American Lament

Everybody is feeling the pinch these days…gas prices are through the roof anymore, and more and more people are angry and cheap.

I know a thing or two about saving gas. My very first car, a Plymouth Caravelle, was notable for two things. First, it was the first car to be produced that was made to look like it was the computer car from the future, but did not, in fact, contain any computers at all. They had three different buttons you could press to turn on the radio, manufactured for no other reason except that it was possible to do. My car looked like a cross between an airplane cockpit and the commode after Star Trek threw up. The other notable thing about it was that my car had an energy efficiency rating such that that, when I pulled up to the pump at the gas station, I would get better gas mileage if I poured the gasoline directly onto the ground instead of actually into my gas tank. As a perennially poor teenager (or, more accurately, a teenager who perennially spent all his money on hair gel and They Might Be Giants CDs instead of transportation costs), I found creative ways to improve my mileage, namely, hoodwinking my friends to drive me places.

So I’d like to say I have a pretty sharp eye when it comes to saving gas. I present, then, as a free consumer benefit, a list of gas-saving tips:

When pumping gas at the station, drive there either early in the morning or late at night. Doing so will not only net you dozens of cents in savings, it is also the perfect time to coldcock the attendant and grab all the money out of the register, since that’s a lot more efficient than making an extra trip to the station to gain a few drops of Regular 87 off of The Man.

Encourage India and China to go to war with each other, preferably with nuclear weapons. This is likely to decrease demand of oil and customer service operators.

Try mixing one part gasoline with three parts water, which should increase your gasoline volume by 300%! I think. Anyway, engines are hot and boil all the water away so you don’t need to worry about it stalling out. Your car loves it! I think. Sawdust works too.

Be born in Saudi Arabia.

Car pool with other people! It’s not only an energy efficient way to travel, but you’ll also get to know your co-workers better. Because if there’s someone you want to spend an additional hour in cramped quarters with every day, it’s the people you already spend eight hours with all week like listening to their boo-hooing every day.

Why make five trips to the grocery store when one will do? Consolidate your trips. Instead of picking up your daughter at soccer practice, let her stay there. Hell, she’s already got practice three times a freakin’ week, and it’s always when House is on. If she loves soccer so damn much she won’t mind.

Boycott the oil companies! Boycotting has done so much to reign in companies in the past, I can’t imagine it not working. Sure, of the 118,000,000 barrels of oil consumed by the world each day, not putting eight gallons in your tank on a random Tuesday will send just the signal to OPEC and the oil companies need!

Try riding a bike! You’ll get exercise and save on gas and smell like a locker room when you get to work. This assumes that you work at a place that is downhill both ways to and from home. And doesn’t have winter. Or rain. Or thieves.

Drive the speed limit; this will save gas. Also, it will make you a pussy.

Support a tax holiday! Politicians are ready to temporarily repeal the gas tax until oh, I don’t know, about the middle of November or so. Supporting a policy that will encourage people to buy more gas is exactly the kind of thing that will bring prices down! At least it will in Fantasy Land after the Laws of Supply and Demand are repealed by King Lumblydum and the Queen Ladybug.

Use public transportation! Public transportation such as light rail, buses, and subways use significantly less oil per passenger than driving your old heap to work every day. Sure, you won’t get to choose your time of arrival or departure, can’t carry anything bigger than a folded-over newspaper, have to sit next to a guy that smells like Play-Dough and vomit, feel guilty about not standing up when some old bat gets on, which is every freakin’ stop anymore, and can’t stop at Wendy’s for a Junior Bacon Cheeseburger you’ve been craving since ten o’clock, but at least over the course of a year you can save about twenty bucks or so.

Purchase and drive a smaller car with better gas mileage. Ha ha! Just kidding. Seriously, you should think about doing the whole stealing money from the cash register thing.

This weekend, Iron Man opened up the box office with over $100 millions dollars in revenue, an indescribable amount of money for something I’ve never cared about more forcefully before in my life. The only thing positive to be said about this development is the fact that it prevented Made of Honor from opening up at number one, the mere existence of which is startling enough to me since I doubt very much it passed California’s strict emissions standards.

I’ve always been lukewarm towards comic books, and ever more so about movies based on comic books. My interest in comic books was pretty much limited into figuring out if paying $3.99 today for some confusingly-paced pseudo-philosophical half-baked storyline was going to be worth significantly more money in the near future as long as I shoved it in a non-acidic case and hid it in a crate in the attic to forget about for about three decades.

Comic book stories—at least the ones that sell—are primarily about superpowers, and each has to cook up either some absurdly original plot device to make it stand out or, if that seems a touch too hard, just make the superhero a scantily clad chick. I mean, seriously, the prevailing hero seems to be largely guys who got bit by lethargic roaches or are the reincarnated spirit of a moon jockey, or some scissor sister who is wearing as much spandex as she doesn’t have modesty. Add a healthy dose of childish hoogidy-boogidy and some scenes of incredibly graphic violence featuring green alien blood instead of the more standard red so it passes the strict Comic Book Code Of Making Sure The Comic Book Industry Never Seriously Competes With Any Other Form Of Modern Entertainment, and prepubescent teenagers and a rather alarming number of twenty and thirty years olds will lap it up.

Of course, I’m pretty much biased against anything that makes me work, and comic book stories make me work. If I am not already familiar with the background and concept of a superhero, I don’t want any part of it. I don’t want to have to go back and do homework about what kind of crime they fight or why they turned to superheroing as a career track just to enjoy it, even if that homework is digging out thirty year’s worth of overdramatic soap operas dressed up in macho costumes and laser beams so everybody seems a lot less gay than they otherwise would.

