The well is running dry, folks.  I thought this one up out of nowhere while I was going twosies, but the stockpile of rainy day strips that I had piled up on my hard drive have all been consumed and I am back to the old routine of missing my deadlines and listening to the bitching of my faithful fan(s).

I’ve been cracking away at a program called Blender.  It’s a free shareware 3d modeling program that is extremely flexible and has more controls than the fucking space shuttle.  It took me two hours to figure out how to make a box.  After doing the equivalent of mashing my meaty dick beaters over and over again against the keyboard I finally cracked the mystery.  Now damned near everything I have been toying with consists of billions and billions of boxes skewed and stretched to form whatever it was that I was trying to make.  My models look decent, but when I attempt to apply a texture to them the rendered frame comes out looking like the septic tank from the Beatle’s Yellow Submarine.  I have a long way to go, but if I could do it with Photoshop, I should be able to do it with Blender.  When I started futzing around with Photoshop, I basically took every single photograph of my friends that I could get my hand on and cropped them into humiliating situations or pretty dresses.  Now I do the same thing, but with cartoons instead of photographs.

It’s progress… sort of.

So I sold my motorcycle to Ken.  It was inevitable, since I haven’t cramped up my ass on that thing since I moved to this humid swamp called Houston.  Ken will no doubt use it as a tool in his never-ending quest to pull crazy ass, and I hope that it serves him well.  By my reckoning, it should serve its purpose in that function, though that particular aspect was less hit and more miss when I rode it.  That makes sense if you consider the fact that Ken grew up to look like Shia LeBeouf while I bear a closer resemblance to a balding blond version of Ernie from Sesame Street as the years pass me by.  Nevertheless, that motorcycle was a sound purchase for me.  This is a fact that in and of itself is something of a small miracle given my propensity toward completely useless purchases.  If you ever get a few beers in Ken, orally or anally, ask him to regale you with the exciting tale of my chair massager that connected to my Xbox, and all the value that it had.

Sickness abounds in my world.  I felt like ass all last week, and no, it wasn’t the popular H1N1 virus that Saira piggybacked in from Atlanta.  It was just a general mystery malaise that kept me in bed for damned near a week, feeling achy and … blah.  While feeling blah far surpasses feeling nauseas or feverous, it feels a lot like being the only person in your house, but swearing that you just heard someone whisper your name.  The ethereal manifestation of non specific symptoms makes it very hard to steel oneself against oncoming sickness.  If I feel like throwing up, at least there is knowledge that if I do yawn out my breakfast there will be a short window of respite from suffering while my body consumes delicious endorphins.  Being tired and bedridden just makes me feel like my body is just half-assed sick, as if it just won’t put forth the effort to have a full blown illness and I’m just going to have to wait it out until my mortal coil is done phoning it in.

I still worked, though.  I just did so in my underwear from the comfort of my computer room while my cats stared at me with a mixture of admiration and madness.  I don’t know how it is with those of you who own cats, but the felines in my house raise their hackles whenever I talk into my cell phone.  Since cats instinctually compare themselves to the sun and its pivotal relationship as the center of the entire universe, I don’t think that they realize that when the only human in the house begins talking out loud, he isn’t berating or admonishing them.  He’s simply talking to another human a billion rooms away… or he’s just, you know… talking to himself.  This possibility didn’t enter their little prissy brains, so every time I connected to one of my users in Wyoming, Alaska, Colorado, Utah, Virginia, ect… one or both of the little shit makers decided that if I was going to yell at them, then they were going to yell right back, by God.  What this means is that while I was talking to these people, these annoying ass cats were piping in on the conversation with scattered yips and howls in an effort to show that I’m not the boss of them.

Sometimes I hate those God damned things.

