see the moral of the story.

Get even early and utterly. Get even immediately following a slight and without mercy to ensure there’s no confusion as to who deserved what. If it’s a year later, you’ll be the badguy.

Your job title—when you had a job—was Internet Marketing and Strategy Program Manager. Or was it Vice President of Internal Communications? No it was Senior Manager of Information Architecture and Peer to Peer Systems, East Texas Region.

Why the hell would you assume that a reasonable marketplace would want to hire you to do such vapidly ludicrous clock-punching and back-slapping routine for $73,000 per annum plus stock, benefits, and all the expense reports you could get away with?

And the rest: Why the hell would you stay in any of the industries that Japan, South Korea, South America, China, Mexico, and India have been doing better and cheaper for almost 3 decades now? You had all the warning in the world. You had people walking around your block with sandwich boards printed, “Repent! The End is Near!” You had a severance package that would’ve lasted you through earning an associate technical degree if you’d been frugal. In short, you had the balls of Adam Smith on a silver platter and were arrogant enough to demand seconds.

When you can ask the world honestly, “What am I worth?” instead of flailing an arm in the air to get your chance to scream, “I deserve this and that…” When that happens… Ah, it’s all academic, I s’pose. Life isn’t that long.

Nothing happened today but that won’t stop me from garnishing the world’s knowledge base with another parsley sprig!

Isn’t it just fabulous to be American! Never having to endure 5 minutes of silence simply rules. I mean even that 1 minute of silence on September 12^th a couple years back—well, that was pretty hard to take. Thank God for the Internet. How else would you know I don’t have anything important to say?

Being able to write about this is probably the most fulfilling thing in life. And it’s so easy too. I think that’s what I like the most about it. No effort! Wow. I mean, if it was too hard to post this, I suppose I wouldn’t do it. I mean who needs the hassle, right? Thank God for technology.

Where was I? Oh, yes, hurting you, ever so mildly, either by implication or just wasting of 2 minutes of your own life.

Felt okay. Little disappointing really. Guess I could’ve worked harder on it.

In reply to the post of one Mr. A-Mixed-Race-Baby-Proves-I’m-Not-A-Gay-Racist-Doesn’t-It-Well-Doesn’t-It (oh, but I kid!) about the Nazionalista Public Radio network’s general programming—at least they haven’t called Carter a traitor this year!–I offer the following. And it’s offered at the IDENTICAL level of sobriety…

Sesame Street

I don’t know when they went soft and PC. Perhaps they hired one child psychologist too many and forgot that real little kids pull the wings off insects and are extremely curious about each others genitals no matter how much the adults plug their ears and go, “La-la, la-la.” They should be showing reruns of their 1970s shows because each new audience only watches for 10 years max anyway. And another thing, if they can stack the fucking Toys “R” Us to the rafters with quivering Elmos, they can damn well pay their own way and quit taking money from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Jay Jay the Jay-bird, I mean, Jet Plane

The most thinly veiled, “it’s okay to touch yourself” message ever produced for broadcast in the upbeat, downbeat, upbeat musical number: “Wing Wiggling.” But it wasn’t enough that they convey the message to children that personal secrets are okay and “wing wiggling” isn’t wrong. They had to convey that everyone has such base needs and that they are best worked out in groups. The writers and animators of this show have psychological problems. Truly. Deeply.

Teletubbies

You think I’m gonna go after them. You’re wrong. This show is freakish, repulsive, and frightening only until you see it next to an 8 month old child. At that point it becomes fucking Shakespeare. There is nothing else on TV for the 18 months and under crowd (except Boohbah from the same producer, new below). The makers should get the Medal of Honor and a Nobel Peace Prize for the countless half-hours they’ve restored to the new, criminally exhausted parents of the world.

Boohbah

Again, this is only for very young kids but Anne Wood is an unadulterated genius.

Clifford the Big Red Dog

A couple young men shot and killed someone driving past their house recently. They are blaming “Grand Theft Auto” for the murder because, they claim, it shows there are no consequences for your actions. I disagree. In “Grand Theft Auto” you do get to kill, rob, visit hookers, and participate in other New York cultural activities but you have to fight constantly to live and stay free. If you stop running or changing clothes, the cops will shoot you to death or nab you. Nobody gets through that game without dying and going to jail many, many times. “Clifford the Big Red Dog” on the other hand is responsible for that murder and those boy’s attitude. It’s just one I’m picking out but many of these kids’ programs show irresponsible, dangerous, daily kinds of behavior without consequences. It’s their very mRNA.

Cyberchase

A really good show in some ways. Teaches logic, the rare gift that you either have by 10 or you basically have no chance of ever gaining because the American public education system won’t allow it. I wish this show were more entertaining. That’s its problem—not funny, not so fun. There is nothing wrong with mixing fart jokes with analytical thought. The first show that gets that might save the next generation from knowing there even is a minimum wage.

Reading Rainbow

Nothing to go after here. Anything that gets kids to acknowledge that books exist is a good thing. Slight whiff of desperation to avoid cancellation of his 19 year hitch from Mr. Burton is a bit unappealing lately.

Barney

Fuck!

Between the Lions

Now we know where “Sesame Street”’s balls went. I read a review of the show where a fellow said said people had called him a Nazi for criticizing the show. Those people were wrong to say such a mean and inaccurate thing. Disliking “Between the Lions” doesn’t make one a Nazi but a retard.

George Shrinks

This show is a great start to making sure children have trouble learning physics.

Caillou

Caillou, the brainwashed little Canadian special education cancer patient, reeks of pride in indoctrinating children to be good little room and plate cleaning automatons. It’s a perfect training-wheel training video for the Future Cube Farmers of America. You’re a good little bald boy if you do as your told and keep your imagination where it belongs, pent up for the day when you’re an experimental physician with a concentration camp full of children of your own.

Zoom

I only mention this show because I want to write about Caroline. There, I’ve done it and I haven’t broken any laws.

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

This man died not long ago. February. All of the sudden it feels like it just happened today and I’m 6 years old again. It’s a testament to Bill Cosby’s class and grace that almost his entire acceptance speech for the “Bob Hope Humanitarian Award” was about Fred. No other man in the world has ever been more supportive of children, more aware of how scary it can be to be small in a giants’ world. No one else has ever been able to look directly into a television camera and tell children it’s alright to wet your bed and crap your pants, it has nothing to do with who you are. No one else will ever be able to make up for more shitty parenting in the world in just 30 minutes. No one else has ever told every child in North America that they are loveable.

Corporate hooks in the meat sponsorship

Much, if not all, of the PBS programming for children now has private corporate sponsorship other than the CPB. They get to air carefully crafted self-promoting missives in return. Among the many tag lines that squeal to be answered is AOL’s. Their sponsorship comes with the parental soporific: “AOL helps kids to find new things to be curious about everyday.” Yeah, that’s right, the Internet is a great place for kids to learn: “Mommy, what are ruby showers?”