As far as I’m concerned, the alpha and omega of my comic book superhero world involves the following:

Superman: Invincible, afraid of kryptonite, deflects suspicion by being the exact opposite of the definition of a superhero: a journalist.
Batman: Creepy guy that lives in a cave, drives a kickass car. Also: Mr. Mom.
Wonder Woman: Hasn’t had a period since 1967.
Green Lantern: I know absolutely nothing about the Green Lantern, but I know for certain he’s eventually going to be co-opted by the environmentalists and help fight villains such as the Merck Corporation.
Captain America: Closet commie
Spiderman: spins web, suspiciously agile, dates someone who is in reality the abstract personification of marijuana as long don’t tell your parents about it.
The X-Men: Nothing much more different than what I’ve seen on Bourbon street at two in the afternoon.
Power Girl: An awesome set of DDs.

(Just to save everyone the time, don’t bother writing and telling me how much of the above information I’ve got wrong. I can bet safe money that there are scores of fans out there wringing their hands and foaming at the mouth, stating loudly to no one in particular, “Spider-Man should be properly spelled with a hyphen!” While I respect the integral facets of decade’s worth of creative effort, I can’t in all honesty…care.)

So enters Iron Man, a superhero I knew next to nothing about prior to the release of the film. And what I did know what pretty much the fact that I am aware of the fact that the words “iron” and “man” are common words but are rarely used in conjunction with each other. Knowing that Robert Downey, Jr. portrays him in the film, it added a touch of preconceived notions about his character. This just won’t do, of course, so despite my better judgment I looked up the story behind Iron Man, and from what I can tell the following sums it up:

-Anthony Stark who, in reality, is a wealthy industrialist who rather than manage his immense personal fortune goes out to fight crime in a big iron suit.

-His iron suit is really an allegory of Cold War weapons and the immense amount of responsibility that comes with wielding so much destructive power. Or an allegory about the role of technology and how it affects an individual’s identity. Or an allegory about the manifestation of bourgeoisie culture in modern times or some complete horseshit like that.

-He spends most of his time protecting his copyright status by disabling other villains who use his iron man suit without express written permission and paying standard royalty rates.

-Despite popular conception, he has not lost his mind, he is not blind, he can walk, and he is alive. These were never really in question.

-Is bipolar, regularly drives around Sunset Boulevard naked, and ingests ten kilos of pure cocaine a day (movie version only)

I’ll probably eventually see it, if not for only the fact that this is the sort of thing everyone eventually watches anyway. For me, I’m waiting for the most sought-after super power of all: Original Idea Coming Out Of Hollywood Man. Hmm. Maybe I should just ask for an iron suit that shoots laser beams instead. That seems more likely.

I have had one of the first truly defining moments of my life.

My hair dryer tried to kill me.

Now, to set the stage of this incredibly traumatic experience, let me first state that it was a mere few days ago that I went and engaged in another incredibly traumatic experience, getting my hair cut. Now, I like to think of myself as a fairly non-metrosexual guy, inasmuch that I haven’t really taken care of myself in any sense of the word since about 1985, which, coincidentally, is the last time I updated my haircut. But I do have a lot of hair, and it does have a certain level of maintenance so I don’t walk around looking like a cross between Alfalfa and Sanjaya. So while I don’t fuss over my hair—I try to keep my yearly spending on hair products about equivalent to my nearly expenditures on calendars—I also don’t want to walk around looking perpetually like everyone in the world’s younger 9-year-old brother who is in that awkward stage after they give up wearing that wrestling T-shirt every single day but before learning how to use a comb.

As such, I prefer that my hair to be left a little longer than normal, since if it’s cut too short it tends to stick up, and I have to shove enough chemicals in my hair that Hans Blix wants to inspect it. (Wow, a Sanjaya joke and a Hans Blix joke all in one day. Time to update the Rolodex.) And yet every single hairdresser I’ve patronized since I learned to walk has taken me saying “Please don’t cut my hair too short” to “cut every single piece of hair on my head to the minimum length molecularly possible.” Seriously, I’m like a six year old in that chair, sulking while she tries to chat me up about the weather to distract me from the fact that she’s chopping off waaay too much hair. What’s left is an atrocity wrapped in a disaster, at least until two weeks are up and it either grows in or I kind of forget about it. Granted, it’s sort of my fault, since I’m not assertive enough to say anything and instead just throw a big wad of cash at her as I leave so she doesn’t see me tear up, partly because it’s not worth the hassle and partly because I don’t trust women who are holding sharp objects.

So I was already kind of torqued off when I woke up Saturday. I woke up late after staying up the previous night either partying hard with my ladeez or doing crossword puzzles (I don’t recall which) and was getting ready to greet the day at a somewhat reduced pace, in the sense that it took longer for me to get ready than it took Dostoevsky to write The Brothers Karamazov had he had to invent each Russian word as he wrote it.

So after my shower, I start to dry my hair. To sketch the profile, the hair dryer, which had recently attended to its eighth birthday, was mauve, which also means it was a gift, since I would never electively acquire such a color. But while drying my hair this day, it tended to switch between the high setting and the low setting primarily at will, something that should of set off alarm bells like it was an ELO concert but instead I assumed it was just one of those things electronic devices do because they hate me more than they hate their own life, as evidenced by my DVD player that is currently solely powered by its own sense of self-loathing.

Alas, with the motor grinding away and sounding more and more like a cat choking on the Empire State Building, I did something I knew the moment I did it that I should not have done it. I peered deep into the nozzle of the hair dryer while it was still running in the extraordinarily likely case that between the time I finished my shower and started drying my hair I had earned an engineering degree and would know be able to both diagnose and fix the problem.

Instead, I was greeted with the hair dryer catching on fire. OK, perhaps that’s a bit dramatic, but saying that “I caught a modest burst of flame as the dust and accumulated hair burned up in about two seconds” just makes me sound like a pussy. I did, however, quickly do what all of the emergency medical personnel tell us to do when we are holding malfunctioning electronics in a room full of water, which is to scream like a little girl and throw the thing on the floor. I also believe I complemented my heroic acts by loudly stating something along the lines of “Goshen gee willikers, my hair dryer has caught on fire! Heavens to Betsy!” Or something conveying those same sentiments; it’s all a hazy blur at this point.

