Debatin' Palin refuses to do Ifill's biddin', winds up beatin' Biden

As near as I can tell, either Sarah Palin won the vice-presidential debate or she didn't lose the vice-presidential debate, or both. I can't be sure, because I'm only able to read a limited number of newspapers, not all of them; it's possible that if I regularly read every newspaper and magazine there is, I might have gotten a different impression, but I don't and I didn't.

My local newspaper, the Arizona Republic, says "Biden, Palin hold their own," so I guess that means they fought to a draw. That's what I make of it, anyway. They held onto their own stuff, but they didn't get hold of anybody else's. According to the New York Times, "In debate, GOP ticket survives a test." And they're a liberal bastion, so that probably means that they knew she won, but just weren't willing to come right out and say it. The Christian Science Monitor's headline is "Palin rebounds in debate -- but is it too late?" Sometimes I read the fine print, too, and down in that the CSM says that she had a "better-than-expected performance." I feel like we can trust those guys, because they're Christians. But on the other hand, they're also scientists, so I don't know. I think that's why they have the two parts in their headline: the Christians just giving us the straight talk about how God has blessed her debate and raised her to victory, and then the goshdarned scientists have to get in there with their glass-half-empty attitudes and start picking everything apart. Why can't they just leave well enough alone? Personally, I think it'd be better if they just fired the whole lot of those scientists and became the Christian Monitor.

But anyway, I think all of us that are in the spirit of nonpartisanship can agree that Sarah did real good, and I have a theory as to why that was. Now admittedly, it's just a theory, not a fact, but I think it's only fair that my theory be given equal credence with other people's theories, like the theory of general relativity or the theory of evolution, cause that's how democracy works. And, my theory has dogs in it. It goes something like this:

In the beginning, Sarah Palin was like a pit bull that hadn't had very much to eat. Now I don't mean anything bad by that, that she looks like a pit bull or anything. It didn't even have to be a pit bull -- a chihuahua would have worked as well for the purpose of the analogy. Or a cat. I actually have more experience with cats, but I know Sarah likes pit bulls, so that's why I'm using those. So anyway, the McCain campaign feeds her a whole lot of talking points and campaign slogans and stuff like that, as much as she can hold. Then she goes to her interview with Katie Couric and regurgitates it all, but here's the problem: It turns out that she had chewed up all her talking points before she swallowed them, more like a cow really than a pit bull, or any kind of dog that I'm familiar with, because in my experience dogs don't chew at all, they just gulp stuff down as quick as they can. They don't much care what it is -- they'll even eat cat poop, I've seen them do it -- and if it turns out later that it wasn't really something they wanted, they just puke it up on the carpet while you're at work, so that by the time you find it it's already mostly dry and you can't get it out to save your life.

So anyway, by the time she's talking to Katie, all the talking points are all jumbled up and half digested, and even conservatives, who should be used to this sort of thing by now, can't quite make heads or tails out of it, and some people start to wonder if maybe she's not quite right in the head. Or worse still, that maybe she's not even a real American, but some kind of immigrant that doesn't even speak American but who's got a hold of some American words and made a mess out of them.

But the real problem was that instead of being like the pit bull, she was more like the cow. And I mean that in the nicest possible way, not that Sarah is really like a cow in any way except for the really good and flattering ways that one might be like a cow, if there are any. And the campaign guys think to themselves, "It's the chewing, stupid!" So they go down to Sedona and start all over again, now that Sarah's emptied out, and they fill her up again but this time they make sure that she just gulps the points down like a pit bull would, or any kind of dog, so that they stay reasonably intact and then when they come back up at the debate they kinda make sense or at least you can tell that it's English and not gibberish or some other foreign language.

And everybody's so impressed to hear Sarah speaking English, and winking at the same time with no apparent difficulty, that it's obvious that she has what it takes to be the vice-president or even the president, if need be. And once that's settled, the debate is as good as won.

Meanwhile poor Joe Biden had a totally wrong and old-fashioned idea about debates that he had to get rid of and learn the new style. He still thought that in the debate it would be good to appear to be more intelligent and knowledgeable than the other guy, or girl in this case. Fortunately, his people got to him in time and let him know in no uncertain terms that the last thing he was to do was to let on that he thought he was more intelligent and knowledgeable than Sarah, or that he thought anybody else should think that, even if it's as plain as the nose on your face. That's the new way debates work. Nobody wants to get a president that's smarter than them, cause then he'd be doing all this stuff and you wouldn't know what the hell is going on and whether you should be for it or against it.

And another thing that helped Sarah win the debate is how she let that uppity Gwen Ifill know right up front that she didn't have any intention of answering her stupid media-filtered questions, but that she would exercise her freedom of speech which is guaranteed in some one of those amendments, and speak directly to the American people and tell them what they wanted and needed to hear. After all, she's a maverick and mavericks like her and John McCain do whatever they want and not what they're told to do, or even necessarily what they ought to do. Especially not what they're told to do by some biased liberal media that's written a book about Obama.

Oh, and I read a story this morning about how Sarah was a bit annoyed with that Katie Couric about her unseemly behavior in the interviews. Not really, really annoyed, like Rush Limbaugh always is, but just a tiny bit peeved, like anyone would be if they tried to put that media filter on you and ask you a bunch of dumb questions that nobody really cares about, like about the Supreme Court and foreign policy and the big bailout.

Here's what Sarah said after seeing the interviews on television: "The Sarah Palin in those interviews was a little bit annoyed," she said. "It's like, man, no matter what you say, you are going to get clobbered. If you choose to answer a question, you are going to get clobbered on the answer. If you choose to try to pivot and go to another subject that you believe that Americans want to hear about, you get clobbered for that too."

The Sarah Palin that's talking could clearly see that that other Sarah Palin in the big glass box was annoyed. And no wonder she was annoyed! Who wouldn't be? If you answer the question you get clobbered, if you pivot off and answer another question that the American people are really interested in you get clobbered, and though she doesn't mention it here, it also seems to be the case that if you just sit there and don't answer any question at all you get clobbered. So pretty much you're going to get clobbered anytime you go around that mean Katie Couric.

But despite all that clobbering, Sarah --who was a journalism major, don't forget --was gracious and magnanimous enough to try to help Katie out so that if the network ever gives her another chance to do an interview, she might be able to do a better job. That's a common way that people from small towns are, as opposed to people that aren't from small towns. What she did is, she took time out of her busy schedule to prepare a list of questions that are more fair and balanced and more closely aligned with what the American people want to hear about, for Katie to use if she wanted.

Here's what she said on Fox News, which I guess has some sort of a filter too, being a media, but I think the filter there has got a much bigger mesh and lets a lot more of the truth get through to the American people:

"In those Katie Couric interviews, I did feel that there were lot of things that she was missing in terms of an opportunity to ask what a VP candidate stands for, what the values are represented in our ticket. I wanted to talk about Barack Obama increasing taxes, which would lead to killing jobs. I wanted to talk about his proposal to increase government spending by another trillion dollars. Some of his comments that he's made about the war, that I think may, in my world, disqualify someone from consideration as the next commander in chief. Some of the comments that he has made about Afghanistan -- what we are doing there, supposedly just air raiding villages and killing civilians. That's reckless. I want to talk about things like that. Like the fact that he's a Muslim. And the rumors going around that he's the Antichrist -- I'm not, like, saying he is the Antichrist, I don't know. But I think that's something the American people would be interested in hearing about. Gosh darn it, I think we should just let them hear both sides and make up their own minds about whether Barak Hussein Obama is the Antichrist. So I guess I have to apologize for being a bit annoyed, but that's also an indication of being outside the Washington elite, outside of the media elite also. I just wanted to talk to Americans without the filter and let them know what we stand for."

She even apologized for getting annoyed about getting clobbered! That's the kind of class people have who are outside of the Washington elite and the media elite and -- though she doesn't mention it here -- the intellectual elite. And I noticed that Gwen Ifill didn't ask any of those questions at the debate either, so the American people would still be wondering about Barak Obama killing jobs and being too reckless if Sarah hadn't taken the initiative and pivoted onto those questions of her own accord.