I don’t actually play Batman: Arkham Asylum on the PS3, but I figured that shoving an entire keyboard up Ken’s cartoonish ass would be a bit excessive.  I am playing this awesome marvel of gaming on my PC, which has its inherited merits and flaws.  The up side is that the game looks awesome on my computer.  The downside is that the game program is something called a ‘console port’.  This means that they took the game for the Xbox and almost made it work well on the PC.  All things considered, it still has excellent game play on my computer, at least compared to the AWFUL Spider-Man Web of Shadows port that came out last year.  That one almost made me cry.  True story.

Has anyone out there watched that new show called ‘The Vampire Diaries’?  It’s on the CW network, so a person could accurately guess absolutely everything about the show.  For the most part, it’s a generic teen semi-hip quasi-drama where immaculately gorgeous 25 year old teenagers with generically exotic names in an upper middle class town bluntly weave themselves together with each others’ emotional drama… with vampires.  Once upon a time the addition of vampires could spruce up damned near anything in my eyes, but those rosy days of my youth took place before a television show called ‘Vampire: The Embraced’ broke my fucking heart like it was Fredo Corleone and I was Michael.  Ever since then my mental picture of vampires is that of skinny emo crackers sashaying around Victorian houses with innumerous drinking goblets within easy reach of their perfectly and hygienically manicured hands.  Basically, popular media has turned them into pretty sissies, idiots, or pretty sissy idiots.  ‘The Vampire Diaries’ is no exception.

You already know the good vampire, even if you’ve never seen him.  He’s brooding and gorgeous.  He has an appropriately pretentious name like Stephan, or Liger, or Umulat, or some stupid damned thing.  He’s a vampire but he doesn’t kill people anymore, so he’s basically a big fluffy house cat that used to be a tiger.  Oh, and of course, just so that they don’t miss the shitty boiler plate prerequisites for any Hollywood production about an immortal, there’s a hot 24 year old 17 year old that looks EXACTLY like his long dead love.  They’re NOT EVEN TRYING!!!!

And of course there’s the bad vampire.  His name is pretentious too, but not as pretentious as the good guy’s.  He’s gorgeous.  He does kill people, happily, and with the repetition of faceless death that we have come to associate with the CW’s shows.  He has sworn to ruin/ ridicule/ stalk/ sabotage/ etc… the good guy’s life.  This is a vow that he made a century ago and he still adheres to it, ‘cause that’s how he is, damn it.  For decades, he has hunted his self styled enemy.  For over a hundred years.  Over 5200 weeks.  Well over 36,500 days.  What I’m trying to say is that he has meted out his unchanging hatred and enmity toward the good vampire for a long fucking time, right?  If this show lasts, I predict that their dynamic will go through more evolutions and changes in the next four years than it had in the faceless century that built up to it.  That’s the boiler plate plotline, folks.  It’s gonna fucking happen.

We are left with the orphan/ victim/ hero/ hottie girl that the good vampire has loved with all of his heart for the entire 37 hours that he has known her.  She is smart, gorgeous, friendly, gorgeous, pensive, and gorgeous.  At first she can’t fathom why she is so attracted to this super fine chunk of fit manhood that shows up every time she turns around.  Literally.  In the premier episode, she turned around about ten times and every time there he was, standing silently and staring at her with unblinking intensity right at the very edge of where her aura stops.  A hot vampire/model does that and it’s considered passionate and sensual.  I do it and I get a face full of mace and a few kicks to the crotch.  That, my friends, is the major difference between the CW’s world and the real world.  In the real world, if the authorities discover a corpse in the woods that looks like it was ripped apart by an animal, they do forensic work.  They look for animal hair, or they look at the bite marks to figure out what kind of animal it was and when it killed the victim.  In the CW world the police nod at the body, cover it with a white sheet, and then immediately give interviews to the news crews while medics load the mutilated body into the back of the ambulance.  And that’s it.  Case solved.  Time for coffee.  This is the CW folks.

The uninspired fuckers who write this crap make tons more money than I do.  Does that seem right to you?