My hair dryer, having finally taken its stand in protest of eight hears of hard labor of working for four minutes every day, let out a few last whimpers in the form of what in hindsight were probably highly dangerous sparks, then just stopped, dead. I lifted the limp carcass and carried it outside so the house wouldn’t smell like a Dutch masseuse, then promptly went to the drug store to buy a new one. I wasn’t going to let an attempted assassination stop me from exercising my American right as a citizen to go through life with dry hair.

I have the misfortune of living in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Well, that’s not really fair. I rather like this state of mine, of course, what with growing up and living here and all. But it does come with one major drawback, aside from having roads that are about as well-kept as a Namibian mountain pass and a winter season that lasts upwards of a decade or so, is that we are currently in a midst of a drag-down, knock-out, piss-cutter of a primary battle for the Democratic nod for the presidential campaign.

In decades past, the Pennsylvania primary was relegated to comfortable irrelevancy. With an election all the way the hell in April, candidates knew full well they wouldn’t have to bother with pandering to Pennsylvania’s former steelworkers, cranky social conservatives, and Amish radicals. Since the national primaries tended to be front-loaded—2012’s primary actually just started last week—most nominations were all wrapped up by the time the Keystone State bothered to have a say.

Which, normally, is a good thing, since the average Pennsylvanian’s opinion is pretty much boiled down to two sentiments: “Give me my Social Security check,” and “Give me my Social Security check right now.” Sure, there are other considerations, such as guns and the NFL playoffs, but these tend to be drowned out by the sheer number of old people that live in Pennsylvania, where the average age of a newborn is about 45.

Pennsylvania’s always been a bit of a dry rot when it comes to national politics. Despite being one of the original thirteen colonies, they’ve had a rather small percentage of national prominent politicians. We’ve only had one President, and that was the blank-face James Buchanan, known mostly to historians as the guy who actually invented a way to freeze time for four years. And the only members of the current congressional delegation to be noteworthy as of late is Arlen Specter, the guy who tried to sell the fact that a bullet went from the grassy knoll to Hanoi and back en route to its deadly target, and Jack Murtha, who would have had a front-row eyewitness account of the Haditha attack had it not been for the fact that he’s been clinically dead ever since he turned two hundred years old.

Enter Mssrs. Obama and Clinton.

Mrs. Clinton is looking at a do-or-die situation in Pennsylvania, with “do” being “still having only a 50/50 shot of getting the nomination” and “die” being “drop out and make around $4.5 million per year on a speaking tour.” Under normal circumstances, Pennsylvania would be a shoo-in for her. It’s a big, clumsy, industrial state, the kind she does well in, with one foot in a decaying industrial economy and one foot in the high-tech boom, assuming that assisted living facilities are classified as high-tech. Blue-collar workers gravitate towards her, much like they did in Ohio and would have in Michigan had Michigan held an actual primary.

Hillary also has another powerful supporter in the governor, Ed Rendell. Rendell has been an energetic campaigner for Hillary, and somehow manages to translate his political capital and position into mass popularity. No offense to the man, but if anyone were to create the image of a politician from scratch that is the personification of the slouching, tie-askew, back-slapping, smoke-filled room occupying, cigar-chomping, OTB-dwelling, deal-making, fast-talking confidence man, that person would be dead after Rendell hires some guy to put a slug in his temple.

Then again, the story of Pennsylvania is really a story about Philadelphia, where Barack Obama is doing extraordinarily well. His message of hope and inspiration appeals greatly to those in Philadelphia, who have to deal with Cheez Whiz on steak sandwiches and the occasional firebombing of entire city blocks by the police department.

The biggest news around the state, though, is Obama’s contention that Pennsylvanians are bitter about their economic outlook, and so “cling” to guns, God, and anti-immigrant sentiments to make up for the loss. For many, this was seen as condescending and elitist, with Obama under the misunderstanding that if presented with high-paying, good jobs, we would all trade our guns in for Dick Dawkins books or something. It doesn’t appear as though Obama understands that the only thing to get between a Pennsylvanian and his gun is the bullet.

The candidate’s tactics seem to be a touch odd, though. Clinton’s main contention is that everyone has already gone through her baggage and sifted through a darkened attic full of cattle futures, Travelgate, and a steadfast refusal to bake cookies. Obama, for his part, finds himself defensive after it was revealed that his neighbor’s future wife once babysat someone who was a roommate with a college student who once read a book called “Vladimir Lenin: Was He Really All That Bad?”

Both senators are presenting Pennsylvanian with the same choice as they are giving the nation: a candidacy of hope, inspiration, and results, or a candidacy with a slightly different mix of hope, inspiration, and results. When the results are in, either one candidate or the other will be the victor, or, most likely, a stalemated outcome that doesn’t produce any clear-cut winner and this whole thing drags out until they’re pulling random people off the street to vote in San Juan to crown the victor. Of course, there’s going to be one clear winner: Pennsylvania. When this is finally—finally!—over, Pennsylvania can go back to being complacently ignored.

Now, that’s something worth clinging to.

It’s time! It looks like we’re headed for the Big R.

No one really wants to think about a recession, since recessions are inherently disruptive forces in the economy—people lose jobs, the purchase of popular large-ticket items are postponed, and people have gut-wrenching decisions to make as to which group of immigrants to blame for it.

Of course, recessions aren’t wholly bad things, either. They tend to stabilize prices and force companies to become more efficient. Unfortunately, these two specific things are just those things that are currently spiraling out of control: inflation is creeping up, and the mortgage industry has, to put it diplomatically, screwed the ugliest underage pooch bareback at the church picnic.

