don't think twice, shoot thrice.

as if you don't already love america too much, enjoy the pathetic state of our media as you are forced to watch a commercial before being able to hear the details of a sextuple-murder-suicide from the wisconsin attorney general.

on that note, here's a cute little verse i've put together on just such a theme.
________________________________________________________

balance

"what do you think is worse," she said,
"being crazy or being dead?"

("who cares?" i said,)

"what matters, dear, is, by design,
we can't be both at the same time."

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a thousand tiny satans.

i know it seems like it would go without saying, but i was explaining to my girlfriend this weekend that while i am made out of flesh and bone, which is made of fats and fibers and proteins, which are made of molecules which are made of atoms which are made of subatomic particles which some think may consist of infinitely small vibrating strings...she is made of a thousand tiny satans. she, being evil, took this quite personally. but it wasn't intended to be a personal attack. it was more an attempt to truly explain (in terms that a liberated, educated woman could understand) the difference between men and women. her base substance is sin. my base substance is universal truth. is it fair? probably not. but that's life. on the bright side, if a woman should succeed in manufacturing a baby, there is only a fifty percent chance that the tiny satans will be inherited. thank you, meiosis.

the saga continues. my strange cousin, between attemps at expelling body-thetans, is still communicating with me. on friday night, while i was in the movie theater (michael clayton--go see it), she called me three times. first from her phone, then from an unlisted number. eventually i answered, and she was calling to ask why i hadn't responded to her email (see previous post) and to make sure that she had the right "email number." at this point, a few things became clear to me:

1. she is not human.
2. she lives in a space cavern.
3. she sits indian-style in her space cavern all day, eating eucalyptus and reading my mind.
4. she sometimes inhabits my mind and makes me do shameful things.
5. she now goes by her space name which humans can't pronounce because they only have one throat.

i'm probably not going to survive her interrogations much longer. they will probably sick blackwater on me when i refuse to admit that each discontinuity in days of thunder was "intentional and comedic." i hear it all starts when beck's voicemail starts leaving messages on your voicemail. then you wake up on freewinds with a can of moxie where your prostate used to be, listening to jimmy buffett and being tickle-tortured until you admit that, technically, the story of xenu cannot be disproven. i'll be dead before you can count to ot-iii.

pranks against psychiatry.

so, the other day i get a call from a cousin of mine to whom i hadn't spoken in about eight years. word, as heard through the family grapevine, was that she was in clearwater training to be some sort of scientology priestess. i didn't know whether it would make her uncomfortable or not to bring this up, so we didn't talk about it on the phone. we exchanged news and the proverbial pleasantries (i don't know which proverb that comes from), and she sounded like a normal twentysomething who was doing a lot of traveling and enjoying herself. weird, yes: it was out of the blue. scientology-weird, no: an unspoken presence, maybe; the only thing a little odd about her was that i realized (as we concluded our chat by exchanging emails) that she had never heard of gmail. oh, also, "exchange" was misused there. i gave her my email. she didn't have one.

she wrote me today. not from her own email address, but from someone else's. (maybe she has to be supervised?) naturally, i googled his name. now, i've googled a lot of names in my day, and normally i expect to learn that a friend of mine shares his name with an australian soap star or college track and field champ. but this time i hit the jackpot. this guy testified in the lisa mcpherson trial. he was, according to the case file, the security guard stationed outside her door to keep her inside. at one point, he even had to hold her down while she was injected with sedatives. no doctors were present. if you don't remember this case, you should definitely read up on it. here are some tv segments as a refresher.

in other, less creepy news, the bank next door is begging me to commit vandalism. their enormous sign advertising "interest bearing" in human-sized letters makes me wish upon our very many stars for some scissors (i could probably find these at a store, also) and invisibility salve. a couple of minutes with these two things and i could redecorate park avenue with the words "interesting bear." this would make, at least, my day.

also, this morning i saw a woman fall victim to the marilyn monroe vent thing. a train went by under us and hot air shot through the streetholes. unlike marilyn, she made no effort to keep her skirt from flying up to her shoulders. also she was the fattest woman in new york.

i have other stuff to say, but alas.