So the love of my life brought back three things from Dragoncon this year.  She brought back an autographed picture of Patrick Stewart, an autographed picture of Spock and Kirk signed by Nemoy and the Shat, and a possible case of the swine flu.  Apparently Donya’s friend was a plague carrier this weekend, and was diagnosed today with the H1N1 virus.  That means that Saira, in her loving and charitable manner, may have brought my death to me.  No one’s really surprised.

I’m all too aware that it is nigh impossible to cavort about a convention where thirty thousand people are jammed packed shoulder to shoulder into three hotels like some Japanese political rally without exposing oneself to more infections than Courtney Love’s anus.  The risk of contamination increases exponentially when one considers the not insignificant minority of the participants of the Con who seem to be philosophically opposed to soap and water.  And toothpaste.  And, in some fetidly horrible examples, toilet paper.  It’s like a huge kindergarten class, if somewhere in the continental United States there were a school where 5 year olds are getting shitfaced and squeezing themselves into outfits that they have NO BUSINESS wearing.

Bully for the person whose self image is not controlled by the outside world’s perception of them.  It is admirable to witness a person whose value is weighed against the standards that they set for themselves, as opposed to the ridiculously mercurial standards that popular culture defines in meticulous detail in order to sell clothes, magazines and God.  I am impressed by those self confident people… just not when they try to squeeze their 215 pound skin suit into a skimpy Wal-Mart bathing suit that has been Magic-Markered to death in an effort to make it look like Sailor Moon’s.  Leave that shit at home.  Please!  No one wants to see your engorged donkey oscillate with every jolt that your miserable and straining five-inch boot heel sends up your well fed frame.  It’s a God damned shame that these people don’t have enough good friends who are willing to take that bullet by informing Chunkzilla that even at a convention where grown assed people dress as Wookies and cartoon characters, NOBODY wants to see a deuce-and-a-half poured into a Star Wars slave girl outfit.  It’s just uncalled for.  In fact… it’s nasty.

I’m no paragon of fitness myself, but I am man enough to admit it.  No one’s going to see my soft pretty ass crack peeking out from a tiger striped Speedo, and for good reason.  Assuming for a brief minute that I actually succeeded in tricking myself into thinking that there were people in this world that would actually want to see such a visage, I have a failsafe that protects both me and you:  An honest girlfriend.

Saira would kick me square in my banana hammock if I ever tried to fool myself like that, and we can all thank Christ for that.  So I’m left to ask the question that damned near everyone wants to ask those hefty delusional convention goers:  Who are your friends and why in God’s sacred and holy secret name did they let you leave your room like THAT?  Maybe I should play the asshole card next year and show up with an ass-load of cheap rain ponchos to hand out to those enthusiasts to cover up with.  It’s not very nice to them, but it’s unimaginably kind to every other person in the whole fucking world.

Why won’t anyone stop this man?  I remember back in the days when almost everyone I knew had a job and this country was between wars with brown people, we all gathered together in my boy Andito’s crappy red Hyundai Death Trap and jaunted to the cinema in giddy anticipation of watching the new ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ movie.  Then, after watching the failure of celluloid that was this poorly conceived feature film, we were made sad.  That day, as our feet slowly dragged our disappointed and morose band of friends out of that six dollar punishment, I gave birth to my hatred of Marlon Wayans.

As a person, I have no idea what this man is like.  For all I know he could give piggyback rides to orphaned landmine victims between volunteering in soup kitchens.  I begrudgingly give him kudos for his performance in ‘Requiem for a Dream’.  I guess that when it comes to playing a drug addled street thug with limited intelligence and means, he found his zone.  Perhaps it’s just a simple matter of casting him in an acting role that doesn’t require him to scream out in ridiculous outrage every fifteen fucking seconds.  The irrefutable fact that I do know about this man is that any time he is in a movie about something that I love I want to set the world on fire.  True story. 