While there are plenty of reasons for the recession—not the least of which is that we have a recession approximately every eight to ten years or so since the beginning of the republic so it’s hardly an unmitigated surprise—the crystallizing factor is the mortgage situation. Mortgage companies have been offering deals that no one in their right mind would take, unless the person taking the terms of the loan 1) didn’t bother to read the terms of the loan, and 2) assumed that if anything bad happened they could just close their eyes and wish really really hard that maybe the mortgage company would let them off the hook and not have to pay them for a few years. These are otherwise known as subprime loans, or ARMs, or “adjustable rate mortgages,” or “loans for people who spend five bucks a day buying nasty breakfast sandwiches at the gas station but still bitch when their electric bill goes up twenty bucks a month” or “I can’t possibly imagine anyone thinking these are a great deal loans nor can I believe these are anything except borderline legal,” or would be if the acronym fit. Of course, lending companies aren’t exactly blameless, either.

Mortgage Lender: And here’s the paperwork. Sign here.
New House Owner: Wow. There’s a lot of stuff to read here.
Mortgage Lender: Don’t worry. You only need to read the part that says “If I Don’t Take This Amazing Offer And Sign Here, I Will Be Clinically Declared A Complete Idiot.”
New House Owner: Uh…is there anything I need to know? The rates won’t change if there is a shift in the interest rates or anything, right?
Mortgage Lender: I will pay you one thousand dollars cold if you just sign that damn paper.
New House Owner: Deal.

As should be a surprise to absolutely no one, the interest rate hikes were triggered and people started to default on their mortgages. The reason for the hike can be debated—the weak dollar, the moral hazard brought about by government regulations, the Freemasons and UFOs working together for once—the important thing to remember is that it isn’t anybody’s fault except the oil companies.

Of course, anyone expecting the government to do anything about it is going to be sorely disappointed. Of course, government intervention in the economy is kind of what got us here in the first place, so anyone expect the government to do nothing about it is going to be sorely disappointed.

The President, for his part, is going to great lengths assuring the American public that we are not, and never will be, in a recession. However, just in case, he and Congress have approved an economic stimulus plan which consists of 1) rewarding both the people who took loans they couldn’t repay and the lenders who foolishly gave it to them, and 2) bribed—I mean, gave a tax rebate—to anyone who files a tax return this year. Just like after 9/11 when George W. Bush advised people that the best way to stop terrorism was to make a trip to the mall to buy slutty clothes and wacky wall walkers and Simon Cowell Talking Dolls, he’s encouraging people to not pay down credit cards but to buy other pieces of junk they don’t need. Where on earth Bush got the idea that spending immense amounts of money you don’t have is a fiscally sound idea I’ll never know.

Of course, those looking to the Democrats for a workable plan to stimulate the economy will be disheartened. Though, really, anyone paying attention for the past two hundred years shouldn’t expect anything radically different. The Democrat’s plan has been, essentially, to send everyone in the lower-middle-class or less a check for a bajillion dollars. They will offset this by instituting a windfall tax on the rich, with the “rich” defined as “anything greater than the wage of the highest-paid union contract that contributed to our campaign” and “windfall” being defined as “pretty much anything you make this year.”

Economists seem to be mixed as to how bad the recession will get. For every report about massive layoffs, there is another report with an uptick in consumer spending. And many of the normal indicators of a recession—people spending less on luxury items, tightening of food budgets, decreasing our placidyl intake—aren’t indicating in the normal way that they should be. Most people seem content to take the recession in stride, so long as it means they don’t have to buy more efficient cars, buy less gas, change their spending habits, look closer at their household budget, or actually do anything at all that could make any difference whatsoever. Besides that, most consumers will be fine.

Anyway, with politicians unable to come up with a workable plan, companies holding their cards close to their chest, and consumers reluctant to alter their lifestyle, the best option seems to be to just close their eyes and wish really really hard that everything will be fine. It’s worked so well before, I can’t possibly imagine why it won’t work now.

April first is here, and that means that pranks and deceit are in plentiful supply for those with short-term memory loss. Seriously, if it was April Fool’s Day at eight o’clock this morning, it still is at six at night. You car’s tire really isn’t flat, and she’s not really pregnant. At least by you.

Anyway, now is a good as time as any to spring together a loosely related collection of current happenings based on fraud, lies, and miscommunication. Hey, I’m cranky and lazy. Give me an E for effort.

When we get fooled, we prefer it be by a professional so at least we feel a little better about ourselves afterwards, and there is no more professional huckster than the common elected official. (Getting hoodwinked by Uncle Albert or your five-year-old nephew doesn’t exactly do wonders for one’s self-esteem.) Most people kind of assume that politicians lie at a constant rate of 1:1. This is an expected but lamentable idea, lamentable because it speaks to the darker side of democracy and makes us cynical about the true nature of mankind. Expected, of course, because it is 100% true with unassailable accuracy.

So when Hillary Clinton—who you may not have noticed is running for president –decided on the spot during a campaign speech to make up an elaborate story about being shot at by snipers during a visit to Bosnia, most people didn’t have any reason to doubt it. Of course, she was hoping that this story was to highlight the fact that 1) she was in a foreign country during a foreign crisis, which oh by the way Barack has not; 2) despite the fact that she is female she is not afraid to engage herself in potentially dangerous situations, and 3) I don’t see Barack dodging sniper fire anywhere, now, do you?

Unfortunately, most people picked up on 4) it never happened. Seems an odd tale to tell, since it’s rather easily verifiable what with all those cameras following her around everywhere, even back when she was First Lady. She shrugged it off as a rather Nixonian “mistakes were made” kind of thing, simply stating that she misspoke. This is, to be blunt, an outrage; I can’t get away with that sort of talk, so I’m not quite sure why she can.

Me: I would like to return this microwave.
Clerk: Is there anything wrong with it?
Me: It wouldn’t work when I plugged it in.
Clerk: It looks like someone tried to dry their silverware in here. I don’t think that’s covered by the warranty.
Me: Sorry. I misspoke.
Clerk: Oh, OK then. Here you go.