After the interview, McCain staffers explained to her that the Sarah Palin in the glass box was actually her, Sarah Palin. "Gosh, there's just so much stuff you've got to learn to be vice-president," she said. "Just last week I saw myself on the TV, I was talking about some of the things the American people want to know, and doing a goshdarned fine job of it, ya betcha, and sounding really smart. And I said to John, 'Look how pretty I am!' and he said 'That's not you, Sarah, that's Tina Fey.' And I'm like, wow, I really thought that was me, but hey, I'm just a hockey mom, you know, not some nucular scientist, so I don't much understand all that technological stuff, or witchcraft or whatever it is that's going on there. So when I saw this new Sarah Palin I wasn't really sure at first which one she was, but it turns out that one was me after all. It can get really confusing, but I never blink, because I know that I'm ready to lead, which Barak Hussein Obama is not."

It can get confusing, I know. Sometimes we make a video of the cats and play it for them on the TV, and they think it's another cat and start batting at the screen, and then they look around behind the TV to see if the other cat's there, which it's not, of course. It's pretty funny. I think the same thing'll work for dogs, too, but I'm not really sure because I don't know that much about dogs.

Footnote

Well, I finally broke down and went to the foot doctor, which it turns out is called a podiatrist, and there’s nothing wrong with my feet after all, except they just look a little funny. Probably did all along. Anyway, the podiatrist suggested I might want to get my head looked at too, while I was at it, so I think maybe I will. As I mentioned before, I’ve got a lot of pictures of my head, so I thought I’d take those in, so the doctor can see how it’s progressed over time, and make sure it’s doing OK.

Funny feet, cont.

I got to thinking some more about those funny looking feet of mine, and got a little worried that something might be wrong with them after all, and maybe I should go to a pedophile and get them checked out.

I tried looking around for some pictures so I could see if they were really any different from how they used to be, but I couldn’t find a single one. That’s peculiar, isn’t it? I’ve got a lot of pictures of my head, from various angles, but not one that I could find of my feet. I think that anybody who’s got any of the risk factors for foot disease should take some pictures now so that they could know if a problem’s come up, and get something done about it. Or if you’re like me and don’t know what any of those risk factors are, it’s probably best to go ahead and take the pictures anyway, just to be on the safe side. You know what they say, better safe than sorry.

I wish people would quit asking me about horses

I’ve received a number of comments (n=2) in response to the horse & beggar post, from people asking me to clarify some other sayings they’ve come across and were unwilling or unable to figure out on their own. It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that I have just touched the surface of the tip of a vast iceberg of axiomatic bafflement sweeping the country. People today seem to have lost touch with this repository of folk wisdom that is such an important part of our national heritage, but that nobody can make heads or tails of. It’s a national disgrace, really, and something should be done about it.

However, I don’t see why I have been called upon to do it, when I’ve made it abundantly clear in previous posts that I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. Especially when it comes to horses and women. You know who knows a lot about horses, is that Michael Brown. It probably would have worked out better if they’d made me director of FEMA and had him answer these horse questions.

But that’s all water under the bridge. I never should have stuck my finger in this tarbaby in the first place, but now I’ve made my bed and I’ll have to lie in it. I guess it’s just my cross to bear, but you know what—it’s a damn sight better than having to carry an actual cross around, so I suppose I should thank my lucky stars and just grin and bear it with a stiff upper lip. I’ll give it a shot, and let the chips fall where they may.

First off, Sandy has asked me to explain the saying “Be careful what you wish for—you just might get it.” Well, it never hurts to be careful, crossing the street or whatever, but wishing has become particularly dangerous in recent years due to deregulation. The major wish-granting entities (e.g., genies, stars, submerged pennies, etc.) are a pretty ill-tempered lot, and it makes them cranky to have to give people their wishes, even though it’s their job. Especially genies, they’re the worst. They’re spiteful little things. I guess they just get burned out after years of wish-granting and become bitter and resentful because they can’t make any wishes themselves (just like the employees of Publishers Clearing House can’t enter the sweepstakes) and have to live in a bottle. So they start begrudging people their wishes, and looking for any technicality they can use to screw them over while still living up to the letter of the contract, as they are legally and magically obligated to do. When you’re dealing with a genie, I’ve found that it helps to dissolve a few Prozacs in some water and pour that in the bottle a couple weeks before you’re ready to make your wish. Your results may vary.

In addition, a lot of people have become careless about their wishing as a result of that whole horse-and-beggar thing, and assume that it doesn’t much matter what they actually wish for, because they’re just gonna get a horse, no matter what. The saying-writers are aware of this and want people to shape up, for their own good, so they came up with this new saying. The point is that you want to make real sure you’ve carefully thought about all the possible interpretations of your wish before you make it. Otherwise, you might wind up with some unintended and unpleasant consequences--like all your food turning to gold, so that you break out most of your teeth and then starve to death, for example.

And then Red One wanted to know about looking into the gift horse’s mouth. This is a particularly interesting one for me because it is actually intended to lead people astray, whereas most sayings attempt to warn you of potential pitfalls. (They are rarely successful, because nobody understands what they’re talking about, but at least they were well-intentioned and contributed to the paving of that bumpy road to Hell.)

Someone should write a countersaying like “Always look a gift horse in the mouth.” I’d do it if I had the time, but I don’t. The truth is, you can’t be too careful when it comes to a gift horse. There’s a long tradition of using gift horses to inflict pain and suffering by hiding stuff inside them, like Trojans or WMDs. But if you get a flashlight and look down inside the thing, you can see what’s hidden in there and make an informed decision as to whether it’s in your best interests to accept the horse or not. So the horse terrorists came up with this saying to try and convince people that it was impolite to look inside a horse you’re offered, so they’d be embarrassed to check him out until they got home, and by then it’s too late. You should never accept a horse from a stranger without looking in its mouth. And it probably wouldn’t hurt to put on some gloves and check out the other end while you’re at it.

Of horses and young women

[Red One made a comment on the beggar/horse story, and in it she asked me to clarify some other horse-related matters that were troubling her. I started commenting back, but then I decided that it was such an important subject that I should put it out on the regular page, besides it was getting much too long for a comment. This is her comment/question, for those of you who don't bother to read the comments: Wel, first of all I have some terrific pictures of some really great Amazonian lily pads I would be happy to share. Secondly, how do you explain all those young women who are so attracted to horses. How does that fit into this scenerio?]

This is my reply:

First of all, we would all love to see those pads, Red One. Did you ever try sleeping on them?

Secondly, I don't see why I should have to explain about those young women and their horses when I had nothing to do with it, and when there are approximately 6,462,012,538 people on this planet who know more about what attracts young women than I do.

I’m not even convinced that it’s true—this may be just another example of that darned observational bias that’s going around. Perhaps the people who make this claim simply don’t pay much attention to a horse unless it’s got a young woman on it, and then they think “Wow, every time I see a horse there’s a young woman too. What’s with that?” That’s probably how I’d be.

For example, I know from studying the data that there are approximately equal numbers of young men and young women on campus. However, on a typical trip to campus I observe a far greater number of young women. If questioned later, I would probably concede (unless I were feeling particularly feisty that day) that theoretically I must have seen young men but I can rarely recall a specific instance of that happening, unless they were blocking my view of the young women.

It all has to do with the nature of perception. Most people think that they see everything that’s going on around them, but most people are wrong about that, as they are about a lot of other stuff. In fact, the brain doesn’t have the patience to look at everything you point your eyes at, so it picks out those things that in its own opinion are most visually appealing or most important to the survival of the species. Young women are both of these things, in addition to being sugar, spice and everything nice. Young men, on the other hand, are snips and snails and puppy dog tails (not the whole puppy dog, which would be nice, but just the gross disarticulated tail), so it’s a waste of time to bother looking at them.

The brain completely ignores unimportant objects that enter the visual field, so it’s like they’re invisible. I know that on several occasions while observing young women, I have accidentally bumped into young men who were in my way and were invisible at the time. They often react gruffly, as young men commonly lack a proper respect for their elders, which is another strike against them, in my opinion. Once, while simultaneously observing young women and contemplating the difficult quantum mechanical question of why those low-slung pants don’t just fall off*, I walked right into a tree. My brain likes the way trees look, and usually I can see them, but this particular problem required so much neuronal processing power that even such functions as tree-seeing had to be temporarily suspended.

That’s the scientific explanation. It took me a lot of thinking to come up with it, and a lot of writing to try to explain it in simple terms so that it could be understood by people who haven’t much of a scientific background, or who are just plain stupid. I’m getting a bit tired of science, cause it’s so much trouble and doesn’t really impress young women very much. Or horses, for that matter. Horses have very little respect for science, and more often than not if a scientist attempts to mount a horse, it’ll just snort and roll its eyes, and run away. With a young woman, it’s pretty much the same situation.