I’m not trying to falsely impress upon you the idea that ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ would have been a masterpiece if it weren’t for the awkward placement of a hood rat in a medieval fantasy setting.  There was a whole truckload of awfulness in that movie.  So much so that even the devil Marlon Wayans’ performance camouflaged itself amongst the cacophony of hackneyed performances and ridiculously zombie-like dialogue.  From Thora Birch’s character looking as confused as a cheerleader doing long division in her head to Bruce Payne’s antagonist speaking as if he were slowly dying from a stroke, everything between the opening credits and the closing credits was dipped in warm gooey shit.  I’ll bet that it took more than a pretty penny to make that cinematic abortion, so it begs the question of why there wasn’t one single person involved in its construction who possessed the presence of mind to recognize that they were producing a movie that Helen Keller would walk out of.

God and Baby Jesus knows that I damned near worship the memory of E. Gary Gygax, the founder and creator of the Dungeons and Dragons role playing games, but where the hell was he when they were pinching out this loaf?  Did they distract him with strawberry scented piles of cash while they humiliated his legacy?  The wonderful thing that is Dungeons and Dragons, in my nerdy and noisy mind, has the equivalent sacredness (yes that IS a word) that The Lord of the Rings has for fantasy fiction novels.  D&D is the goddamned foundation upon which sex-free adolescents like we were would unleash our powerful imaginations in countless therapeutic nocturnal sessions of wonderful game play.

That’s right- therapeutic.  I said it.  We didn’t run into our high schools with loaded hand cannons or plant pipe bombs around the cafeteria, we only dreamed about it and incorporated those fantasies into our role playing sessions.  That’s why the mortality rate was so much lower back then.  The pent up anger and repression that we felt has a healthy and semi-expensive outlet so that whenever our outrage, or just plain old normal rage, would build up inside of our hormone saturated souls, we would gather around a table, or floor, or mall dining area, and we would viciously kill imaginary people by the truckload.  Not once in the years since then and now has that violence spilled out into the real world.  I have not murdered a single elf since High School.  Nary a troll nor a blink dog has suffered my wrath.  I’m just sayin’ is all.  In Texas the fear of the devil that the pearl necklaced cross clutchers had regarding D&D kept us under the radar.  They were afraid that, since a paranoid schizophrenic from Bethesda fell off of his meds and killed himself in 1979 while dressed in elf ears or some such ridiculous damned thing, the influence of a system of cognitive activities which require imagination and abstract thinking would ruin their progeny.  What they don’t realize is that we don’t fucking throw footballs.  Or baseballs.  Or any balls, for that matter.  A good sized chunk of us don’t take enjoyment at watching large men in tight pants and body armor smash into each other and wrestle each other to the ground.  That sounds a little too gay for me, and I like stage musicals, for Christ’s sake!  So instead of blowing out our knees and breaking our bones in pursuit of extremely fleeting conquests, people like me gathered around with other people like me and shared stories about what we would do if we weren’t unlucky enough to have been born like people like us.  Makes sense to me.

But what was my point?  Oh yeah…

Fuck Marlon Wayans.

This is what I come up with when I have nothing else prepared.  I figured that this is as close to a public service as I can get without actually contributing to society, which is, of course, the last damned thing I’d want to do.

We’ve all been there.  Hell, I’ll bet some of you have even been them.  You know who I’m talking about.  Those selfish shit noggins who park their too-fucking-big for them SUV mammoths so cockeyed that they take up at least 2 parking spaces.  It’s an annoyance when you’re orbiting a congested parking lot, hunting for a free place to dock, but my mind starts cooking up diabolical revenge scenarios when I walk outside and find that some random paint eater has planted his Dodge Compensator less than a handful of centimeters away from my vehicle, forcing me into shapes that would make a professional contortionist shit themselves in order to get into my truck.  I might be pressed to admit that there may or may not have been a few occasions when the edge of my door or the jagged unforgiving teeth of one of my keys carried away an angry sampling of the misplanted machine as a trophy.