Thankfully, no harm was done. It was a minor gaffe, which, granted, may cost her the presidential nomination, but at least no crime beyond gross misjudgment occurred. That cannot be said about the story from the Los Angeles Times, which ran a blow-the-roof-off-the-dump story about how Sean “Puffy” Combs single-handedly shot Tupak Shakur in the head at point-blank range then freestyles over his dead, blood-soaked body while all the girls said “Heeeeeey.” (I may be incorrect in this recounting.) Turns out that the documents proving that Combs was involved in the shooting were elaborate fakes, if by “elaborate” I mean “something a fifth grader cooked up in his basement which to be fair is still enough to stump your average newspaper reporter.” The documents looked as if they were typed on a typewriter, have rampant spelling errors, and was submitted by a man known for falsifying stories. (I mean, computers were around in ’94, and they all had spellcheck; otherwise, I never would have made it out of Management Techniques 101 back then.) Thankfully, the ethics and standards of the journalistic community vetted this as a sure thing and filed the story, of which numerous apologizes have been drafted, noted, and buried on page eight under the local sewage maintenance schedule.

While the Los Angeles Times story involved the crime of fraud, miscommunication by a lesser degree probably drives more human interaction than washed-up rap stars or presidential candidates. A study was recently released that men and women read nonverbal cues differently and have difficulty interpreting inflection and signals by the opposite sex. Or, in layman’s terms, every guy things every girl wants to sleep with him, and every girl wants to pretend she doesn’t but actually does. It’s hardly a new phenomenon, but that didn’t stop a collection of scientists to spend an insane amount of time and money to state the patently obvious. Witness the typical exchange:

Guy: Hey there.
Girl: I’m not interested.
Guy: She wants me so bad.

Let’s face it; this is the intricate symmetry that social evolution has produced for us over centuries of development. Without equal doses of needless resistance and blatant obliviousness, the act of procreation would never get us anywhere. Of course, I’ve been told that such misogynistic generalizations will do nothing but feed misinformation into the romantic cycle that prevents that perpetual dance of gettin’ it on in the first place. You could have fooled me.

Spring has sprung, and as always it presents the population with brand new activities to enjoy. (Granted, here in Western Pennsylvania the concept of the first day of spring is purely academic.) Circumstances have changed and the things once thought lost causes in the dark recesses of winter now become golden opportunities to screw up the rest of your year. So have fun this spring, and keep these thoughts close to the top of your mind:

Baseball: Please, for the love of all that is good in this world, why? Watching baseball is bad enough. It’s a boring, archaic game, less a pure sport of athletics and synergy and more of chunky guys battling it out for the best ever in hand-eye coordination—and not just for hitting the ball out of the park but poking a syringe needle into a butt cheek. People who follow baseball (read: people over the age of 50) will fulminate about the balance of pitching and hitting, and the intricate strategy involved in the process of the game. This is—to put it diplomatically—a steaming pile of lies and sinful transgressions. Baseball is reduced to “hack at ball with bat, run if you hit” when you get right down to it. And the only strategy involved is somehow managing to keep your salary costs low enough that you can laugh all the way to the bank to cash your luxury tax check. It doesn’t need to be said that the situation is entirely different for hockey, which, thanks to the foresight of the National Hockey League, the average season lasts about 18 months and pretty much any team with a stick and at least for Norwegians can make the playoffs. (sorry, Columbus.) It can therefore also be legitimately classified as a spring sport.

Finding Love: Spring is a notoriously busy time for getting notoriously busy. Bulky sweatshirts are shed, the air is fresh and breezy, and pink haltertops and sandy beaches are a pleasant substitute for an otherwise expensive Cialis prescription. Hormones are normally escalated to the point that the mere coexistence of opposing genders is enough to spark romance, as is evidenced by the popularity of spring break, dance clubs, and book store checkout lanes. (Hey, to each their own.) A word of warning, though: getting too preoccupied in the spring may lead to a summer of question marks and warning signs, a fall of stressful conversations and raging battles of reality versus star-struck love, and a destined, lonely winter bundled up in Uggs and your grandmother’s comforter, drinking hot chocolate laced with rum and listening to the Indigo Girls. I’m just sayin’.

Spring Cleaning: After the winter doldrums, where most people stay indoors breathing recycled air and not cleaning, it’s not only cathartic for people to clean, it’s also a good way to get your husband off his ass to do work by not putting out until he does. (See above.) A lot of junk accumulates over the fall and winter months, and most people will spend plenty of time carting bucketfuls of kitsch and paperwork, partly from a devoted sense of cleanliness, and partly from going through about one-fifth of last year’s insurance papers and tax forms before declaring “screw it” and chucking the whole pile in the wastebasket. It’s also useful as a psychological tool; the symbolic “cleaning of the house” will be a good segway to getting your own state of affairs in order, at least for the next two weeks before you get weak and eat a plate of chicken wings and call your ex.

Speeding: Spring often affords a small window of glorious, glorious opportunity for most people: exceeding the speed limit. At least, it is for people in temperate zones such as myself. During the winter months, large piles of gray, disgusting snow pile up on roads and make truly ridiculous speeding difficult to manage. After spring, road work tends to slow things down, since construction workers tend to look unkindly upon those who go 85 through work zones. So after the black ice melts but before the cones go up, it’s a wonderful opportunity to live out that fantasy you’ve always had: to put the metal to the medal and see how fact your Sebring can go on the highway. I’m cautiously putting my money on “not very much.”

Gardening: For those of you who aren’t aware that World War II is over, gardening presents a wonderful opportunity to 1) occupy your time with horticulture and nature; 2) get some exercise and fresh air after a stuffy winter; and 3) spend months upon months of hard and sweaty labor so that, at the beginning of fall, you will have about six medium-size deformed tomatoes and two dozen cucumbers that no one will ever eat, ever. Still, it’s a good way to get some use out of that straw hat you for some reason own, unless you plan on moving to Sao Paulo to be a banana rancher or star in a coffee commercial.