The more I think about it, I believe I’m going to give up science altogether, and move over into philosophy. The great thing about philosophy is that you just have to make something up and write it down and you’re done, whereas in science after you make something up you have to go out and try to get some data to support it, and sometimes after all that trouble the data you wind up with doesn’t support the thing you made up and you have to start all over and make up something else, which is really a nuisance. Or else you have to make up some different data that fits in better with your hypothesis, which is a lot of extra work in itself, and if you get caught doing it you’ll get in trouble. Obviously, science is a big fat hassle.

So let’s reexamine the question from a more philosophical perspective:

1. God’s ways are mysterious, and impossible to figure out. If God had meant for man to understand why young women are so unusually fond of horses, He would have created man already knowing it. The fact that man doesn’t know it means God doesn’t want him to know it, and when God doesn’t want you to know something you’re better off to just mind your own business before you get in trouble like that guy Adam did.
2. There are no young women or horses. There’s nothing but you, and you’re in a cave, and what seems to be young women and horses is just a bunch of shadows on the wall of the cave.
3. It doesn’t matter why the young women like horses. All that is meaningful is that young women and horses exist, and that we’re not really in that creepy little claustrophobic cave. Actually, the horses don’t matter either.
4. The occasional conjunction of young women and horses is not sufficient to infer causation. All we can state with surety is that young women and horses have been perceived to be frequently in close proximity, and people are starting to talk.
5. All pain and suffering in the world is caused by young women and horses, or more precisely, by the desire to apprehend young women through the various sensory modalities. This suffering can be relieved only by getting really drunk and singing the blues.

See how easy that was? I was able to get five philosophies done in less than half the time it took me to do the one science, and it takes up a lot less space on the page too.

---

*The Low-Rider Pants Problem has intrigued and baffled thinkers such as myself for over a year. Simply stated, the problem is that in order to maintain an upright and locked position, pants rely on the basic physiological principle that in humans the hips are usually greater in circumference than the waist. Therefore, if the opening at the top of the pants is matched to the size of the waist, they will remain in place, prevented from sliding down by the greater girth of the hips. Usually there is some form of fastening mechanism which, when disengaged, permits the pants to be drawn up over the hips, but when fastened secures the pants at waist level. (In some cases, this ratio is reversed--when this happens additional support devices such as suspenders are necessary to maintain the pants in the desired position.)

However, the top of a pair of low-rider pants hits around mid-hip, and as the wearer’s body tapers from that point downward, the pants might be expected to move in that direction when acted upon by the force of gravity. The only force opposing gravity in this situation is friction. All the other forces, and most reasonable observers, are pulling for gravity. And yet, despite my extensive field work, I have never observed a single instance in which gravity and its allies and well-wishers prevailed. At this time, there is no known physical law that can explain this phenomenon, other than the Prime Directive.

The myth of the equestrian beggar

Those of you who are inclined to read my blog might have noticed that lately I’ve been having a bit of the writer’s block. It’s a curious ailment, this writer’s block—for one thing it seems to strike writers much more frequently than the general population, which is ironic in view of the fact that those are precisely the people who are most inconvenienced by it.

It’s hard to explain to people who aren’t writers just what it’s like. I suppose the best way to think of it is that it’s kind of like having constipation in your brain. You just keep on sitting there trying to get something out, and then your legs start getting numb, and after a while you get to worrying that maybe it’s not even writer’s block at all but something worse, something fatal and incurable. That maybe it’s a tumor of some sort that’s got everything blocked up, and now you’re never going to be able to live long enough to climb Mt. Everest. I don’t want to climb Mt. Everest, but I want to live long enough that I could if I changed my mind about it and decided I did want to after all. And then a little while after that, in case something else came up that I wanted to do, but hadn’t gotten around to.

The opposite of writer’s block is a condition called logorrhea (like brain diarrhea) which is where you spew out an excessive number of words. For some reason nobody thought to give writer’s block a nice name like that, as far as I know, so I’m going to make one up myself—dyslogia. This makes it much more obvious that it’s a real disease, which could even have marches and ribbons and stuff, and for which you could take prescription drugs.

Unless Tom Cruise found out about it, in which case he might jump up and down on your couch with his shoes on until you stopped. I read in the news today that Tom is dead set against people taking drugs for any kind of mental problem they might be having. He doesn’t take anything himself, it seems--it’s because he’s in the Church of Scientology and they don’t approve of that sort of thing.

Apparently Tom has been in the Church of Scientology a long time, and has worked his way up to being an OT-VII, or at least that’s what people say. It’s hard to know for sure, because it’s a secret what kind of OT you are. In fact, it seems that being an OT-VII is a lot like being a secret agent, so there’s no way to know for sure if somebody’s one unless Karl Rove tells Robert Novack and he writes it up. I hope Robert Novack doesn’t get the dyslogia or we never will find out.

It sounds like it’s pretty fun being an OT-VII, because you can control the universe with your mind, among other things, and get Katie Holmes for your girlfriend, and jump on people’s couches whenever you like, and there’s nothing they can do about it. Cause if they complain you can shoot death rays out of your eyes and vaporize them, and that’ll shut them up pretty fast, I’ll bet. Tom is so high up in that stuff that even Oprah can’t stop him from jumping on the couch, despite the fact that she controls a major portion of the universe with her own mind.

When he was a kid my friend Rob and his sister used to jump on the couch so much they ruined it. His Mom would try to get them to stop, but she never could, and one day she just gave up and stood there watching them and said, “Well, I guess I just can’t have anything nice.” Rob and I called that the “Prime Directive” and felt that it applied to our jobs, and to certain other aspects of our lives at the time. Then Rob went and got a bunch of nice things, but I have done my best to remain true to the Prime Directive.

I sort of wish now that I had just dumped that Prime Directive years ago and gotten some other kind of Directive that wasn’t quite so restrictive, or maybe joined up with the Church of Scientology, but you know what they say “If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.”

Why do they say that? Wouldn’t it be much nicer if people would just state their point in plain and unambiguous language instead of feeling compelled to toss in one of these odd little sayings, which don’t usually have any real connection to the subject at hand. Because if no beggars or horses were involved in the initial discussion, I can’t see how it’s at all helpful to introduce them into it.

Frankly, I don’t think that whoever wrote this particular adage knew a whole helluva lot about beggars to start with. Probably not horses either, but beggars for sure. I’ve encountered a lot of beggars—they’re all over on Mill Ave.—and not one of them has ever asked me for a horse, just spare change. What would they do with a horse anyway, if they had one? Spare change is easy to store, but the same cannot be said for a horse. Some beggars have dogs or cats that they push around in shopping carts, but you’d be hard pressed to find a shopping cart big enough for a horse, and even if you could there’s probably some ordinance against it.

And if there’s not they’d make one fast enough, once the sidewalks started filling up with shopping cart horses and people couldn’t get by them to go into Starbucks. Soon all the politicians would be making hay of the situation, lamenting about how these unsightly horses are discouraging tourism and ruining the economy, and promising to be tougher on shopping cart horses than their opponent is, and saddling the poor beggars with all kinds of fines and unfunded mandates. Before long they’d be begging day and night just to pay the horse’s bills, and have no time to beg anything for themselves.

No, a horse would be the complete and utter ruin of a beggar. It’s absolutely the last thing they need.

Or want. Like I said, no beggar I’ve ever met expressed any desire for a horse. Most of the people I’ve known who ever showed much interest in horses were rich people, not beggars at all. So I believe it’s more likely that if wishes were horses, rich people would ride, and then when they got back home there would be beggars all over the place, cause they would have had sense enough to wish they were rich people, not for some stupid horse.

I think they’ve made the mistake here—and it’s a common one—of assuming some facts not in evidence. In fact, I’m not convinced they were even facts to start with. Not only do they seem to be making the unwarranted assumption that a beggar would wish for a horse, but also that the wishes beggars make always come true. Cause it doesn’t say “If wishes were horses AND wishes came true, then beggars would ride.” They just assume the horse wishes are going to come true. But I feel like if somebody’s a beggar it probably shows that they’re worse than average at getting their wishes to come true, cause I doubt that that many people would wish to be beggars.

Furthermore, it shouldn’t say they would ride, only that they could if they wanted to, because a lot of them might not choose to ride even if they had a horse. I know I’d think twice about it, and I’m not even a beggar. So it should really say “If wishes were horses, AND if wishes really came true, AND if a beggar made a wish, then that beggar would receive a horse and could ride the horse if he or she chose to, and were physically capable of doing so.”