It’s just god damned annoying, is all.  Unless you are driving a car that has been proven to cure cancer and give homeless people minty fresh breath, there is no excuse for anyone to slide their car into a 45 degree angle over two parking spaces.  So, as a way of spreading my hatred across the nation, state, or perhaps just the city, I would like to propose that if you are meeting friends at a local neighborhood OutAppleChilis Steakhouse and you happen to come across an atrocity like the one that I have described, I invite you to carry a copy of this strip to place on the offender’s windshield.  If you and your friends are feeling adventurous, feel free to keep a close watch on the cars parked to either side of this asshole so that when a space opens up on either side, you and a friend can squeeze the passenger side of your vehicles into a close flush with theirs.  Then, after taking all of his information, such as license number, make, and color, hop into someone else’s car and go see a movie.  Hell, make it a double feature.  This has a slim chance of teaching a fuck-nut how his parking affects the people around him, but has a very solid chance of turning your frown upside down.  And if he keys your car or damages your property because you treated him in the same manner that he treats the world… call the cops and take his info to publicdata.com.  Then you can DESTROY HIM!!!!

GO MINIONS!!!! DESTROY!!!!

DESTROOOOY!!!!

When I go out to grab something to eat, I keep my choices as simple as possible, and for good reason.  The employees that work in the nearest fast food joints have brains that are also as simple as possible, and I have found that it greases the wheels when I step inside of the worst Whataburger in Texas and order a number X with a Coke.  The less steps involved translates to a slimmer chance of me walking away with mystery food.  Saira and Ken both request orders that make instructions for disarming an explosive device seem simple by comparison.  To further complicate the otherwise simple task of driving somewhere to pick up consumables for my den-mate, Saira is sometimes overcome with the need to lose herself in deep and intractable reflection in order to ask her Id, indeed her very soul, what she’s hungry for.  And that takes a while.

For the first time in my life, I reported for jury duty yesterday.  The experience was simultaneously educational and a complete waste of time.  Apparently, along with paying sales taxes and supporting government Welfare programs for people who have found it more productive to spend our money than their own, it is also my civic duty to drive through the steamy, cramped and congested one way streets of downtown Houston so that I have the privilege of sharing a hypnotically dreary waiting room with my fellow citizens for three and a half hours before being sent away.  It was an eye-opening experience of the smooth and indomitable gears of the justice system.  The surprise that I still have not managed to completely shake is the fact that none of us were called for juries.  Not a one.  In a city of 4 million people, no one needed a group of peers to judge their fate in the interests of justice.  Well, it’s not like they’d actually get a jury of peers anyway.  Jury selection, as I understand it, is an exercise where lawyers try to weed out as many of the people in the group that seem as if they would not readily side with their clients, and that’s not impartiality.  That’s salesmanship.  If that kind of activity is fair and just, then why the hell can’t defendants also choose their judge in the same manner?

It’s only fair, right?

These are the thoughts that occupied my under stimulated mind while my other end was planted firmly in the most comfortable seats that the lowest government bidder could provide, listening to Pandora and doing… nothing.  For 210 minutes.  In a row.  When the whole fiasco that we call ‘The Jury System’ started, a nice old lady stood up from behind her worn desk which was built as an extension of the wall and began a rapid fire rote that she has evidently repeated every single work day between my first day of Kindergarten and that particular Wednesday.  She explained to us what it took for a person to be ineligible for jury duty, and the first thing that she mentioned is that you must understand English.  The irony was that this statement was said to us in English.  It bears asking, then, that if there were a person in the jury room for whom this exception applied, the odds are pretty damned watertight that the person isn’t going to discover this until they have run the whole race with the rest of us poor bastards… I mean citizens.  After she concluded her polite and practiced droning, they ran an equally unexciting video about the duties and procedures that correspond to our responsibilities as jurors, and also where the snack machines are.  Peppered within this engaging and thought provoking cinematic masterpiece which unfolded before our riveted eyes were short interruptions by Spanish and Vietnamese speaking translators to explain to the audience that if the only thing that they understood from this entire video was them asking if they were the only thing that they understood, they need to raise their hands and go home.  I suppose that if there were viewers who spoke those two specific languages then they were covered.  If someone else was unlucky enough to speak one of the approximately 337 languages that are spoken in this country… tough shit on them, I guess.  At least we’re not so far gone in our own misbegotten Omni-pandering to the supposedly neglected masses of minorities in the nation that all state and federal videos mandatorily must contain every single possible language of the population.  That would transform a fifteen minute masterpiece of judicial monotony into a six hour long epic of the scale of a Larry McMurtry movie.  Good for me and you, not so good for the average Gujarati.  I guess we’ll have to wait until Obama’s second term for that legislation.