So there you have it, in rough order of who caresedness. Remember that spring is not only a reminder that new opportunities await the initiated, but also that taxes are soon to be due, demolishing all your hopes and dreams for a prosperous new season. Happy filing!

The verdict finally came down for the divorce case of Heather Mills and Paul McCartney. Both sides put forth their cases, and most professional pundits gave forth their opinions on the outcome. Of course, those who were familiar with the case knew that Heather didn’t…uh…have a leg to stand on.

Great, now that that’s out of the way, wee may continue. Under normal circumstances, making fun of the handicapped is a reproachable breach of decorum, a tasteless last bastion of the talentless, humorless hack. On the other hand, it is Heather Mills, and being handicapped and being a gold-digging unrepentant whore cancel each other out.

Granted, we still don’t know all the behind-the-scenes information. Nor do I normally really care all that much. My involvement in the lives of the rich and famous has a pretty sharply declining cliff of interest for me. Without an incredibly graphically detailed description of exactly what it is that a drunken, coked-up Lindsay Lohan does in the darkened hallway of a Lisbon discotheque to earn her reputation as one whose knees are not, in fact, in any danger of permanently getting stuck together, I don’t much care all that much. Cest la vie, and all that, they said, as the Titanic crashed into Gomorrah.

And yet this particular story just irritated me to no end. Not irritated in the same sense that knowing that Social Security isn’t getting fixed or that it’s going to snow at the end of March irritates me, but knowing that there are people out there—undeserving people, mind you—that are getting more than they should ever be rewarded. And Heather Mills seemed to embody that exact, specific demographic.

Mills started off as a mere blip on my cultural radar. It’s not exactly unknown to those who know me that while I will concede that while the Beatles are a cultural icon, I put them right up there with Bear Stears and professional baseball as the single most overrated cultural entity of mankind. Partly it’s the songs—I find that their range of their early bubble-gum pop to their later psychedelic let’s-change-the-world-through-music nonsense has only a small overlapping era of a few years where they produced songs I actually enjoy. Granted, I think the Rolling Stones are overrated, too, but at least they don’t make any pretense about art or world peace or other intangible, unattainable things that sell records but also delude fans into thinking any of it matters. They’re officially known as the E*Trade Rolling Stones, for crying out loud, but at least they’re laughing all the way to the bank, which is more than Ringo Starr can say.

So the trials and tribulations of Paul McCartney’s love life weren’t exactly something I pondered over my toast and mango juice in the morning. I usually concentrate more on crafting new and creative ways to get out of doing any work for that day while still getting paid. So when I offhandedly heard about McCartney finally moving past his beloved Linda, a woman who is a saint because while she couldn’t sing and wasn’t very good within the music industry at least she wasn’t Yoko Ono, I kind of registered that in the back of my mind of things to dredge up from the stormy recesses of my brain if it could ever conceivably help me get in some girl’s pants.

The few times I actually saw Heather I wasn’t impressed. Sure, it’s possible it’s because I only saw her on Larry King Live, which is a painful enough process in and of itself, and it’s possibly that it was the first time I had seen Paul in quite some time, probably since “Band on the Run.” Will I still love him when he’s sixty four? Depends on whether all of his face has to be sixty four. Holy cats, did the doctors just paste big chunks of foam rubber on his face and hope he wouldn’t notice? Anyway, the entire process soured me to Heather, who kind of came off as a bossy witch. (Ahem.) I was willing to write it off at the time that it was because I was watching her try to converse with two extraordinarily old men who didn’t quite seem to grasp the fact that they were, in fact, being broadcast live on television.

But over the next few years my opinion did not approve. Again, I was more than willing to write it off to the grumpiness of someone who has gone through extensive physical trauma in their life, though I kind of assumed marrying a freakin’ Beatle would have been enough of a self-esteem boost. And I was also willing to cut her some slack, not being used to being hounded by the press—and not just the press but the British paparazzi, a relationship that is akin to comparing the jug of stale, fetid water sitting in your garage with an Indian typhoon that’s trying to eat your soul.

As the details of the divorce proceedings came out, though, I turned against the woman. I’m an objective person, or I like to pretend that I am, so I incorporate the fact that I’m probably only getting one side of the story. But somehow I doubt it. Mills maintains that she is not a gold digger, which only proves that she apparently does not exactly know what the definition of a gold digger is. (A good reference for her, by the way: any mirror.) And her protestations that $49 million just wasn’t enough to raise their daughter with—saying, in effect, well, I guess she won’t have enough money to fly home to see daddy—is something that would give any PR executive a heart attack. When she fired her lawyers and represented herself, it may have seemed an aggressive and bold move on her end but really just made her look like a deluded, power-hungry amateur former high-class prostitute and pornographic model. (I’m just sayin’.) The last straw, though, is when, after the verdict, she poured water over the head of Paul’s attorney, the last, desperate, childish act of a desperate, childish woman. And that is all the tasteless justification you need to call her Eileen.

I got sick this week.

In Western Pennsylvania, we’re undergoing a minor epidemic of sorts. Plenty of people are contracting the flu, or at least flu-like symptoms, and are flooding the hospital rooms awaiting treatment. Now, I’m not averse to seeking medical treatment, but I always kind of wonder about people who somehow manage to get to the hospital any time a cough lasts more than two hours and yet seem to have cognitive difficulties in, say, showing up to work on time. Then, of course, I remembered that the reason all these people are hot-footing it to the hospital instead of actually being productive with their lives is that everyone in Western Pennsylvania is approximately 2000 years old and if it wasn’t for sitting around the waiting room they’d be eying up Powder Blue Tag Day at the Salvation Army.