Oh no, that wouldn’t work, because there’s another saying “Beggars can’t be choosers.” So I guess the beggars would have to ride on the horse whether they wanted to or not. It doesn’t seem right to me to force the beggars to ride around while everybody else can do as they please, and it might not even be legal. Somebody should challenge that saying in court, and clearly establish once and for all a beggar’s right to choose. The trouble is that it’s hard to find a lawyer who’ll work for spare change.

So I suppose that until they can get the law changed, the saying should read “If wishes were horses, AND if wishes really came true, AND if a beggar made a wish, then that beggar would receive a horse AND would have to ride the horse or be found in contempt of adage.”

Actually, if you examine it a little more closely, I guess it doesn’t really say that only the beggars would wish for horses, but that any wish that anybody made would result in a horse. It’s like sometimes when you send away for something, there’s fine print where they say that if they don’t have the thing you ordered, they’ll send you some other thing of equal or greater value. So you order one thing, and then you get something else that you didn’t want. It seems to me that it’s debatable if that thing is of equal or greater value--or of any value whatever, if you’ve got no use for it--but you can’t send it back because of the fine print. Well, I guess you could send it back if you wanted, but they won’t give your money back, so you’d wind up with nothing.

So no matter what you might have actually wished for, you’d get a horse instead--and good luck trying to send it back. What a mess that would be! I’m always wishing for stuff and I’d be in a world of trouble if every time I wished for a boat or something I got a damned horse instead. Make a wish, get a horse. Make a wish, get a horse. Hell, there’d be horses all over the place in no time. Not only could the beggars ride, but also anybody else who wanted to and who could manage to get up on a horse, which isn’t always that easy, because they’re pretty tall and not very cooperative. I guess most people would probably want to ride if they could, because with all those horses around it wouldn’t be very pleasant to walk anywhere. Still, while a strong case can be made that under these conditions many formerly non-equestrian segments of the population—including, though not limited to, beggars--might ride, it is not possible to state with absolute certainty that this would indeed occur.

Now that I think about it, they don’t even say that the wish is going to produce a horse, but that the actual wish itself would become a horse. But what’s a wish? It’s just a kind of thought, which is something inside your head. So if one of your thoughts suddenly turned into a horse, clearly what would happen is that your head would explode. It’d be a bloody mess, and you sure as hell wouldn’t be riding around on any horse after that.

Actually, they don’t even claim that the wishes are going to become horses, but that in this peculiar universe postulated by the adage, they are already horses and always have been, so maybe evolution has been able over the course of billions and billions of years to provide people with heads large enough to accommodate a horse or two. I wonder if that means that what used to be horses in the regular universe is now wishes, or if there just aren’t any wishes at all.

Or maybe there’s one entity now, which is both a wish and a horse simultaneously, like light is both a wave and a particle. The way it works with light is this: If you just go about your business and don’t pay any attention to light, then it’s a wave, but if you get to looking at it it’ll turn into a particle just to spite you. Then if you turn your back it goes back to being a wave, but if you try to whip around real fast and look at it it’s a particle again, no matter how quick you are. It’s kinda like if you were trying to watch something on TV, but every time you looked at the screen the picture just turned into a bunch of little dots. The thing about it is that the physicists have set up cameras and got some pictures of light being a wave, so I don’t know why it doesn’t just own up to it and quit being so pigheaded.

So in the weird universe there’d be this one thing, probably called a horsh, and every time a physicist looked at one it’d go from its wish nature to its horse nature. That’d be one wacky universe, wouldn’t it? I bet physicists wouldn’t be very popular in that universe, and people would avoid them like the plague. Actually, I don’t think they’re all that popular in this universe, even though they can only turn light back and forth, which doesn’t seem to cause much of a problem. People in this Horsh Universe though, they see a physicist coming, they’d run like hell. Cause if you weren’t really careful what you were thinking you might accidentally make a wish, and those physicists would explode your head with a horse just like that, before you had a chance to take it back.

Unless you had one of those supersized heads, then the horse could fit, but I bet it would still be pretty uncomfortable. And now it’d be really, really hard to keep from wishing that you didn’t have a horse in your head, which would give you another one, and pretty soon you’d have a whole herd of them in there and your head would explode anyway, cause there’s only so much that evolution can do. It would have been a complete waste of time for evolution to have bothered making those giant heads if they’re not going to work any better than that, and they don’t sound very attractive either, so my guess is that the Horsh people have regular sized heads just like ours.

Another one of those conditional sayings that’s kind of similar is the one about “If frogs had wings, they wouldn’t bump their butts on lily pads.” That one’s just plain stupid, it’s even worse than the horse one. They make it sound like those lily pads are some kind of navigational hazard that’s always getting in the frogs’ way, and preventing them from getting their business done. That’s not true at all.

In the first place, lily pads are pretty soft to start with, and they’re floating on water besides. In any collision between a frog and a lily pad, the frog’s a lot more likely to hurt the lily pad than the other way around. And it’s not like they’re flying up out of nowhere and smacking those frogs on the butt—the frogs are actively seeking out the lily pads so they’ll have a place to sit. If it weren’t for the lily pads the frogs would just have to keep swimming all the time and I bet a lot of them would just give out and drown. The fact is they really enjoy sitting on those pads and even if they had wings I bet they’d still do it.

It’s like saying that if I had wings I wouldn’t bump my butt on the rocking chair in the living room. I wish I did have wings (Whew, no horse!) but if I did I guarantee you I’d still be sitting in that chair. Probably more than I do now, cause flying seems like it’d be pretty hard work. What do they think, I can just fly around all the time, day and night? Maybe when I was younger, but probably not even then, and certainly not now.

I’m happy to have that chair, and wings or no I’m going to be sitting in it every chance I get. And if I could sit on the lily pads I’d do that too, cause they look pretty comfortable. In fact, if I were a frog, or a really small person the size of a frog, I think it would be nice to just stretch out on a lily pad and take a nap, cause if you think about it they’re a lot like tiny little waterbeds. I wish I could nap on a lily pad (Whew, no horse!), but I’m much too heavy for them, at least the ones I’ve got out in the pond. I’ve read about giant lily pads they have in the Amazon that are plenty big enough to sleep on, but I’ve never really seen one. That’d be sweet! If I could fly around whenever I wanted and then take a nap on a lily pad, I don’t think I’d feel the least bit deprived for not having a horse. That’s what I’m gonna wish for, along with the usual stuff like money and Meg Ryan.

As far as that dyslogia goes, I’m feeling much better now.

Mockingbird

This morning on the radio I was listening to this song called “Mockingbird.” I’ve heard it a lot and never was that impressed, but this morning for some reason I paid closer attention to the plot, which is rather intriguing once you begin to delve into the subtext.

What’s happening is that some guy is attempting to impress his girlfriend, or I don’t know, maybe somebody else’s girlfriend--or wife for all I know, by telling her that he’s going to get her a mockingbird; and furthermore, that if the mockingbird fails to function correctly, that he will replace it with a diamond ring. My first thought was that there was no way the girl would fall for it, but that notion didn’t hold up under closer scrutiny, because it was the girl who was singing the song, and telling all her friends about her new bird, all excited like it was a really great thing to have a mockingbird, or maybe because she was confident that the bird wouldn’t live up to its contract, and that she’d be getting the ring after all. I couldn’t believe the audacity of this guy, or that he’d managed to pull it off.

I mean, it’s just a plain old bird, like live out in the yard. Sure, there might be some difficulty in snagging one, but it’d sure as hell be worth the effort to avoid having to buy a diamond ring. Of course, this guy claims that he bought the stupid bird too, rather than catching it, but I find that highly unlikely. He probably made up some huge price he paid for it too, and apparently she went for it hook, line and sinker. You couldn’t pull this off with a woman who knew much ornithology, but I suppose the guy knew that this was not her field of expertise, or else he’d have offered her something else, like a hissing cockroach, that she’d be less likely to know the value of. I called around a few pet shops, none of them had any mockingbirds, and most suggested that if I wanted one I should just go out in the yard and get it out of a bush or something.

