Snubbed by a Third of My Readership

Oh mercy, I have received a boo plus from one of the two people who are not directly related to me that actually read this thing. So I don't blog with any sort of regularity, my life is so complacent right now that the usual tides of rage that awaken the sleeping writing beast within me have seceded.

Let us begin this tale of woe almost a week ago, ironically enough, on Good Friday. It was the last Friday I had to fast, not eating meat. All I had to do was think about my crucified Lord, eat a fish sandwich, and meditate on the suffering of a half man/half God because I sometimes fire off some baby batter in the shower and occasionally question the moral fortitude of those around me. Oh, and get drunk on big dirty pints of stout, and chew tobacco, and listen to the heavy metal, and consider running for political office, and not giving my tithes, and, well, you get the picture...

So, I am not the most devout follower of the Catholicism, but there are a few steadfast rules that I do not stray from. One of those is not eating meat on Friday. Last year, on a Friday during Lent, I ordered clam chowder. Halfway through the cup, the wife noticed a big piece of bacon on my spoon. "Well, fuck," I thought, "Now I'm going to be sodomized by pigs when I get to hell on top of all the other punishments." To atone for that, no more clam chowder, ever. Better safe than sorry.

Back to last Friday, Good Friday. I ordered a fish sandwich at a local bar. Sounded safe. I should have noticed something was amiss due to a giant piece of melted cheese right on top of the fish. I did not care, fasting had left me starving. I was halfway through the sandwich when a friend noticed that there were two strips of bacon concealed by the mound of cheese. My mind flashed with images of Warren Beatty as I picked the rest of the bacon off of what remained of my sandwich.

Come on, who in the hell puts a couple pieces of pork on a fish sandwich during Lent? Satanists, that's who.

I hope that this appeases the few people in Georgia who read this little slice of cyberspace. I probably won't be blogging with more frequency, since I just discovered the digital crack that is Facebook. Anybody want me to poke them?

Debt Consolidations

The wife and I had a long chat about budgeting our money for the future on Monday. We sized up our current incomes, the debts we owe, and what we will need in the near to distant future. Like everyone else out there, we are pretty much fucked.

For fun, we set up a budget that would have our credit cards paid off in exactly one year, provided we never went out to eat, had to pay for gas, shopped only at the big box superstores (via the bus lines) that have various meats with 90 shelf lives (unholy and delicious), and never turned the thermostat above 50 in the winter or below 90 in the summer. Sweet financial freedom. Fuck that. I like my big dirty pints of Guinness after a hard week of kowtowing to the man. I like to occasionally go see a movie or buy a fancy bobble on the Amazon.com. Sometimes I even like to eat a sandwich for lunch instead of nothing.

Yesterday, I was cutting my friend's hair, and he gave me a book to read. Before you ask, yes I hang out with literate peoples. It was something akin to planning your financial future even if you start really late and very deep in debt. I looked it over and realized that the wife and I had been doing exactly what the book said years ago, "paying ourselves first" and what not. Oh yeah, I've got a couple of thousand dollars in a retirement account that is quickly tanking right now. My house is worth about $15000 less than what I paid for it, and the credit cards are charging us upwards of $200 a month for the privilege of owing them money.

This morning, I turned on the news and the world is going to hell in a handbasket. The dollar has officially gone into the toilet, the housing market is kaput, and the price of food is skyrocketing. I went to work with a smile on my face. I thought, "Huh, if I can pay off most of my debt in a year, why am I so panicked? I have a job, a wife, a house, and am fairly healthy. Who really cares what happens?"

I am totally voting for Nader again.

SAD and the Brush with Overindulgent Chickens

This morning, as I watched the morning news and waited until the absolute last minute to catch my bus, I noticed something extremely odd. There is a sequence on the news program that I watch in the morning called "Wonderful Ones," in which parents send in pictures of their children and the said pictures are plastered on the screen with a little blurb by the casters as to how the child will be celebrating, where, and with whom.

This segment always heats my core with rage because it is not only a sheer violation of the child's right to privacy (come on, you know in ten years, when the parents bring out the DVR of this clip, it will be totally embarrassing), but the parents sound like such schmucks. For example: Kailey will be celebrating a farm motif for her birthday, celebrating with big brother Kevin and her parents Todd and Julie. Hmmm, farm motif for a first birthday. Do you really think little Kailey wanted a fucking farm motif? What is even better, is that an androgynous blob of baby flesh dressed in head to toe camo is called Kailey. I was stunned, but I am also now well aware that while homosexuality might be genetic, it can still get a shove through proper nurturing.

But back to the segment. In the last week, they changed the background surrounding the pictures from shitty 80s clip art to shitty 90s clip art. Leaps and bounds for this tiny CBS affiliate. Then, something else struck my ears with the force of an armada of hummingbirds blowing taps at a bowling alley. The background music had also been changed. Instead of shitty 1980s car commercial music, there was now some bastardized Danny Elfman carnival music playing in the background.

I quickly cranked up the volume and dropped my jaw in horror as pictures of camo laden, baby lesbians gave way to my own internal hallucinations of Pennywise making a California ham roll on a tractor.

I decided it best to change the channel. So I did.

A commercial for Egg Beaters was playing on the other station. A stockboy had just finished stacking about four million cartons of the disgusting fake eggs on the shelf and then bent down to see if there were any more in his obviously empty case. He looked back and they were gone, stolen by a marauding group of mother hens who could not tell the fucking difference between an egg and a fucking mother fucking shit in a box craptacular square fucking cartoned egg substitute (the announcer told me so). The problem with this was, the chickens, after moving all these cartons, tore ass out of the store, passing a rotisserie oven full of dead, cooking chickens.

This made me make a minor comparison to the current degradation of these great United States. The people, so obsessed with consumerism, have given over even their children to the needs and wants of the corporation. No one can recognize their children anymore because they are too dressed up in the latest designer clothes and medicated with the latest name brand anti-depressants. This need to consume makes us ignore the solemnity of death and to totally forget the wisdom of our now departed loved ones, thus forgetting so much history that it is doomed to repeat itself.

Did anyone else see this commercial and get filled with existential dread and despair?