Of course, the hospitals’ reaction to the patient overload is to weed out those who have truly life-threatening illnesses with those that simply need to drink a lot of water and maybe take a day off instead of trying to save it for being “sick” on July 5th. Thankfully, they’ve come up with a fairly comprehensive battery of medical tests to differentiate these two groups:

Patient: I think I have the flu.
Nurse: Do you have insurance?

I don’t think I have the flu. Even though the company I work for engages in the cost-saving practice of recirculating all of the air in the building instead of having to subscribe to a costly daily influx of fresh air, I have managed to successfully avoid being sick this season…until this week. I went from a small tickle in the back of my throat to grasping desperately at the imaginary blades that were continually piercing my sinuses in a matter of a day and a half. But it still seemed like a fairly normal winterish cold to me, so I figured I would soldier on and see how things turned out.

Whilst I was sick, I was trying to manage it as holistically as possible, but it just wasn’t happening. I tend to have a reasonably robust immune system, in the sense that the natural colds and bugs everyone catches are mild for me and run their course over the matter of a few days. Sure, there’s the occasional day where allusions to open faucets and Dresden would not be too terribly off target. But it’s been nearly ten years since I’ve had a drag-down, knockout illness that made me locate random objects and convert them into abstract manifestations of things I can beg to for the sweet release of death. (“Please, white ceramic toilet, crack and fall upon my head one final time to prevent that incessant throbbing interrupted only occasionally for the act of evacuating the contents of my stomach via multiple conduits.”) And that was in college, where the normal rules of health and sanitation no longer apply in any meaningful way.

Of course, I hate 1) doctors, 2) medicine, and 3) science, so I tend towards self-medication. And as far as I’m concerned the only cure anyone ever needs, from the common cold to congestive heart failure, is a healthy supply of cough drops. This masks my mental block of not actually doing anything to cure my illness; it also signals to anyone within range to realize that I smell like menthol and probably should steer clear of me lest they end up spending the week feeling like those unfortunate folks on 28 Days Later.

To complicate things, I hadn’t really been sleeping right. On Sunday night, I laid my head down for my nightly snooze, thinking there would be little else in the world to worry about except for perhaps a mild case of the standard Monday Morning Grumpy-Poos. I had yet to feel sick.

I awoke the next morning and my bedroom was like Ho Chi Minh City. I had somehow managed to ball up all my blankets—each individually—and launch them across the room. I had opened drawers, kicked over boxes, knocked over stacks of books, and rifled through my papers. And I had no recollection of doing any of this. Now, I somehow managed to make it through the first thirty years of my life without ever having a nightmare. And as far as I know I didn’t that night, either, though I had this vague sense of intensity through the night—an understatement, given how disrespectfully I treated my blankets. I wasn’t tired or angry when I woke up, but I probably would have given John Kerry a run for his money, at least in the realm of unpredictable night thrashing.

Monday night, the same thing happened. Only this time it wasn’t as bad, but that was mostly because I hadn’t bothered to clean up from the previous night.

Tuesday night…well, the less said, the better. Suffice it to say I woke up around two in the morning curled up shirtless in the fetal position on my floor. Granted, I’ve spent a lot of two o’clocks in my life waking up in this fashion, but at least this time I wasn’t crying.

Wednesday night, I said the hell with this, and took two Benedryl. Problem solved.

Only perhaps too well. I’m a big fan of Benedryl, but I’m certainly aware that different people have different reactions. For me, as far as I’m concerned, given how I act when I take Benedryl, it would have been a sure way to have my draft exemption revoked had I been taking it forty years ago. I’m also fully aware that while taking one Benedryl is bad enough, two is actively making the choice to subtract actual years off of your life, but after a third night of unprofessional nocturnal behavior it was a cost I was willing to pay. (To be fair, this was Benedryl’s “pansy-strength” dosage, which is still strong enough to conquer Tikrit if the UN would let us.)

Note that this was independent of my flu-like symptoms. I didn’t start feeling sick until Tuesday night. I assumed the Benedryl would work. While it stopped the night terrorism, I was still sick.

After a day and a half, I realized that this wasn’t a common cold, but something a little stronger, and eating Vicks Vap-O-Rub out of the jar and slipping knockout drops in my coffee wasn’t going to cut it. I was starting to get sinus pressure, which, given my historical record, occurs once every never. So instead of becoming the person I used to sit next to at work who spent 100% of her effort in any activity in her entire life complaining about her sinuses, I decided to nip it in the bud. So I stopped by the drug store and bought a medication I had never, in my entire life, taken before: Sudafed.

I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.

Now, my decision to purchase Sudafed was based on less than rational premises. At the time, I was kind of stumbling through the aisles at seven in the morning, half drunk on Benedryl and half delirious from sinus pressure. (Oh, don’t look at me like that. You’ve straggled into Denny’s at three in the morning under less respectable circumstances than this.) At this point, my market decision would be based not on active ingredients or price, but on what graphical representation of generic icons destroying viruses was prominently displayed on the box. It was a tough call, because there were really only two medications that seemed to match my symptoms. One of them had a flower on it; I think this was supposed to signify that, once I took their medicine, I would be able to smell flowers with no problem. Considering at this point that I was about to demand that the medication I purchase have a dog-molesting Nazi drug fiend garroting a virus in front of its children, I was in no mood to buy anything with flowers on it. So I bought Sudafed instead.

Now, Sudafed almost lost out in the Battle of Me Making Up My mind, too, since there is a huge yellow box that says “Does not contain Pseudoephedrine.” This did not seem like a selling point to me, really, but in the end I wasn’t going to blame the manufacturer of Sudafed any more than the people that have gone out and cut off the balls of the FDA regulators that ever thought about approving any drug that might actually help someone without there being an iron-clad guarantee that anyone who has a one out of two billion change of dying is not a lawyer.