This is a pretty old song I think, from a kinder, gentler era when women were more trusting and easier to trick. It’s been my experience that the sophisticated feminists of today are less prone to taking a lot of crap off a guy, and probably wouldn’t fall for something like this. If they were willing to accept a bird at all—which I doubt—they for sure wouldn’t settle for some yard bird, but would demand something like a scarlet macaw, and most likely would turn around and sell it on eBay and then buy a diamond ring with the proceeds. And probably sell some of your stuff too, while they were at it, like your guitar and your camcorder.

I’d like to know why he decided to go with a mockingbird in the first place, and not some other kind of locally-grown bird, like a pigeon. I wonder if he just thought of the mockingbird right off, or if he arrived at it after some experimentation. I bet he’s tried this thing before with other girls, and didn’t get it quite right, so they broke up and he had to get a new girlfriend and take another stab at it.

Here’s what I think happened, is that he just got in a bind one day and had to improvise a present at the last minute, because he’d forgotten some important gift-giving opportunity, probably an anniversary of some sort. Women have the ability to perceive a lot more anniversaries than men can, just like dogs can hear stuff we can’t. Most guys don’t realize that 4 months from the first time you went to a movie together is an anniversary, but it is. So he’s looking around the place for something he can pretend is an anniversary present, and not having much luck, and then he thinks maybe a pet, you know everybody loves a puppy.

Unfortunately, there aren’t any puppies to be had on such short notice, so he grabs up the first thing he can catch, which is, let’s say, a gray house mouse. So he wraps it up with a nice bow, but still he’s not feeling real confident about it, and comes up with this plan where he’ll tell her that if the mouse doesn’t work out for her, he’ll replace it with a sapphire necklace. That he was thinking about the sapphire necklace, and shopping around for one for a couple weeks, but then he saw this mouse and thought it was so cute, and that such a wonderful and unique girl deserved a present just as special as she was, rather than an ordinary old necklace, which is the sort of thing that anybody might use for a 4-month movie anniversary. But then—and this is the man’s genius—he establishes the criterion for determining whether the mouse stays or goes to be something he’s sure the little guy can handle. So he tells her, “And if that mouse won’t run on the wheel I’m going to pick up tomorrow at the pet store, I’ll take it back and swap it in for the necklace.”

Well, of course the mouse can run on a wheel, they’re famous for it. For a couple of days the girl sits around staring at the mouse running on its wheel and trying to determine if this is really in some obscure way an acceptable gift, because she’s probably never had to parse so much bullshit at one time before, but then she thinks “Screw it!”, and packs up and moves to L.A. to become an actress, without even bothering to feed the mouse.

So the guy comes home and sees that the mouse ploy didn’t work and that the mouse doesn't have any food, but still he did get laid a couple of times while she was figuring things out, which is probably better than he would have done with no present at all, so instead of totally abandoning the whole idea he works on perfecting it, and several girlfriends later he’s settled on mockingbirds, with a diamond ring as the backup gift in case the birds keep quiet.

Well, of course the bird’s gonna sing, cause it’s a member of the suborder Oscines of passerine birds, commonly referred to as songbirds, and not surprisingly that’s what they do, is sing. These particular ones are called mockingbirds due to the fact that they don’t write any of their own material, but only do covers of other birds’ songs. I don’t think they mean any disrespect, and they probably should call them coverbirds instead.

And I read somewhere that they don’t do them exactly the same, and each mockingbird has his own style and choice of repertoire. On American Idol they call that “making the song your own.” So if they had mockingbirds on American Idol, which they never do seem to, Paula would say “I felt like you really made that titlark song your own. I loved it.” and Simon would say something like “Paula, you birdbrained slut, that song sucked, and you suck. And Randy sucks, too.” And Randy’d say “Why do I suck? I didn’t like the bird either!” He’d probably call the mockingbird a dog too, cause Randy thinks that a lot of things are dogs that really aren’t.

That sort of harsh treatment is likely the reason you don’t see that many mockingbirds on American Idol, because they’re very sensitive creatures who, as I explained earlier, aren’t really mocking other birds, and don’t particularly appreciate being mocked themselves. (The truth is that even animals that do mock other animals aren’t often receptive to mockery that’s directed at them.) As a matter of fact, mockingbirds are pretty polite as birds go, not like those damn seagulls, for example. About the worst thing they do is to occasionally use copyrighted material without compensating the copyright holder, but that’s a very murky area, legally speaking.

You know, it just occurred to me that maybe those birds got together and decided to call themselves mockingbirds, so that they could contend that their performances were parodies, and get around the copyright issues. I guess those are some pretty clever birds. Not as smart as that guy in the song, though, who’s probably been through 10 or 12 girlfriends by now without ever having to buy any jewelry.

The more I thought about how well that little scheme had worked out for the song guy, the sorrier I was that I didn’t have a girlfriend that I could try it out on. If I had only analyzed this song sooner I probably would have a girlfriend, or at least wouldn’t have spent so much on rings and necklaces trying to keep the ones I had, and could use that money to buy a macaw to keep me company. They can imitate most anything, including human speech, so when I came home from work in the evening it could perch on stuff and mock me while I was trying to watch TV. It'd be almost the same as having a girlfriend.

Unfortunately, I don't have a girlfriend or a macaw, or the money to buy either. However, I do have a roomie who is a girl, and I figured the principle’s the same so I went into the kitchen where Linda was making her breakfast and I said, “You know what, I’m gonna buy you a feral cat.”

“Huh?” she replied, which is fairly noncommittal, but I could tell that I had piqued her interest.

“Yep,” I said, “a feral cat, a really nice one. And I tell you what—if by the end of the week, that cat has not lived up to your expectations, I’ll get out there and cut the grass.”

She was so overcome with emotion she couldn’t even say anything for several seconds, but just stood and looked at me. When she did speak, she tried to conceal how touched she was by feigning a cool, blase kind of attitude, with just a hint of gruffness. You know how some people do, when they have difficulty expressing their true feelings.

“What the hell are you talking about?” she said, but I could tell by the words that remained unspoken between us how much my thoughtful gesture had meant to her. It felt good to bring a bit of joy to Linda’s day, and it wasn’t a major inconvenience for me, as the whole neighborhood’s crawling with feral cats, and I had no intention of actually cutting the grass, no matter what.

The half-empty water bottle

I stopped off at the Gentle Strength Cooperative Store on my way home from work today to fill up the water bottles, but because I only had two quarters I had to go inside to the change machine first. Some water machines will give you change themselves, but this one won’t. It just does water, and sends all the change business to the other machine inside the store. I was happy enough to go inside anyway, cause it was 114 outside and the sun shines right on the water machine that time of day.

I’ve never had any trouble getting change there before, but this time I kept feeding one-dollar bills into that persnickety machine, and it kept spitting them back out. I don’t know, I guess maybe they were counterfeit or something. Finally I managed to find a couple that it was willing to accept, and I already had two quarters, so it came out just right for filling up the two 5-gallon bottles I had. You can work it out for yourself, or just take my word for it.

But then when I took the quarters it gave me and tried to put them in the water machine, it would only take six of those and spit the other two out. Seems to me it was pretty unprofessional of that change machine to be so pissy about the counterfeit dollars, and then turn around and give me a bunch of counterfeit quarters I couldn’t use. Especially when I inserted those dollars in good faith, having no prior knowledge that there was anything wrong with them, whereas the change machine had to have known full well it was giving me bum quarters.

And I probably sweated out at least 15 cents worth of water standing there in the heat trying to coax the water machine into taking those counterfeit quarters when it didn’t want to. This machine is already like the snootiest water machine in town, and will only take quarters, not other coins. The one down by Safeway will take all sorts of coins, even nickels, and it has a nice picture of a blue penguin on front.

Not pennies, though. None of them will take pennies. And the real people in the stores don’t much want to take the pennies either, not if you’ve got a lot of them. Why’d the government even bother making pennies, if they’re not good for anything? I bet you that they’re supposed to have to take those pennies, and the government wouldn’t be happy about it if it came out that they’re not doing it. It’s not like I’m the one responsible for the stupid pennies. It's the government that made them, and if anybody’s got a problem with them they should take it up with the government, and just go ahead and give me my groceries. There oughta be a number you could call, and the government’d send somebody out to make them take those pennies.

For all I know there is a number, and I just don’t know what it is. I wonder if there’s a number you can call and find out about the other numbers you don’t know about, that you could call for various things. It’s hard to keep up with all that stuff, especially when it takes this much time out of your day just trying to buy a few gallons of water. I think if there’s not a law about the pennies, the Senate ought to make a law, or at least apologize for not making one, like they did about the lynchings.

