Sunday, November 25, 2007

Saving Grace.

Harnessing the spirit-power of the Native Americans from whom we borrowed our modern idea of gluttony and meat-savagery, I delivered the following address on the day of thanks:

"May our prayers this Thanksgiving go out to all the flightless birds of the world. So selfless, so unfit for life, so unnaturally selected. The poor ratites, the emu and ostrich, awkward and dinosaurian, fifteen year old girls who outgrew their peers in height and scrawniness but never developed breasts. The reasonably extinct kiwi and New Zealand owlet-nightjar who we unfortunately will never be able to thank in person. And all the millions of extinct and absurd flightless birds who, by freak genetic accident, egg-birthed their way onto the planet of men and, in their flightlessness and usually delicious fatness, disappeared forever after their cameos like Brando after that shitty heist movie with Edward Norton. Our thanks go out also to the penguin. Though you, penguin, are really no good to anybody, your unholy, shitty, miserable existence is symbolic of the plight of all flightless birds everywhere. And now to the most unnaturally selected of them all, the chicken and the turkey. Though not inherently flightless, you've been bred and hormone-injected by men to the point of unflyable obesity. And on this special day, thanks go to the turkey in particular, though, it's only by chance that so many years ago at the very first Thanksgiving the similarly unfit brown people couldn't afford quail, else today we may be able to thank a more respectable creature. But anyway, by whatever roll of the cosmic dice, we are thanking you turkey, despite the uncountable retarded things about you, because that's what America means to me."

Monday, November 19, 2007

Joyeux.

Today is the quarter-century anniversary of the day that signified the successful humping of my parents. They managed, correctly, to bump against one another in that awkward and inelegant way, mixing the chemicals that cause the reactions that make the new person. Then the man went to work to make the money to feed the lady to grow the child to spit out the baby so they could forget about it. Congratulations to them on their special day.

And, as the jillion-sided die bounces and wobbles to a stop, that baby is me. Here I am. Here we are.

Happy birthday to all of you.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Rowboat.

I must look ridiculous right now. I got biblically rained on leaving for work this morning, and I showed up for a "brainstorm" bright and early with the appearance and demeanor of a wet kitten. I've borrowed some clothing from coworkers and am now sporting a red and brown plaid shirt, an oddly-patterned black sweater and a green zippy-uppy polar fleece jacket. I look like I belong face-down in a rowboat next to a pool of post-drunken vomit and the naked body of a woman I've just killed.

At the moment, I might prefer that scenario to the gloomy halls of an advertising agency. Online advertising is on my shit list at the moment. Last Friday, I ordered tickets on Fandango for No Country for Old Men. On Sunday, a message showed up on my Facebook page that said "Evan bought No Country For Old Men on Fandango." I don't use the same email address for Facebook as I do for Fandango, so how the fuck did they make that connection? There must have been some sort of exchange of my personal information without my explicit consent. My guess is that somewhere in the Facebook Terms of Use, we inadvertently signed over all of our rights. I read that this new Facebook campaign might be illegal in New York, so hopefully someone with more initiative than myself will file a class-action suit on behalf of all of us. I want my seventy-five dollars!

For my part, I'm getting sick to my stomach about my job. For one of the accounts I work on, our "target" is fat, depressed, poor people. Even though what we're pushing might serve to make them happier, that's no excuse for helping someone exploit them to make them poorer and fucking Supercorp richer. I won't be doing this for much longer. (But how else do you eat in this town? A wise man once said, while shoving me out of the line for the bathroom at a Lower East Side dive bar, "you can't drink without pissing, motherfucker." It's true, but it doesn't tell the whole true. In this particular city, you can't drink without pissing on someone else's face.)

So I've been tossing around the idea of moving.