After the video’s credits rolled past, and we discovered that there were no Easter eggs after them, they had the assembly stand and raise their right hand.  Then they mumbled to the room an oath that left no room for commas, punctuation, or breathing.  I think it went something like this:

“YouandeachofyoudosolemnlyswearthatinthecaseoftheStateofTexasagainstthedefendantyou willatrueverdictrenderaccordingtothelawandtheevidencesohelpyouGod”.

…after which the group of us were expected to respond with a positive socialistic murmur of ‘I do’.  Just to test if they were paying attention, when the rest of the herd supplied the appropriate affirmation, I retorted with the words ‘blue panties’. 

No one gave a shit.

After that I was whisked away into the bustling wheels of justice.  By ‘whisked away’ I mean that I sat in that fucking chair for hours until they dismissed us, I paid five bucks to get my truck, and then drove back to work five bucks lighter and with half of my day washed away by the potential, but not the actual, importance of a jury system.

See?  The system DOES work!

We’ve all seen the commercials.  They show some old lady in amazingly unsoiled clothing pulling imaginary weeds in her garden or a guy wearing a casual button down shirt walking barefoot on the beach while a disembodied voice tries to sell their company’s particular brand of snake oil to the hypochondriacs that sacrifice tons of cash feed the pharmaceutical industry’s pyres.  Right about the time that the happy-go-lucky beach wanderer picks up a stick and throws it into the ocean, the narrator begins the tirade of side effects, which devours the lion’s share of the commercial’s air time.  If you’re anything like me, besides being handsome and angry, you probably start weighing the side effects against the ailments that the medication is said to alleviate in order to judge whether it would be a fair trade to, say, trade relief from dry itchy eyes for the burden of the real risk of shitting your pants at odd intervals throughout your normal day.  Personally, I’ll take the dry eyes.  But that’s just me… that’s how I roll.

The factor that I find wildly entertaining is when a drug company admits that it has no fucking idea WHY their medication works, but they’ll happily give you their best guess.  I’m not kidding.  Look it up.  It hasn’t hindered the company’s bottom line to admit that the exact working functions of their product are a mystery to everyone?  What the hell?  I guess that the enigmatic nature of these drugs has a deep rooted appeal to the sort of people who see handfuls of pills as uberfixes.  As for myself, were I to visit a doctor who prescribed me some random snappy named pharmaceutical like ‘Fraudulor’ or  ‘Cantpeeotall’, and I inquire as to exactly what it is that the little mystical pill does to alleviate my spastic… whatever, if he were to respond with an ignorantly apologetic shrug, then that shit’s going straight into the trash can.

I have a secret.  A lot of pills out there have probably been engineered to start a chain reaction that requires the consumption of other pills, culminating in the retirement of the people that run pharmaceutical companies.  By that train of thought, it might be fair to say that almost all pills on the market serve the same function: they increase pressure in select bank accounts.  Whether this pressure is systolic or diastolic, I have no idea.   Allow me to illustrate my point:  Let us suggest, for the sake of me always being right, that I farted in an elevator that I was sharing with Kate Beckinsale, and now I am severely depressed.  You may not believe this, but they have a pill for that.  Unfortunately, one of the possible side effects for anti-depression medication is suicidal thoughts.   I’m not kidding here.  If you take a pill for depression, it might make you want to kill yourself.  True story.