And, as luck would have it, the counterfeit quarters were the last two I tried, so I wound up having one bottle with five gallons of water in it, and one bottle with three, rather than two bottles each with four gallons, which would have been preferable. Cause if I’d known ahead of time that I was only going to get eight gallons of water all told, I could have divided it up like that and not had a 5-gallon bottle to lift up on the water dispenser, which is a pretty heavy bottle. Of course, I guess that means I’ll get a break when it comes time to lift the 3-gallon bottle, which won’t weigh as much as it would have otherwise, but who knows when that’ll be? I could get hit by a train before then, and get no benefit at all out of that 3-gallon bottle. All I know for sure is that when I lifted the 5-gallon bottle I threw my back out, and now it hurts whenever I move or don’t move.

I guess I should’ve done the lighter one first and saved the other one, in case I got in the way of the train I wouldn’t have had to lift it at all. The thing is that it’s hard to predict in advance when you’re going to have a bad back day and save the lighter water bottles for then, or if you’re going to get hit by the train, and should do the light one now and save the heavy one for somebody else to have to lift after you’re dead. I never could predict that sort of thing. All I can tell psychically is stuff like when a train is actually a Spirit Guide, nothing really practical like if it’s gonna run you over, or if you’re gonna hurt your back on a water bottle.

Funny Feet

I was in the shower the other night and I dropped the soap, and when I looked down to find it I noticed that my feet didn’t look quite right. Nothing in particular, they just seemed a little weird, different from how I remembered them. I don’t know if they got that way recently, or if it’s been a while and I just hadn’t noticed, because I don’t pay much attention to them normally.

I don’t have much to say about it, I just thought I’d mention it and see if anybody else had ever noticed that about their own feet, and if they had any idea what causes it.

The City of New Orleans

I was thinking this morning while I was waiting for the train to get on by just how much my life has improved since I stopped embracing negativity Friday before last. Not only am I so much more centered and at peace, but I also feel now that I have a satisfactory understanding of that song “Love Potion No. 9,” which has been bothering me off and on for years. Then all of a sudden—it was like this big flashbulb had gone off in my head—I realized that the train was not a train at all, but was really my Spirit Guide, and just looked like a train. Man, I couldn’t believe what a dummy I had been not to have realized that sooner, because once you do it’s so perfectly obvious, like one of those pictures that just look like a bunch of little dots until you stare at it a while and then whatever it’s a picture of comes out, and from then on you can see it right away. Or most people can. For some reason, I can’t do it and have to sit and stare at the dots again, even if I already know what it’s supposed to be.

I was pretty excited, as you can imagine, but then when I calmed down a little I got to thinking of practical stuff, like what my Spirit Guide’s name was, because Spirit Guide isn’t a name but only a generic term that covers a lot of different Spirit Guides. What I needed was my own Spirit Guide’s given name, so I wouldn’t keep calling him or her “the train,” which is not only much too impersonal, but not even strictly accurate. And maybe I need to know the sex, too, so I won’t have to keep saying him or her, which sounds dumb and doesn’t inspire much confidence in other people that you know what the hell you’re talking about. Before that I guess I need to know if Spirit Guides have any sex, or not.

First off, I looked to see if the name was printed on the side of the Spirit Guide like it sometimes is on a regular train, like the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe, cause wouldn’t I feel stupid if I put a lot of effort into trying to figure it out, and then it turned out it was written there all the time. Unfortunately there were a lot of different things written on it, and they were so inconsistent from day to day that I figured they couldn’t be the name, but were most likely some kind of hidden messages that I should try to figure out what they meant some day when I had the time, after I had worked out what the name was, and the sex. Then I thought about the song “City of New Orleans” which was written by Steve Goodman, not Arlo Guthrie like a lot of people think. It just popped into my head, which I attribute to the mystical influence of the Spirit Guide, who could see that I wasn’t making a lot of headway figuring it out for myself.

I’m pretty pleased that the train’s Spirit Guide name turned out to be City of New Orleans, because henceforth whenever I hear that song it will remind me of my Spirit Guide, and of the efficacy of thinking good thoughts, rather than what it reminds me of now, which is the time I went to New Orleans with this girl Lydia I was madly in love with, and things didn’t go quite as I had hoped, nor as she had hoped. In fact, she was even more disappointed in the whole affair than I was, so much so that she felt compelled to make a great big etching, or a lithograph I guess it was, about four feet square, unfavorably contrasting the actual trip with her idea of how it ought to have gone. And both of those things differed from how I thought it should have been, and told my buddies that it had been. So there were three different versions going, altogether.

What I hadn’t counted on was that there would be a student art show, and that Lydia would put that big lithograph in the show, where the guys would see it, and that they would accept her account of the trip over mine. Well, that last part makes sense, but all the rest was just pure bad luck.

So then they thought it would be funny, which it really wasn’t so much, to make up new lyrics to sing to the tune of “City of New Orleans” pointing out that I was not only a loser but something of a liar as well, as though anyone needed reminding at this point, least of all me. I was a little hurt in addition that they didn’t put any more effort than they did into the new lyrics, which weren’t all that good, and mostly didn’t even rhyme.

The general consensus that emerged seemed to be that Lydia had been way too good for me to start with, and that it was an excess of self-esteem that had led me to try and fly too close to the sun, which had melted the wax off of my wings so they wouldn’t work properly, and that in turn’s what caused me to fall right into the bowl of punch at this student art show, with the attendant embarrassment. I didn’t really fall in the punch, you understand, and I don’t have any wings—it’s a metaphor, something we writers use from time to time to spice things up. The art show is the only part that’s real, other than the embarrassment.

If only I had had a Spirit Guide back then, when I was screwing up big time every single day, and most days more than once.

You know what? It just occurred to me that maybe I had that same Spirit Guide all along and just didn’t have sense enough to recognize it, cause we lived only half a block or so from the railroad track there on Mitchell St., and there were trains going by at 12 midnight, 3 a.m., 6 a.m., and other times during the day that I didn’t find as memorable. What if one of those trains was the City of New Orleans, and I was just too blind to hear what she was trying to tell me, due in no way to any lack of effort on the part of the City of New Orleans, who kicked up such a racket that she made the dishes rattle, and occasionally even knocked a picture off the wall. It’d be different pictures different times, but the only one that never fell off was my print—number 17 of 24—of the ill-fated New Orleans trip, which I now see as a sign or an omen, unless it was just because I used a bigger nail for that one than for the others.

Some people think it’s odd that I would even hang up a picture on my own wall that deals frankly with the sensitive subject matter of my being a loser—an alleged loser—but you know what I say “Keep your successes close, and your failures closer.” After the New Orleans debacle, I hoped to keep my self-esteem tamped down enough that I wouldn’t dare think about flying up close to that stupid sun again, or even going out in the sun. All things sun-related were off the agenda. In this way, I hoped to avoid making the same mistake again. In my youthful ignorance I didn’t realize at the time what I do now with my more mature form of ignorance, which is that there are so many mistakes out there waiting to be made—for all practical purposes an infinite number—that you might as well make the same ones over again as not, because if you don’t you’ll just be making some of the new ones instead, and odds are they’re even worse than the ones you’ve already tried. At least the old ones didn’t kill you outright, or you wouldn’t even be considering the matter now, but who knows what’s liable to happen with the new ones.

I can’t even believe now how I used to say “I hate that train”! It seems so long ago, but actually it was just a couple weeks. I was an altogether different person then, though I looked mostly the same and come to think of it I was wearing this same shirt, I’m pretty sure. And then it turns out that the train was really my Spirit Guide, the City of New Orleans. Wow! And that I just now realized it, after all these years that the CoNO has been patiently dogging me around the country trying to get me to come to my senses, often not even carrying any freight, which must have driven the train company crazy. Think how much better things would have gone if I had just embraced life right off instead of saying “I hate that train” and generally exuding negativity out of every pore. I think lots of people probably make that kind of mistake—though not commonly that exact one—and then later on realize how wrong they were, often after it’s too late, but sometimes before it’s too late, but after what would have been ideal.

For example, over the years I have encountered a number of women whose poor choices have kept them from experiencing the full richness of all that life has to offer, and kept me from it too, through no fault of my own, and gave me the chickflop disorder to boot. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if many of them now realize what a terrible mistake they made by exuding all that negativity, and deeply regret the lost years of joy and inner peace they might have had if they had only been a bit more receptive to the gentle spiritual energy of the universe. I hope they do. It serves them right.