So I took some Sudafed, for the first time in my life. And now, I am an adult.

Normally, while I’m at work, I tend to not involve myself with the affairs of others. Mostly because most transactions that occur on company property do not fall within the jurisdiction of being any of my business, but primarily because everyone at work (for some inexplicable reason) considered me to be an unapproachable monster. But whilst under the influence of Sudafed, I was engaging in activities I never before knew possible. I was flirting with single, attractive girls that were well out of my league. I was flirting with married, attractive girls that were well out of my league. I was telling humorous anecdotes about doing my taxes to anyone in the listening audience of my cubicle. I think I was actually doing more work, too, though I’m pretty sure I just felt like I was doing more work but was really doing the same amount of productivity as before, only with less blatant passive-aggressiveness.

I was, in a word, high. (I type this in the past tense in a futile and deceitful manner, as if I’m not high right now.) How this thing is permitted in the open market is beyond my comprehension. My decision-making processes had been altered to the point where I was making left turns on red, buying Outkast ringtones and tipping more than 15% for merely adequate service. And I’m fairly certain that there are other, worse decisions I’ve made, since there are reasonably large chunks of time that have effectively been blocked out of my memory, either out of some sense of self-preservation or because of some chemically induced reaction.

Of course, whether Sudafed is actually making me feel better is questionable. It could simply be that I’m just as sick as before, I just don’t care now. Which as far as I’m concerned is fine. Potential liver failure is a small price to pay for the unconditional apathy about my everyday life, don’t you think? Maybe you should ask me again in six to eight hours.

Gary Gygax, co-creator of the Dungeons and Dragons line of games, failed his save roll today. He was 69.

Gygax probably isn’t particularly well known by name outside of a few pockets of specific demographics, that demographic undeniably the overlap of the “young,” “male,” and “geek” population. (Although he had a voice spot that barometer of ultimate celebrity, Futurama, was fulfilled with all the grace and dignity that talking cartoon robots drawn by twelve year old South Koreans can generate.) Sure, sure, there are middle-aged guys playing GURPS and girls who play D&D and a few inner bell curve populates who crack out the ten-sided die on occasion, but it’s difficult to not see role playing games as primarily a young adolescent male hobby. Also see: kinda creepy.

I’ve visited the town of RPG but I’ve never moved there. In my teenage years I’d play some science fiction-based role playing games—I wasn’t particularly interested in fantasy games, a weird combination of elves and spells and hellhounds and warmed-over pseudo-occult Disneyfied Alistair Crowley-style Merlins and trolls. Certainly, this was the epitome of geekdom: the ranking clearly goes playing bridge with grandma’s friends > chess player > sci-fi fan > kobold enthusiast. So by throwing dice around in a world of warp engines and alien races, I solidified my own self of self-importance by declaring that at least I wasn’t playing dungeon hockey, even though it would take only one sufficiently advanced technology to prove that we both bleed red. Ultimately, I decided that the world of RPGs was just a touch too geeky for me to tolerate, so I abandoned it to go geocaching and pursue a degree in Economics, clearly a lateral move at least. Right?

In Gygax’s world, though, there was nothing at all like it. (Actually, the first rule in Gygax’s world is that proper nouns should be allowed in Scrabble. But, later.) The best anyone could come up with were these monstrous tabletop wargames simulating such grand campaigns as the Napoleonic Wars or the Peloponnesian Conflict, “simulating” being about as accurate as Survivor being an accurate simulation of surviving. No, these wargames didn’t have much to do with dungeons or dragons, but they had plenty of complicated rules to argue about over a table full of baldy painted pewter horses in a four-year span every other Thursday night.

By creating Dungeons and Dragons, he filled a niche probably nobody in the world knew existed. The ensuing commercial success of D&D established a large, lucrative hobby that exists in almost ridiculous proportions today. (Technical note: Dungeons and Dragons and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons are two completely different products, a fact that 1) the people who should know that already knew that, and 2) the people who didn’t know that don’t really care.) Of course, as with all new, creative, and ground-breaking ideas in this world, it took only a few years for it to become a small commercial darling into a company beset with partnership drama, financial difficulties, and a Saturday morning cartoon, all clear signals that the death bell is soon to toll as soon as it can get a good +2 modifier to do so.

Still, Gygax launched what would turn out to be genre that billowed out beyond a sixteen-page bluebook filled with spreadsheets and formulas. The computer game industry makes more money than the movie industry, and there are very few games on the market that can’t point to some influence to role playing. While role players are hardly mainstream, no longer will passersby stop by a half dozen teenagers grouped around a handdrawn map with a bunch of dice and half-painted orcs and ask “What the hell are you guys doing? You guys are dorks.” They will now stop by a half dozen teenagers grouped around a handdrawn map with a bunch of dice and half-painted orcs and ask “What the hell are you guys doing? You guys are dorks. Come fix my computer.” (Aside: the response to that last statement is dependent on the gender and amount of cleavage of the asker.)

All broad, sweeping generalizations aside (cough, cough), role playing games also confer several extraordinarily important skills and benefits to its players.

1) It encourages face to face socialization, at least compared to MMORPGs and programming visual basic to display and repeat on the screen “Miss Dalton is teh hott!” along with a crude graphical representation of her most outstanding attributes.
2) It familiarizes players with mathematical equations and rational thinking, a highly prizes skill even if it’s only incorporated into a game, given how important calculating things in base eight helps out in the real world.
3) Many a role player has thanked their lucky stars they played Dungeons and Dragons as a child when the inevitable horde of armored changelings descends upon them on their thirstiest birthday.

The fantasy genre didn’t rise and set on Dungeons and Dragons, but it did a lot to legitimize itself over the ensuing decades. What A Beautiful Mind did for eccentric game theorists and Million Dollar Baby did for foxy boxing, role players can point to The Lord of The Rings and say, “ours.” Also see: kinda creepy.