Swear to God.

Now if I don’t end up killing myself, I may suffer from a very minute amount of other side effects such as (deep breath here): fatigue, muscle tremors, impotence, anxiety, gastrointestinal problems, weight loss or gain, angina, disturbed sleep pattern, nervousness and vision changes.  The bad news is, while I may not kill myself, the impotence, anxiety, nervousness and gastrointestinal problems would probably drive me to kill other people.  But hey, I’m in luck… they gots pills for this other shit too!

Let’s tackle the nervousness and muscle pain, just for shits and giggles.  There’s a pill out there that treats both of them.  Naturally, since the two symptoms are related, right?  When I start sweating that I’m about to get pulled over by a cop for speeding the wrong way in a school zone, my muscles start cramping up like any normal person’s.  So now, I’m taking two pills to fix my one original fart-birthed symptom.  But wait:  There’s an added bonus, since the medication that I took for nervous muscles not only has its OWN side effects, such as dry mouth, sleepiness, constipation, decreased appetite and increased sweating, but it also has a risk of exacerbating the side effects of anti-depressants.  It could increase or revisit the original side effects of my happy pills, with a few friends that it brought along for the ride.  So not only do I have the original party pack of twitches and suicidal contemplation, but you can stack hyperactivity and restlessness to the mix.  That’s right:  I could have either sleepiness OR restlessness.  They have pills for dealing with those issues too.

Now, I know that there are a lot of you out there who are on medication or medications, and I just want to make it perfectly clear that yes, I am judging you, but that’s just because I’m so much better than all of you.  Don’t take it personally; it’s a burden on me as well.  I also know that a couple of you out there are pharmacists and doctors, and to those select few I would like to apologize if I have given away any trade secrets or made light of your vocations.  I am not remorseful because I respect their practices or the dignity of their stations, but rather because I know that it’s a really REALLY bad idea to piss off drug dealers!  The rather convincing argument that the pusher-man has for the incalculable personal medication options available to the paying public is that the real trick to alleviating symptoms lies in ascertaining the proper balance to the cocktail of tonics in order to receive more benefits than side effects.  You see, there’s a TRICK to it!  I guess that makes the pusher-man a sort of modern day magician, making ailments disappear and reappear until the climactic final turn, where you wake up one morning and realize that, after guzzling down the meticulously gleaned proper dosages, you feel almost as good as you did before you started taking the medications.  That’s the trick!

It is important that I impress upon you that my snide and witty social commentary on the seemingly capricious need of a good chunk of this America to put pills in their bellies does not mean to suggest that all medicine is a crock of shit.  When it comes to the real and very necessary functionality of gallipots-wielding apothecaries, I am not an idiot.  Well… I’m not a COMPLETE idiot, anyway.  I remain convinced that the legitimate uses of medicine are damned near Brobdingnagian in scope, and not just because I think that the word Brobdingnagian is fucking awesome.  My argument is that some proposed tribulations, such as wrinkles and erectile dysfunction, while admittedly fucking hilarious, are not sicknesses so much as they are the human body’s adherence to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of the universe always increases.  This even includes penises.

But, you know… not MY penis!  Never MY penis!

Let’s recap what’s going on in the world today, and by ‘world’ I mean, of course, North America.  But not Mexico.  Or Canada.  That’s the world, right?