Product report: Hoodia, the Wonder Cactus

If you’ve ever looked over on the right side of this page, you might have noticed that I’ve got a little ad up trying to sell some hoodia. I’ve never had any myself, but a lot of people seem to like it, so I made a whole blog about hoodia to try and get some money out of it before the whole thing blows over. If you click on that ad, or any of those on the hoodia page, the vitamin company sends me a cut of what they make on it. It all comes out of their part, and the people buying the hoodia don’t have to pay any extra. So it doesn’t hurt them to click the ads, but they’ve got nothing to gain from it either, since they’re gonna have to pay the same no matter who gets the money. My plan’s to try to work with the hoodia a while, and then if things don’t pick up there I’ll probably move on to something else that there’s a lot of interest in, like iPods or pornography.

I thought it might be a nice gesture on my part if I checked out the hoodia to see if it really did anything, rather than just relying on some bushmen and TV news people. I didn’t really want to take it myself and kill my own appetite, cause if I didn’t want to eat there wouldn’t be much left that I did want to do, except maybe watch some TV, and I’m not even so keen on that until they get some new shows on. I don’t have much interest in watching those old shows over again, because by now I already know that they’re not any good, but with the new shows you don’t know that yet. You know what they say, hope springs eternal. Besides, I don’t weigh a whole lot as it is, and if I quit eating it’d just make things worse.

So instead I talked my roomie Linda into clicking on the ad and sending away for some. It came last week and she’s been taking it a few days, so I asked her what she thought of it. (This next part is the real product report. All the rest is stuff I threw in extra because I drank a little more green tea than usual.) Linda says that it did take away a good deal of her appetite, and that also she felt a bit more energetic than usual and that it knocked back the ADD and improved her ability to concentrate. She hadn’t expected anything more than the appetite part, and seemed pretty pleased to have gotten the other effects for no extra charge.

I wasn’t surprised about the extra effects, because I had read a similar report from those bushmen. They like to take it to go on these long hunting trips--seems it keeps them from getting tired of hunting quite so fast, and furthermore if they don’t catch anything, they don’t feel as bad about it as they usually would, but just eat some more hoodia. I don’t know if that occurs generally for most people, or if it’s just the bushmen and Linda, but if it does I hope the FDA doesn’t get wind of it, or I never will get anything out of those ads. For the most part the government doesn’t mind you taking something to fix a problem you’ve got--even if it gives you something worse than you already had, like that Vioxx--just so long as it doesn’t make you feel any happier than you did before you took it. If it comes out that people are taking something that makes them more cheerful than seems reasonable, the government will step right in and put a stop to it. For example, if you were to go on a big hunting trip but you didn’t catch anything, then when you got back home there wasn’t anything to eat there either, but instead of getting down about it you just thought “Oh, what the hell!” and kicked back with a glass of water and a big smile on your face, that’s the sort of thing the government would find vexatious, and would have to try to do something about it.

I would like to thank Linda for taking the hoodia and then reporting back to us about how it worked for her, and for clicking on that ad when she went to get it. I often test stuff first on Linda, because she’s got a strong constitution, and nothing bothers her very much. Over the years I’ve tried out a bunch of things on her, radioactive isotopes and all sorts of stuff, and she’s never had much of a problem with any of it. Once this guy told me that it wasn’t ethical to use Linda as a guinea pig, but you know how some people never are satisfied with what anyone else is doing, if they didn’t think of it themselves. The thing is that if I’d wanted a guinea pig, I’d have just gotten one at the store. I picked Linda on purpose because I thought she’d do a better job than that guinea pig, and not require so much cleaning up after.

It’s not like I try to hide the stuff in her food or something and trick her into eating it like you have to do with a cat—I always just hand it to her and say “Here, take this.”
“What is it?”
“It’s like a vitamin, kind of.”

She’s always come through OK, and I think that isotope thing is working out really well for her, cause if she has to get up in the night now for some reason, she can see where she’s going, and not run into stuff, and other people can find her in the dark too, if they need to. If I’d had some isotopes myself I probably wouldn’t have hit my toe on that mop bucket that Linda left out in the hall when I got up to go pee last night. The fact is I was meaning to have some, except that a little later I read where they’d given it to some rats, and they didn’t take to it like Linda had, and then they pulled it off the market. Though by then it was too late for those rats, and they never did quite get over it. I was sorry to hear about that, because when I was a kid I had a rat named Fred who made a pretty nice pet, so I have more feeling for rats that people do generally. Anyway, I wasn’t sure whether I’d prove to be more like Linda or a rat, so I decided to steer clear of that stuff, even though you could still get it on the internet for a while.

Love Potion No. 9

The train got me again this morning, but this time I’m sure it was not my fault, because I was thinking good thoughts, and besides I was like five blocks away from the track. I had just turned onto University and right away had to stop at the back of this long line of cars. I still feel that the basic principle is valid though, and that somebody in the car line must have been thinking bad thoughts, exceptionally bad thoughts it would seem, because I’ve never seen it catch so many cars all at once. I wish I could have counseled those negative drivers and maybe helped them to experience the peace and contentment that I have come to feel in my own life since last Friday morning, but unfortunately I was unable to sense which cars were causing the trouble. I sort of got a feeling that the problematic vibes were emanating from a clump of cars up around the intersection with Maple, that were blocking the intersection so that the Maple cars couldn’t go either, even though there was no train in their way, and despite the fact that the University cars had nothing to gain from blocking the Maple cars, other than to be about 10 feet closer to a moving train, which I feel sure did not even appear to be made of chocolate from their perspective. Anyway, it was just a vague sense of a small cloud of negativity, more like a negative patch of fog really, nothing concrete. I guess I don’t possess that particular psychic gift of being able to precisely pinpoint negative thoughts, though I do possess several other gifts, some psychic, some not, which I’m sure are equally useful to mankind, or will someday prove to be.

Fortunately, there was a song playing on the radio that has always troubled me, and I have been meaning for years to think about what the hell was going on with this song, and whether it really didn’t make much sense, or if it maybe made more sense than a regular song, and I just didn’t get it, but up to this point I’ve never had the time. Now, because the train was having to go to extraordinary lengths to nudge this recalcitrant group of drivers into the higher plane of existence that the train and I occupy, I finally had the time.

The song’s name is “Love Potion No. 9” and this is what disturbs me about it…well, first let me give you a brief synopsis of the plot, in case you don’t know the song. There’s this guy, and it seems that he’s a flop with chicks. This is a situation that I’ve experienced on occasion, incredible as that may seem to those who know me, and I can feel his pain, which for me is like a dull ache in the left upper chest that I sometimes mistake for a heart attack and have to go to the emergency room. Though he may experience it differently. It’s my understanding that the perception of chickflop pain varies greatly with the individual. I had a friend once who claimed that for him it was a sharp, needle-sticky kind of sensation in his right leg, but I don’t really buy that—everybody knows that this is a variety of heart pain, and the right leg is just too far from the heart for it to have gotten down there. I suspect that he was having sciatica, or maybe deep vein thrombosis, but I just nodded sympathetically and said “Ummm.” Once people latch on to these irrational beliefs, there’s really no way to dissuade them, and it’s a pain in the ass to even try.

What I think is really sad is that the guy in the song sought out the help of a trained professional—in fact, he did everything just like they tell you to in those public service announcements—and still things went so poorly for him.

First off, he made the sensible decision to go to a gypsy, not some phone psychic, or an unlicensed charlatan like that hippy guy that lived in an abandoned pig shack in Hawaii and told me and Kirsten that our love would last forever, when in fact it didn’t even make it through the end of the return flight. A gypsy would’ve know that.

And he didn’t just go to the first gypsy he happened to come upon, but instead went way across town so that he could see a gypsy with a gold-capped tooth, which is the ne plus ultra of gypsy love doctors. It’s similar to the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, but shinier. So the poor guy did everything like he should have, but due to the egregious malfeasance of that darned gypsy, obtained results that were far from satisfactory. Isn’t that the way of the world? You know what they say, there’s a rotten apple in every barrel. I don’t know if the gypsy just wasn’t paying attention, or maybe she was burned out on love doctoring and didn’t take any pride in her work anymore, or possibly she had some kind of weird brain tumor that made her hear things opposite from how they really are, or to hear stuff correctly but then do the opposite thing from what she should have done without meaning to, or maybe the bottles came from the supplier labeled wrong and it wasn’t really her fault. Oh no, it couldn’t have been that last one, cause the song says that she mixed it up there on the premises, in a sink, which doesn’t sound very sanitary to me. But all the others are still possibilities. I don’t know. All I know is this is one gypsy that ought to be sued the hell out of, and reported to the Better Business Bureau.

Cause the last thing this guy needed—that part of the song is clear even to me, and I’m not a gypsy—was an aphrodisiac for himself! But that’s what he got, and as a result of this prescribing error, he kissed a cop on 34st and Vine, a course of action he would never have considered had he not been under the influence of drugs. In the ensuing fracas, his potion bottle sustained multiple fractures, and the potion leaked out all over his new khaki Dockers, staining them so badly that even a Vietnamese drycleaner couldn't get it out. Frankly I still feel like he got pretty lucky with that cop, just losing a bottle of potion that wasn’t right for his condition to start with, and a pair of pants. A lot of cops wouldn’t have been so restrained in their response, and the situation could have turned real ugly.

Now some gypsy apologists try to claim that the gypsy was giving him the LP9 to slip into girls’ drinks while they were gone to the bathroom, and that he was the one who misunderstood, and didn’t bother to read the package insert, but this argument is completely refuted by even the most cursory examination of the lyrics. The song clearly states that he took the drug right there in the gypsy’s office, in full view of the gypsy herself, who didn’t lift one finger to stop him. And furthermore he engaged in substantial preparatory activity prior to quaffing the potion—holding his nose and closing his eyes, etc.—so his intentions would have been perfectly obvious to any gypsy worth her salt. I’m not even a gypsy, and I recognize the international signs that someone is about to drink medicine that smells like turpentine and looks like India ink. Hell, a two-year old child would have known what was going down, or a four-year old for sure.

So in the end, the poor guy was still a flop with chicks, but now it was worse than before, because he had taken that aphrodisiac and was even hornier than he usually was, which was already more than was constructive, given his situation. Not to mention that he’d had a very traumatic day, what with having to drive across town, and that little run-in with the cop and all, plus he was out whatever he’d paid for the potion. Cause there’s no way you’re ever going to get your money back from a gypsy. Don’t even try.

You know, I was thinking of trying to seek professional help for my own chickflop issues, but now I don’t know what to do, because my insurance won’t pay for a shrink, or a hooker, and this song guy’s experience has really put me off gypsies.

I hate that stupid train!

I still haven’t felt like doing anything about that fly shoe, but now it’s gotten covered up with some newspapers anyway, so I think I’m just going to forget about it and go ahead and throw the other one away, cause one shoe’s not much good to me.

Well, this morning I woke up and it’s 8:58! Seems that the electricity went out during the night and ruined the alarm clock, so now I’m really late for work. But I took the time to eat my cereal anyway, because breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and it’s a good thing I did, because it turns out that I was not destined to arrive at work any time soon.

The problem is that stupid train that always seems to be able to get right between me and work—or even worse, between me and home—no matter what time of day it is. So this morning it’s there and it’s just creeping along, not even as fast as I could walk, and it’s pulling like a hundred cars. I’m not kidding you—and there’re all just those flat ones with no sides, and there’s nothing on them. Completely empty, every one. Maybe that’s why it’s going so slow, they figure what the hell, we’re not pulling any real stuff anyway. I think if I were driving a train that didn't have anything on it, I'd be in a hurry to get somewhere where I could put something on it, but apparently these train guys don't share my sentiments. Then finally it comes to the last car and we’re all getting ready to drive and then the damn thing stops like three feet past the crossing, so of course the bars won’t come up and we’re all still stuck there in the hundred degree heat! And it sat there for 9 minutes—I timed it!

I hate that train! And you know what, I think they can tell when you don’t like them, and it’s because this train can sense my negative thoughts that it’s always getting in my way and making me late for work. It’s like cats, you know how they can always find the one person in the room who doesn’t like cats, and get in their lap and do that thing they do like they’re kneading bread, which is really just an excuse to claw somebody’s leg. Maybe that sounds crazy, but I really believe it’s true. And it’s just trains, not planes or cars or boats. I know some people think that cars are like that too, but they’re not. It’s only trains.

However, I think that the people in the cars could tell, some of them at least, the ones who are attuned to this sort of spiritual energy, because a couple of them kept looking at me kinda weird—the guy in the white pickup next to me in the middle lane, and the woman who was right in front of me. She kept fiddling with the mirror, like she was checking her makeup, but I could see her eye in the mirror, and she was looking right at me. I think they could tell it was my fault that we were stuck there in the heat, and it was starting to piss them off, especially after the thing just completely stopped dead on the tracks.

So I decided to try thinking positive thoughts, to see if that would help, but it wasn’t easy because I really hate that train. First I cleared my mind, which is always easier first thing in the morning, because not so much has gotten in it yet, and then I imagined that the train was made of dark chocolate, and that all of the flat cars, instead of being empty, had cheerleaders on them, waving pompoms. It was working pretty good, I was feeling a lot more positive toward the train, and I decided to imagine that we were on a beautiful beach in the Caribbean, with that clear turquoise water like I like, and there were a bunch of girls there on the beach too, wearing bikinis. And sure enough, it wasn’t thirty seconds before the train moved on and let us by. To tell you the truth, I kinda hated to leave, because of the bikini girls, but I knew I needed to get to work, and besides the people behind me were getting impatient now, and starting to honk.

I was so impressed with the results I had obtained that I decided I’d try it when I got to the office too, but that didn’t work as well. I was about an hour and a half late, and my boss was pretty annoyed, and even though I imagined that she was wearing a bikini most of the day, her disposition did not improve noticeably.

A fly-blown night

I’ll try to make a blog today, but I don’t know if I’m up to it, cause I really didn’t get much sleep last night. I’d gotten in bed and was just about to turn out the light, when I see this fly buzzing around. I was really tired, and I wanted to ignore him and go on to sleep, but I couldn’t stop thinking that as soon as I was asleep he would land on my face and start walking around on my mouth. In fact, I sleep with my mouth a little bit open—it’s a lot cuter than it sounds—so there’s no guarantee that he wouldn’t walk right in my mouth. That wouldn’t be good for either of us, but you know flies are not that smart, and there’s no telling what they’re liable to do.

The prospect of mouth flies seemed totally unacceptable to me, so I got up and looked around for something to hit him with, but the only thing readily available was a pair of Jockey shorts that I had thrown on top of the dresser instead of putting in the drawer. I tried those but they were too floppy, and besides I got to thinking that if I did squash the fly with my underwear I’d have to throw them away because there’s no way I’d be wearing anything with smushed fly on it.

Besides, while I was chasing him around with the underwear he flew into the closet, so I shut the door and stuffed some dirty clothes into the crack at the bottom, and figured I’d deal with it in the morning. But then I went to the bathroom, and when I got back he had somehow gotten out and was flying around the room again, all abuzz with excitement about his great escape.

Anyway, I was pretty much awake by now, so I put on my shoes and went out on the back porch to get the fly swatter. We actually have a collection of four flyswatters that we keep in the flyswatter area, but the only one I like is the turquoise plastic one with the wire handle. There’s another one that’s all plastic, but it doesn’t work too well, and another one that has a wire handle but with a wire mesh head instead of the plastic. You can kill a fly with it, but the trouble is that the squashed flies tend to get stuck in the wire mesh, and once they’ve dried there’s no getting them out. With the turquoise plastic one the dead flies just bounce off and fall down behind the couch or whatever. I’m really not sure what happens to them then, if they just disintegrate, or if the cats eat them, or the Roomba gets them, but I never do see them again, and that’s all that matters to me. Out of sight, out of mind.

So now I’m back in the bedroom, wide awake now and armed, but all this fanning around has stirred up my floaters. I had a detached retina a few years ago, and now I have this crap inside my eyeball, little black things that float around and look just like flies. So I’m swatting away at stuff, but there’s not really anything there—it’s just the floaters. Finally, just by pure chance I hit the real fly, and he falls right into one of my black Rockports, that are my favorite shoes. I was really sick of messing with this fly, so I just put the shoe out in the hall, thinking I’d deal with it in the morning, but this morning I didn’t want to deal with it either, so it’s still sitting there. I may have to throw it away, cause I’m not so keen on the idea of wearing a shoe that’s got a dead fly in it. That’s one of the main reasons I prefer to swat them in the living room, cause they just fall behind the couch. That and the light’s better in there.

Test

Sound and fury signifying nothing