In San Antonio, TX a mother accidentally decapitated her three week old son with a steak knife after stabbing him multiple times.  She said it was an accident, but I don’t know… She then told the police that the devil made her do it.  Now, in rational parts of the world this woman would be locked away for a looong time in a room with no hard surfaces.  However, she was arrested in Texas, so the San Antonio police have probably issued a warrant for the devil, alias Lucifer, The Tempter, Beelzebub, Karl Rove, ect…  The father of the child was already informed that the mother, I’m sorry… the woman (she ain’t a mother no more) was a schizophrenic when he impregnated her.  Listen closely guys.  This is VERY important, so I want you all to write this down:  It is a well known fact that women are crazy, but when the bitch is diagnosed schizoid… get ready for it… DON’T FUCK HER!!!!!!!  It will not end well EVER!  Do you know why?  It’s because the bitch is schizoid!!!!  It will not end well, and it will probably end up in the news, like this waste of carbon.  There were no doubt a lot of people who said to themselves, ‘You know, I should probably tell this guy that she likes to set fires and gets into screaming matches with city busses before he goes and plants his seed in her belly…. Naaaaaw.  I’m sure a baby is just what she needs to stop her from defecating in water fountains.”  Ken, holla if ya hear me bro!

During my morning coffee I spotted a heartwarming headline about a missing baby being returned to her family.  Upon closer inspection, the story quickly changed from heart warming to blood chilling.  According to the Associated Press, Julie Corey, a resident of Worchester Massachusetts and also crazier than a shit house rat, stole an infant from her downstairs neighbor.  I know what you’re thinking.  This seems more like an every day asshole kidnapping than a bum-fucking coo-coo rampage, right?  Oh, you’re SO wrong.  As the deliciously hot caffeinated beverage slid down my throat in a non-Freudian way, I discovered that Julie Corey, hereto wit to be labeled “Nutzoid Cunt” actually cut the baby out of the mother’s womb and claimed it as her own.  Police caught up with her and her boyfriend at a homeless shelter one state over.  Call me callous, but if my girlfriend comes home covered in blood and claiming to have just given birth when I noticed that very same morning, over my bowl of Captain Crunch, that she wasn’t pregnant… we’re breaking the fuck up.  I might call the men in white coats, I might call her Mom…  I don’t really know until I’m faced with the situation.  Alls I know is I’m getting the fuck out of Dodge before this Nutzoid Cunt starts thinking that I’m smuggling a baby in my guts too.  That’s one problem that can be easily solved with the proper application of one bullet.

A South Carolina man, and by man I mean a really sick shithead, has been charged with the repeated sexual assault of a horse.  The money word in that last sentence isn’t the word ‘horse’, I think.  The word ‘repeated’ kind of made my ears perk up and my stomach turn.  Rodell Vereen has been charged with buggery, which I just discovered is an actual term and not just something English people say to insult each other.  The owner and caretaker of the 21 year old horse noticed that she was acting strange and getting infections.  She also remembered THAT GUY THEY ARRESTED LAST YEAR FOR FUCKING THAT VERY SAME HORSE so she set up a camera and caught the buggery on tape.  She then threw down on the man with a shotgun and held him until the police arrived, cuffed him, threw him in the patrol car, booked him for trespassing and buggery, threw away the handcuffs, shampooed the back of the car, and pointed at him while laughing.  I’m on the fence here about whether this issue needs a bullet thrown into the mix.  Clearly this is hilarious.  To me, I mean.  It’s probably devastating to the poor horse.  Now, if the goofy factor of the equine in this torrid tale were replaced by something more mundane, such as a human being, than I would have no compunctions about letting gunpowder clean up this mess.  With that in mind, complicated by the fact that this is the SECOND TIME THIS DUDE HAS BEEN ARRESTED FOR FUCKING THIS HORSE, I would petition the state for a daily dose of lead to be administered to the brain until such time as the patient no longer fucks that poor God damn horse.

What the squiggly fuck is going on in this country?  Are we reduced to hurting babies and fucking horses?  How… how did THAT happen?  Is it that we’ve always stolen or stabbed babies and doinked horses, but no one ever talked about it?  Infanticide has been going on for thousands of years, I know, but I’m pretty sure I would have been told if there were people out there fucking horses.  I mean, fucking horses is weird, right?  It’s not just me, right?

Right?